Although I agree with most people that the optical drive will be gone on the MBPs sooner or later, one thing that could result from this lost of the optical drive worries me more. 🙁
I bet the main reason for Apple to drop the optical drive in future models is so that they can further reduce the size of the MBPs. When I say size, I don't mean thickness, I mean the width of the MBP notebooks. My reasoning & one that I dread is that Apple could reduce a chunk of the MBPs' width after dropping the optical drive & moving from 16:10 screens to 16:9 screens. 🙁 This is not impossible since almost every notebook manufacturers have already moved most of their screens that are being offered to 16:9 ratios. 🙁