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eljanitor

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Feb 10, 2011
411
20
Not too long ago Apple Computer introduced the first Mac with a CD drive. Previous to this all operating systems were on floppy discs, and would sometimes suffer erasures from magnets etc.

This was a great step for Apple and since then the CD/DVD drive has been a great feature on all Mac's until recently. Soon after the CD Drive was a standard feature in all Mac's USB was introduced and this was another great step forward. Then we saw Firewire 400, Firewire 800, and Gigabit Ethernet. All great things that many PC computers lacked as a standard feature. You could buy add in cards to support these options, until eventually they caught up and included some of these features as a standard feature.

Then Apple took away Firewire 400 on some models, ie: Macbook. They also decided to take the CD/DVD drive out of the new Mac mini. Newer technology usually means something has to be compromised. So you get Thunderbolt, but you loose something in return. You get the app store, but you loose the optical drive. Quite possibly soon as most PC manufacturers are doing you may open the box to your new Apple computer and find that there are no discs, ( Like many PC manufacturers that will remain nameless).

Why do you need an optical drive when you have the app store? You can just download the new OS to your machine and install it from the internet. What if, and what if you cant connect to the internet? What if theres a problem with your account and Apple needs some time to resolve the issue so they can validate your account? What if your a business with computers that need to be working now, not tomorrow?

Always nice to have the OS on a disc somewhere so you can just pop it in and do a clean reinstall if you need, and be up and running soon. Wait theres no optical drive so um............wheres that flash drive? Wheres that external USB drive? I know its um ..........here somewhere.

Just some food for thought for everyone.
 
Someone who needs a computer badly will take proper precautions for the case it won't work, like having the installer on some kind of portable medium, or even better, having a clone of the entire system on an external HDD.

As I use my Mac for work, I clone it on a daily/weekly basis, and restoring from such a clone can take an hour or less, which I had to do as I had to delete some stuff to make room for some very big video to play for presentation, which I couldn't transcode in time, as the director is the last-minute kind, thus an external USB HDD would have been to slow.
After that presentation was done, I could restore from a clone from two days earlier (just worked for 30 hours), and was up and running an hour later.

Anyway, I just installed Lion on my test iMac and I still could see the Recovery partition when I pressed OPTION during startup.
 
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