But Apple (read: Steve Jobs) is not big on peripheral device options. My guess is that when Apple decides the day of the integrated optical is over, it will be as gone as the floppy was.
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When will be a superdriveless macbook?
- Thread starter knucles
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But Apple (read: Steve Jobs) is not big on peripheral device options. My guess is that when Apple decides the day of the integrated optical is over, it will be as gone as the floppy was.
I think it'll be here for awhile. Reality is, majority of people (average joe) only know CD/DVD's and don't really know about downloading drivers from websites so not to include an optical drive would be taking away from all those users.
Even if the next osx is sold in a pen drive? i've heard something about it and really makes sense, must be so hard for them to design a really smal computer eith so much possibly free space so near...
they actually sit down and design a mac around a optical drive, i bet those designers hate the optical drive as much as i do.
they actually sit down and design a mac around a optical drive, i bet those designers hate the optical drive as much as i do.
+1
im thinking of getting one of them optibay mods. seriously, i want a RAID in my machine.
I hardly doubt that an Apple buying a uMBP is an average joe...
I would love to see the option of having the MBP without the drive, but in the same sense, it allows users like myself to burn DVDs for their DVD drives for parents or friends with outdated technology...
I'd love it if apple offered the mbp with an external bus powered superdrive like the air. I too think that it's too much wasted internal space that could be used for cooling and extra battery.
To be honest with you, I don't think Apple is going to drop a disc drive any time soon- people, in general, still use it way too much. Without one, you can't watch movies, install/troubleshoot an OS, share files with people who use CDs and DVDs, import CDs, etc. etc.
Obviously discs aren't exactly the "media of the future", since they've been around awhile, and there's such a push in all media industries to switch to a download-based system of distribution, but companies are still working to create higher and higher capacity discs due to their portability and low cost to manufacture- you could carry a couple hundred gigs around on a handful of the high-capacity discs they're working on right now.
I can see, maybe 5-10 years in the future, POSSIBLY running everything off of small flash drives instead, as these get higher in capacity and cheaper in price, but I don't know... it's more likely we'll just see a blu-ray player or other high-capacity disc format instead of a superdrive
Obviously discs aren't exactly the "media of the future", since they've been around awhile, and there's such a push in all media industries to switch to a download-based system of distribution, but companies are still working to create higher and higher capacity discs due to their portability and low cost to manufacture- you could carry a couple hundred gigs around on a handful of the high-capacity discs they're working on right now.
I can see, maybe 5-10 years in the future, POSSIBLY running everything off of small flash drives instead, as these get higher in capacity and cheaper in price, but I don't know... it's more likely we'll just see a blu-ray player or other high-capacity disc format instead of a superdrive
Oh, and may I also relate that there are some of us (like me) who rarely use our Macbook/MBPs on battery, and when we do, don't need more than 3-6 hours of battery life? And who use the superdrive on a regular basis to watch DVDs and burn projects to distribute to others? Who then need a disc drive to read them? If you don't like the space it's taking up, you can remove the drive- it'll make things lighter, and cooler, I guess. And some have installed a solid state drive in its' place, finding more storage and a faster drive speed to be more important to them than an internal disc drive.
For many of us who care about quality, the death of optical discs is very far off. Why? Video.
Standard definition video downloads still don't even come close to DVD, and they can't be upscaled to higher resolutions the same way DVD can.
High definition video downloads can't even really be called "high definition" when compared to blu-ray disc. iTunes downloads don't even contain half the amount of pixels compared to what blu-ray offers, and they're generally encoded at 4.5Mbps (compared to blu-ray's ability to handle video bitrates up to 45Mbps). Plus you get sub-DVD quality audio out of "HD" movie downloads, if it even has 5.1 sound, compared to blu-ray's sometimes lossless and sometimes uncompressed audio. Even when blu-ray has only a lossy audio track, its still encoded at twice the bitrate of iTunes download, if it's Dolby Digital, or uses the same 1.5Mbps DTS track that was used in theaters.
Theres also the issue of bandwidth. Even if you have Charter or Verizon's fastest connections (60Mbps Charter, 50Mbps Verizon), it would still take about the length of the movie to download it, if it was blu-ray quality. When you consider the fact that the average US broadband connection is only 3.9Mbps, its going to take longer than the movie is to download just an iTunes "HD" film.
And don't bring up "better video codecs" or any of that. Blu-ray already uses H.264 (same as iTunes) and VC-1. It's just encoded at a substantially higher bitrate. I mean, let's be honest here, iTunes "HD" downloads don't even compete with properly upscaled DVDs because of the low bit-rate and poor encoder used. Even x264 (open source H.264 encoder) looks better at the same bit-rates compared to iTunes HD films. And don't forget the audio quality. 384Kbps AC-3 doesn't cut it any more when DVDs use 448Kbps AC3 and 768Kbps and 1.5Mbps DTS, while blu-ray discs tend to have lossless Dolby True HD or DTS Master HD or just uncompressed PCM.
Not really. A 4GB flash drive is still around $15 for a good reliable one. A good reliable DVD-R is only about 20 cents. You can get about 438GB of storage in the form of DVD-Rs for around $20. Good discs too.
DVD-Rs are still the most cost effective form of storage out there.
And, again, optical discs offer much higher quality video than any other medium right now.
Of course, but the utility of a laptop is that everything's integrated. The disk could be external too, and the monitor, and the pointing device, and the power supply. But who wants to lug external equipment around with them? I want everything in one small package, including an optical drive.
it's called a Macbook Air,and the hardware in the Air is horrible,I can't believe they sell.I would never buy a Mac with any less of a processor than a Macbook as your starting to get what Window's people get,cheasy processors.I mean 2K for a 1.83Ghz C2D?????Come on a Macbook even has a 2.26Ghz and the Macbook's processor doesn't take up anymore space than the air.Unless the air doesn't have a fan,then that explains it.I wonder when the Air will be upgraded.
And I want a second hard drive and a bigger battery without having to carry around an external hard drive and be tethered to a power supply more often.
And I want a second hard drive and a bigger battery without having to carry around an external hard drive and be tethered to a power supply more often.
Too bad this would violate the Steve Jobs Doctrine: Don't Confuse Your Customers With Too Many Choices.
Exactly. So there won't be a choice thenjust no optical drive.Too bad this would violate the Steve Jobs Doctrine: Don't Confuse Your Customers With Too Many Choices.
Of course they could go the route of the Mac mini Server but without Mac OS X Server that doesn't seem to be too many choices, does it?
Right; I already said the same back here:
Sometimes being a Mac fan is frustrating.