whats funny is in this near post optical drive world, I never got into the thumb drive thing. I know they are cheap and are getting bigger and bigger in capacity. I just always make the jump to a HDD.
I'm not a Macbook user, so I won't know this personally. But when the retina macbooks were being rumored/announced, so many people so badly wanted the disc drive removed from the updated version. Yeah, I get that it'll make it thinner and lighter. But then obviously, you can't use CD's anymore. I know the Mac App Store is trying to make the transition to downloadable software rather than software on CD's, but there are still software out there on discs. How are those installed? What if you want to play a CD? Or DVD? A computer game?
I'm just curious why people were so strongly in favor of the removal of the disc drive. Personally, I would've been slightly disappointed. Again, I'm not a Macbook user, but is the disc drive really that obsolete on a Mac?
(...) it would be bother me having to rely only on external devices, externals cant be taken everywhere.
it's not worth it for something I use a handful of times a year. I work at an AV company and we barely deal with DVD or CD discs these days, thumb drives are cheap and there are plenty of web file transfer services. USB dvd reader/burners are like $30 for the rare times it is needed.
Even in my pc tower the disc drive collects dust, whenever I do my next build I will not even put one in it.
I'm not a Macbook user, so I won't know this personally. But when the retina macbooks were being rumored/announced, so many people so badly wanted the disc drive removed from the updated version. Yeah, I get that it'll make it thinner and lighter. But then obviously, you can't use CD's anymore. I know the Mac App Store is trying to make the transition to downloadable software rather than software on CD's, but there are still software out there on discs. How are those installed? What if you want to play a CD? Or DVD? A computer game?
I'm just curious why people were so strongly in favor of the removal of the disc drive. Personally, I would've been slightly disappointed. Again, I'm not a Macbook user, but is the disc drive really that obsolete on a Mac?
Nobody really wanted it to go, but nobody really needed it either.
case in point-my wife purchased new MBA for business travel. Bought an external drive because she thought she'd "need" it. It sits on the shelf gathering dust. She has used it once in 10 months. Internal drive is unnecessary, adds weight, and yet we all tied to thinking we need it.![]()
As for movies. I challenged my mother in law who wanted to keep her collection of 200 movies on sd DVD to find a movie in her collection that I could not locate a digital version via any of our existing resources.. PS3, Netflix, Hulu, Vudu, On Demand, iTunes, Amazon Prime. She found 6 movies that I was unable to find a digital version. Her DVD collection is now made up of 6 DVDs.
I have not used or bought an optical disk CD, DVD or Bluray in the last two years that's why. With MacBook Air or rMBP you can either buy a external DVD drive or share a drive in another Mac or PC via Remote Disk. Apple still sells a classic Mac Book Pro for those users that still care about optical disks, but clearly the future is no optical disk.
Also with no mechanical drive or mechanical optical drive these were the two parts with the highest failure rate on any notebook so reliability has also been improved as well.
I'm not a Macbook user, so I won't know this personally. But when the retina macbooks were being rumored/announced, so many people so badly wanted the disc drive removed from the updated version. Yeah, I get that it'll make it thinner and lighter. But then obviously, you can't use CD's anymore. I know the Mac App Store is trying to make the transition to downloadable software rather than software on CD's, but there are still software out there on discs. How are those installed? What if you want to play a CD? Or DVD? A computer game?
I'm just curious why people were so strongly in favor of the removal of the disc drive. Personally, I would've been slightly disappointed. Again, I'm not a Macbook user, but is the disc drive really that obsolete on a Mac?