And don’t forget they offered a large point of ingress for dust and liquids in an era when all the ports on laptops are slowly being sealed up (no interchangeable battery flap, few peripheral connections–in favor of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi–and even a magnetic power connector that’s “sealed”). They take up space inside the slender frame of a laptop that’s probably better served with more disk space, or a bigger battery. DVD drives are bulky, eat up power when running, and generate heat. It all makes sense, from a portable computing point of view.
Only the bigger iMac all-in-one, the MacBook Pro range and the Mac Pro desktop workhorse still support internal optical disk drives. The hot-selling MacBook Air, which has no disc drive, is now a consumer-level flagship machine. Apple has stopped selling boxed copies of several software titles including iLife ’11, it was reported today, and is re-routing buyers to the Mac App Store instead. The slot for a DVD, CD, playing-and-burning Superdrive is gone, and the Minis sport boosted internal hard drives instead. The latest Mac Mini is as smooth and shiny as can be, with an almost uninterrupted surface. Other computer and content companies are burying the format too. When the computer maker refreshed its computer offerings this morning it hammered another solid nail into the DVD’s coffin. Apple‘s killing the optical disk format, bit by bit–just as we suspected.
