Is The Optical Disk Drive (DVD, CD, etc) Going Away?

[jyl]

Apple has done away with the Macbook, making the Mac Air the entry-level notebook Mac. The Mac Air has no optical disk drive (ODD). And it has updated the Mac Mini, with more power but no ODD. OS X Lion is sold as a download from the Mac App Store or as a USB thumb drive.

It appears that Apple is trying to do away with the optical disk drive as a standard feature, and to instead use the Internet - excuse me, the "cloud" for software distribution - although obviously you can plug an external ODD into any Mac to watch DVDs etc.

Is the optical disk drive going the way of the floppy?

In some ways it sort of makes sense. A DVD holds about 9GB. NAND flash is under $1/GB now (raw MLC NAND in quantity) and that price is falling -30% per year. In a couple of years, today's DVD that takes up a chunk of space in a system will represent a few bucks of NAND flash stuck into a port that takes up almost no room - or 50 cents of hard drive capacity online. And tablets will have gotten everyone familiar with the no-HDD, no-ODD model.

In another way, its kind of - Borders just went away, is the whole center section of Best Buy next? And the entire chain of Gamestop? And everywhere else they sell spinning shiny coaster thingys? Sigh - I remember when CDs were all fresh and new and exciting.

[red-beard]

I have a 64GB SDXC card as my secondary storage in this tablet. If I need to move files, I do it either with this card, USB or via my LAN. I now copy my software DVDs to the LAN NAS for (re)install.

Hmmmm. My NAS can share a USB drive. Let me see if it can share a DVD-RW or maybe a Bluray-RW. That would make more sense these days anyway. How many of us travel with CDs or DVDs these days?

[HardDrive]

Duh.

[Porsche-O-Phile]

Let's have everyone store their data (including financial, personal, etc) on servers remotely - sure, what can possibly go wrong?

It's not like the NSA or anyone would ever be interested in that or anything, would they?

Would they?

Naaaaaaaahhhhhhhh.

[GH85Carrera]

Yea, even the pentagon gets hacked and top secret plans for aircraft get stolen. I will trust the internet with my files, sure.

[jyl]

I don't keep data on DVD, so that doesn't fuss me. I'm more thinking about not having a physical place to go for books, CDs, DVDs, game software. Doing everything from a screen and a mouse - I know it is efficient, but not sure I like it.

[cstreit]

I'm sure they will. Moving parts are more fragile and consume more power...

[RWebb]

I use these:

[AirKuhl]

And at the same time the Internet providers are moving towards metered service and traffic shaping for multimedia content. I'll take a disc, thanks. But of course, I can't play my BD's on my Macbook because Apple still hasn't realized that they exist.

[wdfifteen]

I hope they don't go away. I archive all my stuff on DVDs and CDs. I have close to a million images on DVDs - one set at the office and one set at home. I have too much invested in time, travel, and effort to trust my stuff to the cloud. A DVD is cheap and relatively permanent. The cloud is ... cloud-like.