[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.