Whither the Portable Optical Drive?

"The MacBook Air and the Ultrabook come without a piece of hardware that's been a mainstay in laptops for a long time — the optical drive," says a piece at CNET. "Maybe because they really aren't that necessary anymore." I would have thought otherwise a few years ago, but traveling in the meantime with a small netbook was certainly handy. Since that machine died, I think I've used the optical drive in its low-end laptop successor a grand total of once, which was to test its wireless compatibility with a Live CD Linux distro.

Re:Movies

[voidptr]

Handbrake it to MP4 before I leave. And more likely than not, copy it over to a tablet that's easier to hold and watch in cattle class than breaking out a full blown laptop.

Why would I want to waste battery spinning a DVD around?

Re:Movies

[brentrad]

I really think that Android needs to support external DVD drives and watching DVD movies. Yes I know downloaded videos are the future, but during this transition time when lots of people have both physical DVDs and downloaded videos, it would definitely help ease the transition.

Re:I use an optical drive to install the OS

[Deorus]

Mac OS X Lion now installs from the Internet [apple.com] into completely blank hard disks (yes, even if the recovery partition is wiped or the original disk replaced), if necessary. No installation media required.

Re:Speak for yourself

[Flytrap]

People have such short memories (or are too young to remember).

When the iMac came out without a floppy disk dive in 1998, exactly the same sentiment was expressed. PC makers gasped, then heckled Apple... But before long they too followed suite and started gradually phasing out floppy disk drives.

Then too, it was the dreaded focus group that dragged out the eventual demise of the floppy - people like you in focus groups saying "... keep the floppy drive, just in case I need to revert to my trusty sneaker-net". Of course we know what every focus group has to say about Adobe Flash... just about the same thing that they have to say about the CD drive now.

Steve Jobs loathed focus groups... that kind of makes sense when you are launching something that consumers do not know they need yet, like a new product. But focus group are useful tools, when used properly. The problem I have found (at least in financial services) is that focus groups are use to make the decision, instead of gauging the acceptability of a decision.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Speak for yourself

[PopeRatzo]

Games these days are being purchased more and more on Steam

That was the case until AT&T started this 150gb data limit and I get throttled and charged extra if I go over.

This week I bought Skyrim on disk. It was the first game I bought that way in a long time. Years.

I wonder how Steam feels about the new data limits being put on by telecoms.

Re:Speak for yourself

[BrokenHalo]

i can't remember the last time I had a HDD fail i didn't get ample warning...

I can, since it happened to me not very long ago. The HDD in my last laptop (the MacBook to which I referred in an earlier post) died without warning just a few weeks ago. It was fine one day, then the next it was rattling and banging away, and refusing to let the machine boot.

Worse, it happened at a time when I had got lazy with my backups, so I lost quite a lot of stuff. A bit embarrassing, really, since I'm big on insisting other people take proper backups, so I've had to eat a generous helping of crow.