I recently stumbled upon an editorial at Engadget lamenting the removal of an optical drive on Apple’s new Mac mini.
“I don’t like it. Not one iota. But frankly, it doesn’t much matter—Apple’s officially done with the optical drive, and there’s no evidence more strikingly clear than the mid-2011 refresh of its Mac mini.”
While the author made several great points, the idea of an optical disk drive (ODD)-less desktop makes perfect sense—well, to me at least. The past certainly plays a vital role in this scenario, as was noted in the editorial. Apple has a track record of doing things like this when others have said it’s idiotic—for example, the removal of the 3.5” floppy drive from the original iMac. But let’s not forget the inclusion of USB ports on that computer as well. It was the first Mac to have USB and, given its release date, probably one of the first consumer computers to even adopt the fledgling standard. Apple has gone so far as to remove printers from the display area of its stores recently. Physical media is something Apple believes is rapidly dying.
So why does removing the ODD make sense? Let’s investigate the uses of disk drives. First and foremost is the playing (we’ll discuss ripping later) of CDs and DVDs. Without speculating about how many people actually use physical CDs on their computers to play music or DVDs to watch a movie—because there certainly are some of you out there who do—let’s just talk about why this makes sense for Apple.
Apple operates iTunes, and the iTunes store is the largest seller of music in the country, by quite a bit. Obviously, if they can push you to buy your music from iTunes, where they get a cut of the sale, rather than you buying a CD from a big box retailer, why wouldn’t they do that? We can all see that the use of CDs is slowly dying, as it becomes merely a pit stop between the record labels and your iPod. With the creation of online music streaming and subscription services such as Grooveshark, Spotify and Rhapsody, purchasing music may die too.
DVDs are slowly being phasing out as well. As online streaming becomes more and more popular with services such as Netflix, iTunes Movie Rentals and Hulu, gone are the days where physical DVDs need to take up an entire wall of our living rooms. You can have as many movies as your computer’s hard drive can hold; even external storage takes up far less space than a wall full of alphabetized DVD cases. Again, renting or buying from iTunes makes sense, instead of ripping DVDs you got from a friend or in the mail from Netflix. Plus, almost everyone has a stand-alone DVD or Blu-ray player and is not using the Mac mini to watch movies on their computer monitor or living room TV.
Ripping a CD is different from ripping a DVD. While fundamentally the idea is the same—content that’s contained on the disk is format-shifted from physical media to digital media—the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) as no issue with us ripping CDs to use on iPods, play on computers using iTunes or stream around the house with AirPlay. The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and movie studios, on the other hand, take issue with the practice of ripping DVDs though, and any step made toward preventing people from content-shifting and sharing movies is OK with them. It might even put Apple in their good graces for licensing movies to iTunes.
Data transferring is another big use of the ODD. Burning data to a disk to share with friends used to be popular; however, with the boom of the “cloud” and the availability of inexpensive, high-capacity, re-useable USB thumb drives, using a CD or DVD to burn data really doesn’t make sense in most scenarios.
Then, let’s factor in the Mac App store. Apple just released an operating system that does not come on a physical disk and sold more than a million “copies” in 24 hours. To say that people have not or will not adopt a diskless lifestyle is fallacy. Think of how much money Apple saved, and possibly passed on to the consumer, on the release of Lion. No time spent burning millions of DVDs and shipping them to stores, no boxes taking up highly valuable shelf space in Apple stores, no inventory to return when an update happens and 10.7 becomes 10.7.3 and they reburn DVDs for retail purchase … not to mention lower piracy rates from people buying one copy of the software and allowing friends and family to install off the same disk This idea can translate to all software—and the Mac App store tracks your purchases for redownloading on another machine if you get a new one.
Like it or not, we are moving to a diskless world and, looking to the future, as Apple tends to do, think about Internet-connected TVs. Look beyond the current AppleTV for sharing content. If your TV had an e-mail address or a specific Internet address, you could be sitting at home in Phoenix and using iTunes to stream a movie or photo slideshow to Grandma’s TV in San Diego. Apple was smart; the company started this trend with the Mac mini. Although it’s a desktop computer, I’m sure some research was done as to HOW people are using the Mac mini. Everyone I know who owns one has it hooked into their HDTV as a place to store purchased movie files or to stream content from iTunes or other Internet-based services. So why not ditch the ODD?
The Internet is connecting us in ways we don’t fully understand yet, but one thing we do know is that the prevalence of Internet-based storage and streaming is growing. I’m certainly not saying that disk media is dead for everyone, and I certainly don’t think that Apple is done with the optical drive entirely either. But I can see that as Apple demotes the computer to being merely a “device” upon which we store content, iCloud and other Internet-based solutions will become faster and easier to use than burning a disk, printing a page or syncing a device.
The Engadget article can be found here: http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/27/editorial-apples-officially-over-the-optical-drive-for-better/.
