The disc drive is dead

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Jamie McKane

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The disc drive is dead

The disc drive, a technology that was born and flourished during the lifetime of many of our readers, is on its deathbed.

Microsoft has launched its first Xbox One without an optical disc drive, with gamers set to download titles - and potentially fully stream them in the future - when they want to play.
 
Still use them from time to time, but then again I have a vhs player I keep for when the wife wants to watch childhood homecam's
 
Funny how Apple did this first like 10 years ago....but they are always accused of being the ones who are catching up.

Double standard?
 
SauRoNZA said:
Funny how Apple did this first like 10 years ago....but they are always accused of being the ones who are catching up.

Double standard?
Click to expand...

No, cos then they were just being dicks, and weren't forward thinking.
 
SauRoNZA said:
Funny how Apple did this first like 10 years ago....but they are always accused of being the ones who are catching up.

Double standard?
Click to expand...

Back then it was an issue (not just Apple, most of the ultrabooks back then came without them and one had to buy those unreliable portable CD/DVD drives)
 
SauRoNZA said:
Funny how Apple did this first like 10 years ago....but they are always accused of being the ones who are catching up.

Double standard?
Click to expand...
Imo apple removes features before their replacements are widespread, which forces you to buy all sorts of extra dongles and such.

Then when those replacement features become widespread they try to take credit for being innovative.

10 years ago we needed disc drives.
 
The disc drive should have been replaced by the USB thumb drive.
But for some reason that never took off.
Don't see why we can't have operating systems, Driver discs and game releases put onto Thumb drives?
Maybe the threat of viruses scared them off that technology, but it would have been the logical successor.
 
With regards to BR players dying out it might be the following facts.
1. No large supermarket chains actually seemed to stock them, only specialist shops or online
2. Cost, why in reality should the HD or UHD for that matter cost prohibitevly more expensive then the DVD.
3. Also why did DVDs actually go up in South Africa, they were at a time R100 for a new release now they are hovering at R130 to R150, with the BR R200 to R250 and the UHD for almost double that in some cases.

This is causing the death of discs, not streaming as an HD stream isn't quite the same as an HD BR or UHD BR. Gaming I can understand as the experience doesn't really change, except when you now cannot redownload the games you've purchased, I'm looking at Xbox for that. Some of the games I downloaded and bought I cannot download again.
 
LazyLion said:
The disc drive should have been replaced by the USB thumb drive.
But for some reason that never took off.
Don't see why we can't have operating systems, Driver discs and game releases put onto Thumb drives?
Maybe the threat of viruses scared them off that technology, but it would have been the logical successor.
Click to expand...
Well it was tried on SD cards if you look at some of the portable games consoles. One of the killers of discs in gaming was the restrictive price of the drive and the media.
Blu-ray drives cost a fortune, games weren't releasing on them as the adoption rate was low and up until the mid 2010s games could still fit on a DVD or two. Now games are the size of blu ray disks and then some. Even if you buy the physical game for a console you can't just plug and play there's an hour's long install and download.
 
Jamie McKane said:
The disc drive is dead

The disc drive, a technology that was born and flourished during the lifetime of many of our readers, is on its deathbed.

Microsoft has launched its first Xbox One without an optical disc drive, with gamers set to download titles - and potentially fully stream them in the future - when they want to play.
Click to expand...

So what happens to this article when a few weeks from now the next gen Xbox is announced with an optical disc drive. The PS5 already does since they were testing backwards compatibility the other day.
 
Ninja'd said:
So what happens to this article when a few weeks from now the next gen Xbox is announced with an optical disc drive. The PS5 already does since they were testing backwards compatibility the other day.
Click to expand...

You can still buy brand new 3.5" stiffy discs and drives.

Just because it's still manufactured for backward compatibility, does not mean it's showing growth. The PS5 will no doubt be the last gen with an optical drive.
 
LazyLion said:
The disc drive should have been replaced by the USB thumb drive.
But for some reason that never took off.
Don't see why we can't have operating systems, Driver discs and game releases put onto Thumb drives?
Maybe the threat of viruses scared them off that technology, but it would have been the logical successor.
Click to expand...

Some of those get a small switch to make it read only, so the vendor need to make a bootable usb disk, and then make it read only inside before adding the molded plastic.

Then it would work similar to DVDs
 
Does anyone have photos of a LightScribe disc which they burt an image on (a cover image on the disc)? There are not many good pics online, and it would be great if you could share in this thread.
 
backstreetboy said:
Lol funny since you still need a dvd or have to mount a 4 gig .iso to install Windows. It can't download the files from the internet with a net installer...
Click to expand...

Nope. Have used a usb stick to install windows 10 since the beginning. No need for a dvd.
 
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