Where to for the optical drive?
There has been a lot of discussion since Apple released the latest iteration of the MacBook Air as to whether or not we actually need an optical drive in modern computers.
To be honest this discussion started when Apple released the original MacBook Air but the device was so underpowered that no-one really paid it much attention. The new Air, however, seems to have captured the attention of the geeks and people have begun wondering about the possibility of the optical drive going the way of the floppy drive, the serial port and the CRT monitor (OK the CRT isn’t dead yet, but it should be).
There is a part of me that will be very glad to see the optical drive pass on from this realm. Just for the chance to never again have a scratched disk stop me from installing my favourite game, or for the drive to decide that it doesn’t want to read DVDs anymore, preventing me from watching a movie or installing the latest piece of software.
There is also a part of me that will be sad to see those shiny disks depart from this world. I will be forced to go elsewhere to find my bird repellents and I might actually have to buy coasters for my desk again.
But seriously, two things are certain. The first is that we are going to see more and more laptops coming out without optical drives and some of these will not be of the ultra-portable type. Manufacturers will simply decide that they would prefer to offer an option with more battery life and forego the optical drive. This is going to be even more prevalent as the price of flash memory continues to drop and notebook computers go completely solid state for storage.
You are going to continue to get optical drives in desktops and in external units, which is probably where the majority of them will come from in the future, with USB 3 on the horizon, the optical drive becomes a data transfer bottleneck.
The real switchover will be driven by two things: The decrease in the price of flash memory until it will a negligible additional cost to ship a flash drive; and the wide availability of decent, low cost bandwidth.
Already services such as Steam offer the ability to download games, Blizzard also lets one download their games directly from their sites. Apple’s upcoming application store will likely set the trend for more and more application vendors to sell directly to the customer, irrespective of the size and complexity of the application.
Cloud based services are rapidly taking over the personal backup space and movies and TV series rentals are heading to the web as well.
So what do you need the optical drive for?
Not much I would venture, but I will lay money that five years from now the majority of PCs sold will still have them and it will be easy to get one 10 years from now, because it took forever for the floppy to die and more PCs have PS2 ports than don’t.
That is unless you buy an Apple because there is nothing Steve Jobs likes better than killing defunct technologies.
Where to for the optical drive? << Comments and views
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