Apple's MacBook Strategy: Optical is Over

PCWorld Magazine ^ | 7/10/2009 | Seth Weintraub

[Swordmaker]

Last month, most of Apple's MacBooks were upgraded with SD card slots. The most popular 13- and 15-inch MacBook Pros both now have card readers. Apple even explains how to build a bootable SD card. Why on earth would Apple go through the trouble of explaining how to create a boot disk from an SD card? That seems way out in left field. They never did that for USB key drives.

I think there is more to it than that. Apple doesn't just do things like SD cards. "You can just throw in a USB SD card reader" had been the mantra up until this point. Apple didn't need to bother itself with these little things.

Now, I think things have changed. The SD card has become part of Apple's MacBook strategy. It should be arriving on the MacBook Air and the regular MacBook at the next updates...and it might even take the place of the DVD drive on the next MacBook.

That's right, I think the SD card is going to replace the DVD drive on most of Apple's laptops going forward. If you really need a DVD, you'll be able to buy an external USB Superdrive - but that option will mostly be a safety net.

Remember when Apple killed the floppy with the iMac? This will be the same thing. You could buy external floppy but how many of you really did?

Think about it. What would you rather have on your laptop? An easily rewritable 32GB SD card the size of a postage stamp that can hold about the same amount of data as 8 DVDs or a big spinning disk that can scratch easily and takes up about 1/4th of the internal usable area in your laptop?

It is a no-brainer; optical is over.

[Blue Highway]

a grown up version of Harry Potter, minus the cape.

[aruanan]

Look for a program called Handbrake.

You beat me to it. I love Handbrake.

[dangus]

A few years ago, I took a grad-level course wherein I wrote a paper on storage devices. I pulled my punch and did not include my prediction of the extinction of the disk drive; I had no need to make controvertible assertions, and I did get an A.

One thing I wrestled with was the elimination of the DVD. There were all sorts of 3D-DVD technologies emerging, which I didn’t see as terribly promising. (Not to say that they wouldn’t come to market, just that they would only prolong disk technology, not save it.) On-line videos (NetFlix) were already coming out, but I figured infrastructure would lag. Something had to replace the video store, and I couldn’t picture video stores switching directly over to SD. What would be the technology that would be halfway between a video store and a SD boot?

These video kiosks which I had not known of at the time are exactly it. Installing a feature to transfer single-viewing videos to your flash drive instead of getting a disk is simple.

[aruanan]

If that happens, DVD and BluRay will be dinosaurs looking for the dinosaur burial grounds, with only a few years of viability left as people move over to the much more portable format.

How much would companies save on packaging? I'd love not to have those crappy CD/DVD cases breaking all the time. Of course, album art would be a whole lot more difficult on something the size of a small postage stamp.

[Swordmaker]

Yikes! I need it... :-)

Two years ago I was helping a friend fix his Windows PC along with another friend of his who was a Senior Microsoft Engineer and owner of six tech companies of his own including Inova (he wrote the power management software for the white LED flashlights that extended the battery life). He pulled out a Flash Drive that was slightly larger than normal that also had its own little LCD screen along with a slide switch. He handed it to me. The LCD screen said "32GB." He told me to push the switch to the other position... when I did, the screen now displayed "2TB!" I laughed and said "Great joke gadget." He replied, "Nope, it's a prototype. The 32GB mode allows regular Windows computers to see it... at least a lot of them will."

I asked him how much it cost... after he said "If you have to ask, you can't afford it!", he more seriously replied that if they were sale, they would be ruinously expensive. In a couple or three years you'll see them for sale when we get the price down and the memory dies more reliable. The failure rate on the dense memory chips is over 85% right now. That isn't good enough for production runs yet. I'm still waiting.

[dangus]

Heh. I haven’t used my optical drive on my notebook yet. I downloaded all my software that wasn’t included. OpenOffice, the GIMP, Chrome, Putty, VLC media player. I thought I’d miss MS Access (the included MS Office didn’t include Access), but I got use to MyPhpAdmin. And the only games I’ve bought have been on Wii.

[Swordmaker]

a grown up version of Harry Potter, minus the cape.

No, that's Steve Jobs... Bill Gates is Ron Weasley. Steve Ballmer is Vincent Crabbe...

[radio_jaos]

Big mistake. I need my DVD drive to watch movies, and Netflix doesn’t deliver them on SD card.

[Swordmaker]

How much would companies save on packaging? I'd love not to have those crappy CD/DVD cases breaking all the time. Of course, album art would be a whole lot more difficult on something the size of a small postage stamp.

I think the in-home, album art package will be about the size of a postal card... the in-store retail blister packs will be about the same size as currently—too big to slip into a thief's pocket—and still hard to open.

[Swordmaker]

Big mistake. I need my DVD drive to watch movies, and Netflix doesn’t deliver them on SD card.

A lot of people watched movies on Beta Tapes... then on VHS Tapes... then on Laser Disks... now DVDs... Netflix does provide downloadable movies. It's only a small step to sending out movies on SD cards instead.

[Spktyr]

No, but you could take some of the later 5.25” Apple II floppies and hook them up to the Mac. It would work, albeit not well.

And then there was the LC and LC II which had an Apple IIe on a card internally - which could connect to a 5.25” Apple II drive and transfer files to and from the Mac.

[Locomotive Breath]

I do video for my son’s sports team. I have to distribute the video to some extremely non-technical people. They can just barely get a conventional DVD player to work. The DVDs are $0.30 in bulk. No way I can distribute the video on SD.

Also, what’s the archive lifespan of a SD versus a properly stored DVD. No where near as permanent I’ll bet.

[Richard Kimball]

[ReignOfError]

Apple may have gotten lucky and didn’t have the backlash I would have expected when they dropped the floppy drives, but they try to dictate that DVDs are no longer relevant and will be replaced by SD cards, and even the Macfaithful™ may start a revolution.

External optical drives aren't gonna disappear. The question is whether they'll be standard on every laptop. External optical drives will still be available -- even today, you can still get USB floppy and Zip drives.

The bottom line is that DVDs hold data. Movies, installers, whatever it is, it's just data. When another medium becomes smaller, cheaper, faster to load, more reliable, and with a smaller, cheaper, more reliable drive to read it, that medium will take the lead.

Apple was ahead of the curve in dropping removable magnetic drives, and while this article takes some leaps, when optical drives become obsolete I wouldn't be surprised if Apple is the first to drop them. As it did 5.25" floppies, 3.5" floppies, RS-232 ports, CRTs and dial-up modems.

[martin_fierro]

lolz

Those were the days.

[MediaMole]

Netflix does do streaming video. ..and you can rip DVDs to SD cards.

That said, DVD disks are a great cheap distribution medium. Pressed disks are cheap and quick to produce. They (and Blu Ray) will remain a staple of the retail store for at least 10 years.

DVD drives will quickly disappear from laptops. They make the computers larger and more fragile than necessary. Remove the DVD and spinning hard drive and you can build a tiny, robust computing device.

IMHO, the next generation of small laptops will be tablets. For portable operation, you can use a soft keyboard like an iPHone. Heavier users can use a bluetooth or usb keyboard. With a tablet design, you also get rid of the hinge, which is the other weak link of the laptop design.

For the sake of argument, I’m typing this post on an Apple bluetooth keyboard that is small enough to fit into a laptop case.

[canuck_conservative]

One difference between the two: as an “electrical device”, flash memory cards would not survive exposure to an EMP pulse; optical disks (non-electrical) would.

I’ll keep backing up the really important stuff onto 2 disks, stored in cool, un-sunlit places far apart.

[AZLiberty]

Rotating media are so 20th century.

[rawhide]

I totally agree. Optical is dying quickly.

[rawhide]

Big mistake. I need my DVD drive to watch movies, and Netflix doesn’t deliver them on SD card.

I envision the day where the mailings will stop and Netflix can only be downloaded.