Mac without optical drives? Ping!
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Posted on 07/11/2009 8:41:34 PM PDT by 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at pcworld.com ...
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Considering the memory available on SD cards now, I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a strategy similar to SIM cards for cell phones where you take your personal settings, music, apps with you and the computers become more disposable.
!
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.
Compact Discs (and its more advanced cousin, the DVD) at one time where the technology of the future, and now they’re beginning to look archaic. Now that you can buy thumb drives with more memory than a standard DVD there doesn’t seem to be much more point to them.
SD cards can die also.
Ummm..., maybe okay for data purposes, but I still get my movies on DVD, and I’ve been known to view them on my Mac laptop and also plug that into a big screen TV and watch it there... :-)
Yikes!
I need it... :-)
So, how would I burn an SD card to watch on my TV?
I mail DVDs with data, pictures and home movies all the time. Cheap to buy, cheap to mail, everyone can view them.
Look for a program called Handbrake.
You're welcome.
If you're watching movies on the go, ripping them to the hard drive is a lot easier on the battery than keeping that 5.25" disc spinning. Standard-definition movies rip down to about 1-2 GB per.
I think this is a ridiculous rumor, and consider the source, PC World.
It's truly mind-boggling what you can do with 1's and 0's!
Did you ever think you could carry a portable "hard drive" on your key ring?
Looking at that 2TB SD card I can say it must be how Bill Gates marveled at the storage medium in the early 80s when he said all anyone would ever need is 640kb, had he ever made that proclamation.
I’m completely cool with it. I just bought one of those little Acer “netbooks” and it doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive. I hope soon all software comes with an SD card option. Remember when everything came with a 5 1/4 and a 3 inch floppy for a while?
Same thing.
When Apple dropped the floppy in 1998, that media was smaller than most files that would be copied. 1.4MB was way to small to handle raw photos, MP3s files, etc. So I think that "lucking out" had nothing to do with it. Foresight and hindsight lots.
Here we are seeing a lot of foresight. Apple has not yet dropped optical drives, but I think they are paving the way. I have been predicting it for a couple of years. It's why I have maintained that Apple is not interested in BluRay burners or even readers.
I think the switch from spinning media to totally solid state media will occur much faster than we think. As the price of Flash memory drops, soon we will be able to buy SD cards in quantities at quantities and prices similar to what we pay today for blank DVDs. Apple may use its clout with the studios who have already agreed to selling digital downloadable movies to pushing them into publishing their movies on read-only SD cards at similar pricing. 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.
Who is Bill Gates?
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