Mac without optical drives? Ping!
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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.
! 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... :-)
I think this is a ridiculous rumor, and consider the source, PC World.
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.
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.
Big mistake. I need my DVD drive to watch movies, and Netflix doesn’t deliver them on SD card.
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.
Rotating media are so 20th century.
I totally agree. Optical is dying quickly.
Im waitng on the “hand/forehead scan” feature. I think the acronym is M.O.B.
To get a two-hour, high definition movie to fit on a standard DVD requires considerable compression and the quality of the original resolution really suffers. Even Blu-Ray requires compression from the HD master.
What I want is an SD card that can hold the entire HD movie master at 300 Gigabytes.
Creators have invested a fortune to create the HD digital content and the storage media needs to catch up to the quality of what has been created.
UNIVAC drum memory
Optical drives are headed for extinction. Apple is simply seeing the writing on the wall. Good for them.
Does anyone recall the switch to DVDs? DVD rentals were one small shelf with 20 movies in the late 90s. By 2003 it had completely switched.
The same will happen here. In 5 years all new media will be either downloadable content or come on a flash disk of some type. There will be options to get it on DVD/Blu-ray, etc. but it won’t be the norm.
Interesting, thanks for the ping!
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.What (if anything) is built into the iPod and iPhone families of products? Might this be a new feature to expect?
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?I've got a few of those, and bought 'em cheap. They're useful on USB-capable Windulls machines as well, either laptops (which don't have floppies, regardless of OS) or on desktop machines which have internal floppies that are plain worn out. :')