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.
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.
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.
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.
I doubt it. adding a portable DVD drive to transfer your info from one to the other should be quick and easy and wouldn’t stop me from buying one.