Not so fast. Until movies and music no longer come on CD/DVD, that won’t happen.
Optical discs aren’t just for software. Lots of people keep an extensive backup music or movie collection on disc because it’s portable and universal. Others like to author their own DVD movies or CD music discs. For those people, a computer without an optical drive would be useless.
Oh, and for the price, they’re still a very reliable form of backup, too. For a few bucks, you can backup gigs of information and not worry about the media being damaged or the data being overwritten.
Exactly!
There will continue to be blank CDs sold, but looking for them in, for example Best Buy; the shelf technology used to lay out the store templates probably results in near-homogeneity; you’ll have to walk over into the coffin corner. There’s a few selections of blank CDs, quite near the one remaining selection of floppy disk, and also nearby one will find a still-decent but shrunken selection of blank DVDs.
“For the eighth time in nine years, U.S. album sales declined.”
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2010/01/cd-sale-free-fall-continued-in-2009/
I have an 8 Terabyte Drobo that I rip all DVD's to, then play over my network. The next generation of Hard Disk drives will soon hold 10 terabytes per square inch. Small storage media devices are doomed, partly because of the tax imposed on the media by the media companies.