2011-03-15

Should Macs still have DVD drives?

Is there still a reason for Apple to provide DVD drives in Macs and MacBooks?
The four main reasons for the existence of a DVD drive are:
  1. Install the operating system. For that, Apple now includes a 8GB minimalistic USB drive with its DVD-less machines (i.e., the MacBook Airs).
  2. Install programs. For that, there have always been downloads, but now there additionally is the Mac App Store.
  3. Watch videos. Still a very valid reason, but Apple would rather see you use iTunes to download videos. With Apple not supporting Blu-Ray, things have long looked a bit silly in this area for Macs, anyway.
  4. Data storage. For most purposes, USB drives (and possibly Thunderbolt drives) are enough. Again, without Blu-Ray, there is less of a point to support this. It would be nice to have more compact storage media, anyway (credit-card-shaped? hologram-based?).
With all of these reasons gone, why would Apple build a DVD drive into their next machines? But what would then set the MacBook apart from the MacBook Air? Only faster processors and non-SD hard drives?

Not having a Blu-Ray option hurts Mac users, but with Thunderbolt, there is now a way to both drop built-in DVD drives and still support Blu-Ray in an elegant way. And without making standard Macs more expensive.
  • Provide an external Thunderbolt-based Blu-Ray drive. Then users can decide on their own whether they want Blu-Ray or not. Apple can charge extra, should it feel that licensing costs are high. But do provide it, Apple! Thunderbolt carries enough electricity so that such a drive would not need a power supply.
  • Support Blu-Ray playing via a Mac OS X app. Only deliver it with the drive, if licensing costs are an issue.
Not supporting Blu-Ray is another case of a strategy tax: Considerations of one department (iTunes movie store) lead to decisions that are negative for other departments (Macs).

Related posts:
  1. More Mac app store news: user experience, prices, etc.
  2. Thunderbolt (code-named Light Peak): an overview
  3. John Siracusa on the Apple strategy tax
  4. Bag of hurt [Marco Arment on how user-unfriendly Blu-Ray is]

2 comments:

Veronica said...

I use my DVD Superdrive to rip music CD's to iTunes to the best quality iTunes allows. Why would I ditch the DVD drive for poor quality iTunes downloads?

Axel Rauschmayer said...

I still use my DVD drive almost every day (to watch DVDs). Note, however that iTunes quality has become very good, so I’m not sure that it’s much better than CD (if at all).

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