9to5mac.com — When you consider the facts, it is a no brainer. What is the largest part of the internals of a laptop and at the same time (as trends go) is used less and less - not to mention its status as a powerhog. What could the average laptop certainly do without on a daily basis? Without a doubt, it is the DVD player.
Sep 22, 2007 View in Crawl 4
cyberoidxSep 23, 2007
Wi-WHAT? DVD Drive?please limit your comments to the near future
macslutSep 23, 2007
There are a lot of retarded comments here (I know, welcome to Digg).I would love it if they removed the optical drive. The keyword here being "removed". This doesn't mean Apple will kill you if you hook up an external optical drive. There are USB powered optical drives that could be OEM'd and even sold as an option from Apple. Also, for software, it's pretty much all downloadable these days anyway. Even the OS doesn't need to be delivered on a DVD, it could be installed via flash drive.Yes, it's time to start phasing out the optical drive.
dgp1Sep 24, 2007
That's fine, I'm sure the larger machines will continue to have them. You by definition just said you don't want a subnotebook, you are willing to tradeoff that size for the DVD functionality. This hypothetical next-gen mac subnote is not targeted at you.
posureSep 24, 2007
As long as they include an external drive and finally add an SD reader, it'd be fine.
masterthiefsterSep 24, 2007
Pressing CDs and DVDs has a nearly negligible overhead (even an end user can buy a box of rewriteable discs costing no more than about $1.50 each). Add a cheap plastic shell and a paper insert and you're done. A ROM implementation would cost noticeably more than this.This means that profits from DVD sales and production would either be smaller because of the increased cost of the medium, or else the companies will have to convince the public to pay more for the new technology so as to maintain closer to their original profit margin.
insomniac8400Sep 25, 2007
I think you are looking for one of these: <a class="user" href="http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/23/30-usb-port-powered-bbq/">http://www.engadget.com/2006/08/23/30-usb-port-pow ...</a>