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Sometimes, it's worth taking a moment to note the end of an era, even when that ending might have happened a long time ago. Today, Apple announced that it considers the mid-2012 13-inch MacBook Pro obsolete. It was the last MacBook Pro to include an optical drive for playing CDs or DVDs.
This means that any MacBook Pro with an optical drive is no longer supported.
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Apple stopped selling the mid-2012 13-inch MacBook Pro in October 2016 (it was available for a while as the company's budget option in the Pro lineup), so anyone doing the math saw this coming.
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The exclusion of an optical drive in subsequent MacBook Pro models was controversial, but it's now clear that whether Apple was jumping the gun at that point or not, optical drives have fallen away for most users, and many Windows laptops no longer include them.
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That's a sign of just how irrelevant optical drives are for today's users, but this seems like a good time to remember a bygone era of physical media that wasn't so long ago. So farewell, mid-2012 13-inch MacBook Pro—honestly, most of us didn't miss you by this point.
[Do you still have a collection of Blu-rays/DVDs? Do you use an Optical Disc drive anymore?] I do.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mojibake Tengu on Saturday February 03 2024, @12:09AM
CD/DVD media polycarbonate is excellent material for my micro milling machine, I used to make tiny robotic components of them.
Some split into two layers after cutting edge/center, making two exact identical/symmetrical parts if milled thoughtfully.
And... don't forget lasers! Good power in BR.
Hmm, now I remember, I have seen a datacenter shaman exorcist staff made of CDs somewhere...
And yes, I still have about a dozen of active optical drives on important machines, a couple of standalone portable devices too.
Do you understand your flash disks and SSDs will become smashed in the first nuke explosion, not necessarily visible nearby?
Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.