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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: 4, Insightful) by SomeGuy on Saturday February 03 2024, @12:50AM (1 child)
I still find recordable CD/DVDs handy for certain kinds of archival. No messy electronics to go bad, I won't loose all of the disks if one gets damaged, and they are read-only so they can't get deleted by one erroneous sector write. A pile of USB flash drives would be totally impractical. Don't have to worry about device connector compatibility except for the drive, that can be changed if needed. Yes, yes, yes, I also make copies to large external hard drives for easier access. Not putting this shit on someone else's ephemeral crufty outsourced file storage servers, I mean "cloud".
I've never seen too much value in having a CD/DVD drive built in to a laptop. On business machines those were used mostly for once and a while loading software. It was probably things like copy protected game disks that kept internal drives as a necessity on laptops for some people.
Of course, on a desktop, there is no reason not to have an internal drive.
Once in a very rare while I pick up a 5$ DVD movie at the great Mart of Wal. Although once I watch it, I usually wish I hadn't. Yech.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Saturday February 03 2024, @11:30AM
I have recently checked on CDs/DVDs ~20 yrs old. The CDs were fine, if not scratched. DVDs though had a failure rate of ~20%. Be aware that the writing process burns away dye, a process that continues by thermal and ambient light influence over time. CDs seem to be robust enough, I would not trust burned DVDs for longer than 5 yrs though. CDs seem to be reliable for 20yrs at least (I will report back in another 20 yrs). Something to also consider is that there are probably differences in quality across brands. My long-term archival is based on HDDs exclusively. I do refresh drives ~every 10 yrs.