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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: 2) by aafcac on Saturday February 03 2024, @01:03AM
That's the route I went. I have more than one because of the asinine region blocking DVD discs where it's impossible to get media in all the languages I'm interested in with just one drive. (Or a bunch of hassle making one region free)
I mostly just use official media for video and CDs only if I can't get a quality lossless copy.