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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 Snospar on Saturday February 03 2024, @01:48AM (3 children)
I'll remember forever the excitement of laying down physical medium and waiting for the audio system to reproduce the sounds of the bands I love right in front of me (well, my ears anyway). Vinyl, Cassette Tape and eventually CD with varying amounts of quality between them - not many remember the horrible early years of CD where the promise of "scratchless" audio seemed to outstrip any attempt to properly master the music. It took many years before digital audio was something truly worth listening to and by then the need for convenience and portability were starting to grow. Pretty soon we were either being encouraged to "rip" our tracks or being warned that such an act was illegal. And that was the first taste of what was to come... music was never "owned" apparently, it was licensed to you in the format you originally paid for. Once MP3 players took off this was already a moot point but when Napster arrived things were definitely out of control.
Now, most appear happy with Spotify but that lack of physical media has meant that someone else controls all the keys to your musical collection. I've had a playlist on Spotify for years, I listen to it (on random) weekly, almost daily, but sometimes I feel something is missing. When I dig into the list I find out that either Spotify have removed a track (without any notification) or they've replaced it with a "Live" or even "bootleg" version I don't recognise. Sometimes the artists have removed their material, and I respect that, but the complete lack of announcement around these changes worries me. With a physical media collection I was in control. Perhaps it wasn't so easy to store, catalogue or search but at least I knew that the music I had yesterday would still be there tomorrow.
Currently an extrapolation to the future leads to silence and I'm not talking about the entropy move to vacuum.
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(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Saturday February 03 2024, @02:09AM
You can own a physical representation of some music piece but owning abstract concept of it makes no sense. I feel that if we let either musicians or rentier rights-holders control what we do with information on our devices then eventually they'll insist on editing our minds too if ever future technology makes this possible, for example to remove memories of music pieces we're for whatever reason not licensed for anymore.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday February 03 2024, @04:15AM (1 child)
I'm not sure CD:s are coming back as retro tho. I can in some regard understand LP/VINYL. Not sure about the richness of the sound or anything like that. But it was big, large and had interesting art on it. It was a good artifact in that regard. They are not really bringing back the cassette, they are small, fiddly, there isn't a lot of room for art. CD is in that regard between them, a little larger then the cassette so better art, should be more portable with players and in cars and such. But still easily replaced by other things. I think it's not the audio by itself that drives the urge for LP, nostalgia and being a great artifact compared to others do it. The rest can just be replaced by a usb stick with some digital music on it.
(Score: 2) by Snospar on Saturday February 03 2024, @12:16PM
Totally agree, browsing friends album collections was always a blast. I think the combination of interesting art styles, the sometimes outright weird liner notes and the ability to look back at a bands progression (e.g. look at album covers from The Beatles). Obviously you'd be doing this while listening to some fantastic music... happy times. The squeeze down to CD took some of the magic away, especially when they simply shrank the album art/text down to the smaller format.
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