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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 Nuke on Saturday February 03 2024, @10:26AM
USB sticks used for archiving dont have much room for sticking explanatory lables on them.
I also have a large collection of CDs and DVDs that came with PC magazines (remember them?) with stuff like esoteric command line utilities, games (now retro), and Linux rescue distros, one of which I used only a few days ago. They are still in the cardboard containers they came in which listed their contents. I see no good reason not to keep them, or to copy that lot to any other type of media or someone's cloud, and contrary to to the warnings I have found no issues reading ones I burned 25 years ago. I have a tower PC with two DVD drives in it (for different regions) and see no reason to remove them or not transfer them to a newer PC as long at the motherboard supports them.