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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 jman on Saturday February 03 2024, @10:34AM
In my 20's it was all about portability, first tape with the Walkman, then these newfangled digital things with the Discman; in the car you could have a collection, but when on the bicycle you could only carry so much media around, an "album" or two at a time.
Nowadays, I go to my local "record store" (yes, they still exist) for both new and used "albums", and also visit the various in-town branches of a nationwide used book store for older CD content.
Physically, these discs get played exactly once: into the computer. (Well, sometimes twice, if I use the car's player on the way home.) Once ingested, many of them end up on the phone, which has has grown to have quite the collection. The phone pipes to my car's stereo system, which is much improved from previous models.
No Spotify, but the phone also has a streaming app. I listen to a couple of stations, one here in the U.S. (and to whom I tithe a little each month as they don't play commercials, and feature content you won't hear on mainstream radio channels), two other classical stations in Switzerland.
The two Swiss stations are neat. One has no announcer at all, just track after track of this concerto, that symphony. If you don't recognize the tune, too bad. The other alternates between a male and female announcer, though I believe they're "canned", not actually on air. Blessedly, neither plays commercials, though even if they did, my German is rusty enough that I wouldn't be sure of what they were trying to schlep.
One downside to everything going digital seems to be album art and the other associated print content that came with a record. Streaming players can feature covers, but without an actual record "liner", who's going to go to the trouble of producing the notes imprinted upon them? Maybe they end up on the artist's blog or something.