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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 turgid on Saturday February 03 2024, @11:19AM (2 children)
I started buying CDs in 1988. They were very expensive (of the order of £15 in those days) and I had to save up for many weeks to be able to afford them. The first one I bought was Tracy Chapman, which was a DDD recording. The sound quality was a revelation compared with the vinyl records and cassette tapes that went before. Plus, the CDs were and still are more robust. I never bought another tape after that, and certainly not vinyl.
I have hundreds and hundreds of CDs which are very precious to me and many are from before the Loudness Wars. I have made backups using cdparanoia of almost all of them and I have them stored in FLAC format. I still buy physical CDs. I don't like streaming over the Internet. I want my sound quality and I don't want some company making a profile of my listening habits. I don't want them to arbitrarily decide one day that I can't listen to something I've already paid for.
For many years, from the 1990s well into the 2000s, optical media were the most convenient form of backup for me too. When I got my first CD writer it mean I could make reliable and quick backups of all my important files on one disk. Later, I got a DVD writer. Now I have something that writes M-Disc. I've never written one.
Years ago I stopped playing CDs in the car because potholes were scratching them, and I certainly didn't want my rare pre-loudness wars CDs damaged. The car I have now plays MP3s from a USB stick, which is good enough. I have scripts to transcode my FLAC files.
USB flash drives are very convenient these days, for booting PCs, for backup and for transporting data. They're fantastically cheap. I recently bought some 128GB sticks for under £5.
However, for music, there hasn't ever been a better format than CD. All of these streaming formats are lossy. I believe that the golden ears types will tell you that CDs aren't perfect (apparently quiet cymbals sound bad due to the high frequency content and fixed-point sampling). I'm not a hipster. I will not be buying vinyl or analogue cassette tapes. I don't care so much about the artwork on the cover.
I want the freedom to listen to what I've paid for in the best quality possible and I want to be able to shift formats for e.g. the car or my phone. I will keep an optical drive around for as long as I can. I also have a few films and TV series on DVD and we have at least one BluRay in the house.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Saturday February 03 2024, @12:57PM (1 child)
I still buy CDs when I find them. I like to have a physical copy of the music in a lossless format. Up until COVID lockdowns there was a local market where I lived where one guy would sell CDs by the kilogram. It was a bit of a gimmick, but it did mean that you could buy a lot of CD's for little money. I would buy 1-2Kg sometimes, random artists that I never heard of, old titles, genres that I never had much exposure too, or just CD's that had nice looking artwork. It was the ultimate impulse purchase.
Some of the music was not for me, but I discovered new Artists that I did not know about through this method.
Thing is nowadays most people really don't care about sound quality. It started with the "Loudness wars" which crippled the CD's dynamic range, and at present day most music seems to be mastered now to sound best on tinny bluetooth speakers, and then lossy compressed to boot.
If you do get a lossless copy of the music, you find that the recording studio samplers are using lossy compression in their samples. So I can hear the lossy artifacts in the musical instruments, which sometimes really contrasts with the quality of the singers voice. If recording studios can't be bothered to use high quality samples the end for "quality audio" has come. At least for everything except classical music, and other "pure instrument" type recording.
Even having a "Hi-Fi" is not a thing anymore. In my parents time the "Hi-Fi stack" took pride in the living room next to the TV, and people would come to listen to music and comment on the quality (especially if you had the money to buy one of those "new" CD players). Different tape decks would play tapes with a different quality so guests would compare the decks they bought with the host, and of course some dubbing and mixtapes would be created.
None of that is really done anymore. There just isn't the interest.
As for my CD collection, up until recently my CDs would get ripped to FLAC and packed away, however I repaired an old CD-deck which had been sitting in my attic for years and found quite the pleasure in actually casting an eye across my CDs, picking one I feel like listening to, and looking at the artwork while listening. It is a different experience to how I usually listen to music. In fact I always struggled to look through my digital collection because the file/folder structure would obscure Albums in a hierarchy, and looking at lists of text does not give me as much input as looking at the spine artwork.
When I know what Album I want to listen to, going to my digital collection is the fastest and best way to listen to it. If however I don't know what I want to listen to, I find physically casting an eye over my CD collection is the best way to make an impulse choice.
As such, as far as I am concerned, CDs are not dead for me yet, and I have no plans for them to become dead. I would be fine if artists who don't want the expense of pressing their own CDs just provided me with FLAC files and some images of the artwork, and I would be happy to burn my own CDs and put them in jewel cases in my collection.
However for non audio use, CD's are pretty much non existent in my day to day life. I have a drive in my desktop, but that is used mostly to copy data off old archival CDs to my file server. I occasionally burn a boot CD if I have a machine that refuses to boot from a USB pen drive, but that is the limit of my use. My laptop has not had an optical drive for more than 10 years, and I can count on one hand how often that has been a problem for me in that time.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday February 03 2024, @01:51PM
Yes, I too mourn the death of HiFi. I hate listening to music over Bluetooth. I don't do it. I bought some "studio monitor" speakers a couple of years back for my PC. They're physically small, but the sound quality is the best I have heard in many years. There's a noticeable drop in sound quality if you try to use Bluetooth.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].