Apple has driven many eras of technology standards. Take the original iMac, which both incorporated USB and ditched the floppy drive. For a time, Zip drives were included in many Apple computers and were widely used (many Windows machines also came with them). The PowerBook G3 came with removable bays just to manage the myriad of media choices.
Physical medias have always been replaced by the next best thing, and rarely removed entirely. Yet our generation is at last finding better solutions than physical media, as our telecommunication technologies reach the point of being able to provide real-time data, regardless of file size. The entire technology industry is moving away from bulky external, disposable media, much of which requires investment in drives, discs and time.
Apple has been putting huge efforts into making the use of Apple TV and iTunes congruous. Plugging your computer into your television is very common now, and gone are the days when many would spend the time and resources burning a DVD just to watch it later in the same room. CDs are rarely ripped, as the iTunes store has reached an incredibly high level of popularity and use. Between iCloud, DropBox, Google Drive, and many other solutions, sharing data is often cloud-based now.
The iMac and Mac mini have shed their optical drives. The MacBook Pro Retina and MacBook Air have never included one. We’re thinking Apple is very close to making the Retina and Air the norm. The unibody design has not been updated in years (never built thinner or lighter), and it suggests Apple is not committed to it any longer as a platform. Instead they’ve built the replacements long ago — the Air and Retina — and are nearly ready to drop the aging 13” and 15” Pro models, much as they did the MacBook.
At the same time, Apple can’t lose the market on 13” consumer machines with high storage capacity. While we’ll be seeing the 13” MacBook Pro stick around quite a bit longer, I could see the 15” leaving us sooner. WWDC is in only three weeks. Will we see more optical drives struck off? Not this soon perhaps, but it’s coming.
External solutions abound for those who still need to use discs.