Where 12 cm Square is a Waste of Space.

I have two laptops that both have a piece of equipment which I hardly ever use in either of them... it measures approximately 12.5 cm by 14 cm by 1 cm, are both mounted internally, and both never see more than 3 hours of use a month, but are always powered up for use whenever the system is alive—it is the once-dependable optical disc drive. Once a main source of getting large masses of data into and out of your computer, or the only way to rip and burn music and your home movies onto CDs and DVDs, these optical drives are fast becoming superseded by the ever-more-imperative and ever-so-heavily used network interface.

With inventions such as YouTube™, Flickr!® and the less popular subscription-based MobileMe® service, the distribution of consumable content and software products for personal use has increasingly been made through the Internet. This means, dependency of your computer's optical disc drive would have dropped sharply over the years.

Adding another nail to the coffin for the once dependable optical drive, for Mac users anyway, is a new Internet-based mechanism for obtaining software for your computer. I have, so far, been highlighting the pitfalls of the Mac App Store for a while now, but simultaneously, I have surely realised that there are also some benefits to the new service, particularly if you happen to have one of those new, gorgeously ultra-thin laptops that yours truely have been making the last few years.

But I didn't expect that the latest crop of laptops that Apple recently released were to continue to have built-in optical drives! Maybe it should have been optional for the 17" model, but no, I didn't expect all three models to all have the drives as standard equipment... right down to the eject key on the keyboard! With Apple already providing at least two ways to have software installed straight from DVD if you really need it, why would anyone need to have an optical drive built into their laptop anymore?

Well, perhaps it is because that there are some Mac software manufacturers that still release their software on optical discs, packed in large boxes and complete with phone-book-thick instruction manuals. It will take some time for Apple to convince every single Mac developer to make their software available on the Mac App Store, so in the interim, delivery via optical disc is still expected to be the way to receive software by many a Mac-using folk.

On the other hand, imagine if you could order a brand new 17" MacBook Pro without that hardly-used optical drive... and replace it with a bigger battery, or more memory, a second internal hard disk or even additional internal CPU and cache hardware! Apple have missed an opportunity to make really impressive laptops with capacities that no-one in the industry can match, because let's face it, after the original iMac, it took the PC industry many many years afterwards to ditch the floppy disk drive, and it was only recently that the inventor of the 3.5" floppy disk finally called it quits.

My old but still useful machines are running with their optical drives sitting inside them seizing due to lack of use. I sometimes wish that I could rip them out and put large-capacity SSDs or regular hard drives in their place... to me, that'd be more useful than the optical drives that take ages to write and would write only a fraction of the amount of data that these SSDs would otherwise hold.

—tonza