Optical drives have outlived their usefulness, IMO. You can get more data, in a smaller space, on a USB drive. Granted, the price of an optical disk vs. a USB

Optical drives have outlived their usefulness, IMO. You can get more data, in a smaller space, on a USB drive. Granted, the price of an optical disk vs. a USB disk is not at parity yet, but I also remember switching from 3.5" floppies to CD's, even when a CD cost 5x a floppy. Optical drives have also always been kind of a bitch to write files to (the process was always cumbersome and long for the amount of data you were writing), so they never really seemed to catch on as a file exchange medium. Plus, there are compatibility issues that crop up every so often. Bottom line, I'm surprised it took this long for CD's to start getting replaced by USB drives. Flash on OSX has sucked for a very long time. Not sure where the blame lies, but it seems to me that Adobe hasn't put a lot of effort into Just Fixing It. Now, we start to see alternative (and, IMO, better) video delivery methods on the intarwebs. Everybody browses the web a little differently, but I think that for the prototypical cutting-edge Apple user, Flash brings minimal value to the average web experience. Java, I have little opinion on. I thought though that Apples changes to Java just related to the custom JVM Apple has used, and not an overall killing off of Java on OSX.