3 ms·
i have a newer 17mbp. can't say i've used the optical, but i like having it there. i would probably move towards a 15" mba if it had their 1680x1050 screen and
by kamechan 16y ago
i have a newer 17mbp. can't say i've used the optical, but i like having it there. i would probably move towards a 15" mba if it had their 1680x1050 screen and more battery life. the 8GB ram thing doesn't really get to me tho. i do all my dev work in vim.
the thing i can't stand is how people are perceiving the dump of the optical drive as something revolutionary. a) the old macbook air didn't have one (a gripe for many) and b) neither do netbooks.
a little off-topic but one thing that really kills me about apple is how they're seemingly refusing to add a blu-ray option even though the standard is well-established. i would really like to have one in my mbp17. not just because i have a res (1920x1200) on the lappy that supports it, but because i also have a 27" panel that i hook my laptop into.
and this move towards "no optical drives" (likely so they can sell more HD content) is only going to solidify that among their lines in my assessment.
hmmmph.
- jokull 16y agoI guess they'd like you to buy movies in the iTunes store instead.
- qjz 16y agoI thoroughly dislike optical drives, regardless of the platform, and see their demise as a good thing. In laptops, they add weight and draw excessive power. Elsewhere, only commercial manufacturing provides reliable storage, but even this is extremely vulnerable to wear and tear from heavy use. At the consumer level, I've had better luck archiving data on floppy disks than any optical media (I've yet to see a CD-RW allow reuse without data corruption). As far as I'm concerned, USB ports make built-in optical drives obsolete.
- kamechan 16y agothe problem is that some movies can't be easily [legally] downloaded/distributed. take "tears of the black tiger" for example. one of the best films ever made, but nearly impossible to get from blockbuster, netflix (only recently could one watch online), or apple movie store in any other medium than DVD. how many more movies are there like this? my wife and i pick up japanese films from tokyo all the time that we can't get elsewhere. i would wager there are plenty more films available on DVD than on downloadable format. sure the reasons for this may be stupid ... but they're reasons nonetheless [for now].
- dualboot 16y agoI would hardly call BluRay a well established standard. It's the lone HD physical media for consumers at this point but most people are still using DVD.
- kamechan 16y agoi meant standard in the sense that it's fully specified as a technology, and is the only large capacity optical disk in the mainstream consumer market. yes, DVD is much more prevalent.
- dualboot 16y agoTwo terabyte drives are $100 or less now. Optical media is growing more irrelevant every day for most of us.
- jbarham 16y ago> Optical media is growing more irrelevant every day for most of us. The vast majority of people have neither the inclination nor the technical wherewithal to rip DVDs to disk. Until every DVD that Netflix stocks has a "Play" button next to it, DVDs are going to continue to be very relevant. And even then Netflix is very US-centric, only very recently expanding into Canada, not to mention the rest of the world.
- Tyrannosaurs 16y agoThe no Blu-ray is supposedly because they see Blu-ray as the mini-disc of video - that essentially most people will happily go from DVD to download without the interim step.
- kamechan 16y agothis may or may not be true. it depends on the level of quality that all these folks spending thousands of dollars on high end panels/plasmas are willing to tolerate. i watch most of my films on a 27" computer display, and mostly over netflix streaming. but if i had a higher end system, no doubt i'd want to have the best quality i could get. and even on a 30Mb/s internet connection, i still can't top the quality of blu-ray. but your analogy is well-founded. convenience usually wins. and after all, laserdiscs looked much better than their competitors and still didn't survive.