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Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised that I haven't read anyone that has connected the dots on the app store for Mac and the emphasis on the Macbook Air. The app store solves the problem for how does one get shrink-wrapped applications onto a Mac with no optical drive? In the future, they may remove optical drives from their laptops entirely.

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I think you're reading a little too much into it. Steam solved this "problem" long ago.

Optical drives may eventually become less common. I admit mine rarely gets much use, but I still fancy throwing a DVD in there once and a while.

But that does present an interesting problem if you're, say, Microsoft. How do you sell Word to someone who doesn't have an optical drive? Would Microsoft or Adobe or anyone else who sells big-ticket shrink-wrapped software turn to the App Store to solve that problem? Not in a million years.

You can already buy Office or CS online and download it. My local electronics store even sells cheap Office licenses with nothing but the key. Microsoft or Adobe don’t need the App Store.

If anyone else developed an app store for Apple that took 30% of developer profits it would fail miserably, regardless of how wonderful it worked. I'm sure Apple will do fine with this new model, but it kind of amazes me people will go for it.

Well that's exactly my point.

The Mac App Store isn't the game changer some people seem to think (or fear) it is. It could very well be a boon to small developers, or it could have no impact at all, but it doesn't change anything.

I don't think it's an enormous change, but it makes it easier for Apple to drop optical drives from all of their laptops. They could do it for the Air previously because it was marketed as a laptop with extra stuff removed - but they could not remove the optical drive in normal Macbooks partly because of this problem.

The other common use case for the optical drive are DVDs and music CDs. Streaming content is making those less necessary.

First, Steam distributes games only. Second, Apple does not tend to depend on third-parties for critical infrastructure.

Eureka! That's exactly what I thought when I heard of the Mac App Store. The App Store seems to me like a move to simplify things for Macbook Air users, which is actually a niche product for regular people. Developers prefer a 13 or 15 inch Macbook Pro because of the computing power and screen real estate they provide. Hell they are called Macbook Pro for a reason. Designers prefer Macbook Pros on the larger side because for the scree real state also. It's off course true that a power user might buy a Air for development, but they are the exception to the rule. The market for the air is businessmen on the run, university students, hipster apple fanboys that don't want to carry a 10 pound machine in their over the shoulder bags. For this people opening a disk image and copying the app to the apps folder might prove too complicated, alas they now have the App Store. This will have absolutely no effect on the ecosystem of users that like OSX because it offers a Unix system with pretty graphics (which Ubuntu even with it's latest updates is lacking) and great usability for the most part. Hell I only use OSX because I do both design and code and I need a machine that can do both and is not Windows. The moment Macbook Pros becomes an oversized Ipad I'm biting the bullet, buying a system 76 laptop, putting Arch linux into it and start contributing code to Gimp.

With the MacBook Air refresh, Apple made "No optical drive" a feature. The OS X Install USB key is an omen of things to come, too. I think you're right, and it's really just a matter of time until they bring it across almost all of their laptop lines.

I don't remember the last time I installed shrink-wrapped software. Adobe CS and Microsoft Office are both downloads these days and those are the only ones I have that I know come in a box too. No app store is needed and if you're big enough to be doing shrink-wrapped software, you're big enough to not want to pay Apple 30% to process your purchases.

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