Comment by jamesteow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jamesteow | Hacker News Reader

"Over the past few years, Apple's been slyly but deliberately severing ties with a piece of hardware that most rational humans still view as essential on a full-scale computer."

I can count the number of times on one hand I've needed an optical drive in the last year.

In the last five years? Probably twenty times or so. I backup on the internet and use external hard drives. I stream content or view it off of an external. If I need to transfer files to someone, I do so using the plethora of online services, wireless networking, or using a thumbdrive.

I'm so very GLAD that Apple has the balls to do this.

"I've gotta say, though -- it's a wee bit difficult to shove 50GB worth of Blu-ray goodness into a North Carolina sky, and I'm saying that while residing just a few hours to the right."

I bought a PS3 years ago for Blu-ray, but I never ended up buying one for movies because the convenience of streaming and mail-in-DVDs made it easier to save space around the apartment.

Yeah, I found this article whiney. The last time I had to use a DVD was upgrading to Snow Leopard. When I went to do the upgrade I had to take my 1 year old laptop in to get fixed because the DVD drive wasn't working on it -- it in fact probably never worked.

I remember when BluRay 'beat' HD-DVD. By the time HD-DVD was dropped by Toshiba I was already thinking "who cares? no one is going to buy bluray anyway."

I suspect within 2 years, ODD will be completely dead from a manufacturers perspective:

* Games will be acquired through app stores (all the major consoles already have these)

* Movies will come from NetFlix type streaming options (Walmart just entered the game, no?)

* Software will be from app stores as well, or USB sticks

That's not to say you won't be able to buy DVD's, it's just that devices won't have the drives.

Biggest losers? Best Buy's and similar stores. What are they going to do with all that shelf space? (I guess I've already proved myself wrong, since they still have racks of audio CD's sell to the odd 'old' person).

I think you address an interesting market that will still need disks. The home-theater geek. It's not yet practical to stream the amounts of data necessary to play a full 1080p movie for 2+ hours without any noticeable degradation or stuttering. For now, if you want the best, you need a Blu-Ray drive.

Or a USB stick.

BR disk: 50GB. USB stick: 64GB

Do you know what a 64GB USB stick costs? For now, USB sticks are not a cost effective way for Sony et. all to deliver their content. I'm sure the price will come down in the future though.

For ahem personal (non-DRMed) use, USB sticks are fine, since you can use and reuse as necessary.

So the Blu-Ray market will pretty much be just slightly larger than the Laserdisc market was. I say it will be slightly larger because in the case of LDs, only highly affluent home theater geeks could afford to buy the players and the discs, whereas BD is priced much more competitively.

EDIT: We can also include everyone that doesn't have access to high speed broadband as candidates for BD, so the potential market isn't quite as grim as I originally surmised. Given the woeful state of broadband expansion in the U.S., there's probably a pretty good market for optical discs for the next 15 years at least.

One point frequently missed by people mocking blu-ray is that a lot of people are using it now pretty much by accident. I have a PS3 for playing games, and at a later date I got a LoveFilm subscription (it's like Netflix but British and rubbish). Now, if I want to watch a movie, it doesn't cost me a penny extra to watch the blu-ray. Do I want high def /for free/? Hell yes, I do! So I think Blu Ray will be sticking around.

However, on the "will the PC crowd miss it?" front - do I need a Bluray player? Yup! Do I need a Bluray player in my netbook, laptop, or desktop computer? Nope!

I would say the majority of people don't really care about the difference between BR and regular def DVD's. Hell, I know/understand the difference and I still don't care.

Audio CD's offered many advantages over tapes and records: audio quality, form factor, reliability. DVD's were much better than VHS for the same reasons. Other than being higher quality, BluRay doesn't really offer anything. I'm not going to replace any of the DVD's I own with BR. In fact, I'm getting rid of the DVD's and depending on streaming services so I don't have to store all that crap.

Based on that, I would actually wager that DVD will be around a lot longer than BluRay. 8 tracks were popular and are basically all gone now, but people still use records.

If I had a place to stream it from, I could easily stream an HD movie with my connection. It's not like in the future /less/ people are going to have fast internet!

You are both correct and very blessed to have such a good connection. In my experience, even people with decent internet speed seldom see that speed sustained for the entirety of a large download or stream.

A Blu-Ray disk holds 50GB. At a 10Mb/s connection (fairly common in the US), that would take over 11 hours to download, assuming no interruptions. Even at 100Mb/s it would take about an hour. Assuming you're streaming 2 hours of content you only have a 2:1 ratio of play time to download time, and that's still assuming no service interruptions. Most consumer ISPs promote their max burst rate in their packages, but for larger files kick the actual speeds down.

But again, there's no reason to assume the situation won't improve in the future, even with the exponential growth in number of devices online and increased usage per device.

You could also run a digital "rental" service - the "delivery time" is how long it takes to download when your connection isn't being used. Of course, that would only help people with slow connections rather than those with harsh caps, but it's something perhaps.

Yes the caps would be a pain to get around, but having the BR quality file delivered overnight is a possible solution. Of course when it's movie time you usually select the movie just before watching it (at least we do), so it might be difficult to get someone to accept a 12 hour wait for their 1080p movie.

If you span it right I think you might be able to get away with it - after all, Netflix works and that takes longer than 12 hours! This would also be less effort as you wouldn't have to post discs back.

H.264 at 10mbit/s looks OK to me. I can wait for it to buffer — it's still faster than getting getting it by snail mail.

Vudu HDX actually works quite well in my experience, but renting Blu-rays is much cheaper than streaming.

I really wish someone (Red Box, Apple) had built kiosks with local cacheing and good down speeds to sell movies at 1080p with a bit rate higher than Blu-Ray. Plug a flash USB in and away you go.

Well, there are people who still buy and rip CDs as a means of obtaining lossless music :).

I will not claim to hear a difference, but like lossless music for archival purposes (to avoid future lossy to lossy conversion). Besides that, some music is still not available legally online.

Still, I would like to see optical drives axed across all Mac models. I can use an external drive for this purpose, and I do not want to carry around the extra weight if not necessary.

I own a couple of Plextor IDE drives still for this purpose. When it comes to ripping music, older is often better!

For any other uses though, I haven't needed a CD drive in the last year. It would have been useful when I installed Windows, merely because it's harder to lose than a USB memory stick!

Last year, my optical drive had gone bad, but I never realized until I had to rip a CD. Apple gave me a new Macbook Pro cause of the bad drive, but that is one of only three times in the last 2 years that I have tried using an optical drive (the other two were to load sample libraries)

I doubt I am going to miss one if they get rid of it, but I know others who would.

The only time I've ever used an optical drive is to re-install the OS.

You can pick up a USB DVD drive for next to nothing for those rare times you need it.

Exactly. Optical drives are to computing today what floppy drives were in 2000. I'm pretty sure I haven't used an optical drive in a computer for over 2 years.

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