Apple declares last MacBook Pro with an optical drive obsolete | Hacker News Reader

Apple declares last MacBook Pro with an optical drive obsolete

arstechnica.com

58 pointsmfiguiere148 comments

Yes, away with those pesky DVDs—stream everything. Give us a portion of your income every month so that you may never pay just a single time to access some piece of media.

I feel like we are moving towards a service/subscription based economy. Which definitely makes some media more accessible and equitable, and might be a mutually beneficial agreement between the producer and the consumer.

But that does raise the question of ownership. Given that now some game companies are looking to turn even single player games into a subscription based model...

Besides ownership, the problem I see with that is that (most) people can only afford so many subscriptions, and with recent fragmentation in the streaming market there are a lot of subscriptions.

I want to see one thing on a streaming service, but I can't afford to pay monthly for that service just to watch that one thing. I would have bought the DVD and given them some of my money, but without that option I don't get to watch that thing and they get none of my money.

I suppose overall they still get somebody's money every month, so they don't mind missing out on mine... but somehow it still feels like a step backwards for digital media.

Except a single dvd back then was inflation adjusted more expensive than one month of these subscription? So how does your reasoning hold?

One month sure, but if I watch it more than once or take more than a month to complete a while season the subscription adds up. Plus a lot more was available to rent on DVD, which makes more sense for something I only want to watch once rather than signing up for a subscription service and hoping I remember to cancel before it renews.

To be fair I bought (and buy) many of my DVDs at thrift stores and garage sales, so the media companies didn't see my money directly. But indirectly it did enable my neighbors to buy new DVDs to fill the space they cleaned from their sale.

Perhaps I am being irrational, but I'm getting increasingly frustrated with the fragmented and rent-seeking streaming landscape. Some other people's comments here suggest I'm not the only one with strong feelings about this.

Between new and bargain bin DVDs, let’s say it averages out to the price of a streaming service. I’m paying $25/month for Hulu/Disney right now, so that seems generous.

Streaming started up around 2007. If I were to buy 1 DVD per month instead of going with a streaming service, I’d have a movie collection with 192 movies I probably really like. With many people now subscribing to 3 or 4 streaming services, that equivalent movie collection could be even bigger for the same cost.

If I were to fall on hard times and need to cut back on spending, stopping the streaming services leaves me with nothing. At $10/month, I would have paid almost $2k and have nothing to show for it. With the DVDs, I could stop buying new ones, and still have a pretty solid library to pull from.

I have a trouble believing that everything can be a subscription when it seems like the current TV streaming subscriptions cannot even coexist with each other.

Accessible to whom? I'll bring the usual argument that most media is not available in my country, and many other countries. They simply don't sell it to us here, and services like Netflix are either unavailable (although Netflix itself works fine, most others don't), or give access to several percent of their library while expecting us to pay the same amount as any first grade consumer.

It's especially bad with Japanese media. Last time I checked, crunchyroll wanted the same amount of cash every month as from Americans, while giving us access to maybe 30 or 40 old titles. And any one of those can disappear at any moment, which had already happened at least once. No, thank you.

You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy. This is how our world could change by 2030. [1]

Oddly enough the WEF removed the linked page, it now just says Sorry, but we can’t find the page you were looking for. Maybe they are on to the fact that most people are not looking forward to their vision of the future?

[1] https://www.facebook.com/worldeconomicforum/videos/8-predict...

It was based on this essay.

https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/welcome-to-2030-i-ow...

Discussed before here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25068820

(The original article has disappeared but the archive.org doesn't forget.)

>definitely makes some media more accessible and equitable

I disagree on this bit. Media is only accessible as long as the rights holders decide to play ball with the streaming service(s) the user happens to subscribe to. Constant rug pulling is going on with no sign of it stopping.

Just a few months ago I was watching Suits on Amazon Prime. I was 3 seasons in, and I went to watch (after just watching an episode the previous day) and it was now listed as needing to pay per episode. Netflix bought the rights and it was over there now. Another movie, I started watching and had to pause it halfway through, when I went back to finish it, it wanted me to pay for a rental, because their rights ran out. This is a horrible customer experience.

VHS, DVD, and BD were much more accessible. Region issues aside, if I buy a DVD it will play in my DVD player and no one can decide to take my rights to play it away mid-movie. The way streaming is today, it would be like needing to have a different DVD player for each studio, or if the VHS vs Betamax, or Blu-ray vs HD-DVD battles never ended.

One of my big[] worries is that I will grow old and want to watch the movies from my youth and be unable to because the studio went out of business, or decided that movie wasn’t worth streaming, or one of countless other reasons why access would be lost. It’s the modern day version of the “Disney Vault”, which I always hated as a kid. They’d release VHS tapes for a limited time to create scarcity and drive up demand, then pull it and release something else. My sister’s favorite Disney movie never seemed to come out of the vault.

I actually have a friend who has been messaging me pretty regularly lamenting that he wants to watch some movies from the early 2000s and can’t find them on the couple services he has. He doesn’t really know what to do. He wants to watch some movies, he is paying money every month to these companies, and he isn’t getting the content he is after. These movies are 20 years old, the studios and actors have made their money, there is no reason anyone should need to deal with these roadblocks to access. He has been talking about going back to DVD. What other option does he have? How is this accessible and equitable?

[] it’s a big worry in the realm of media, I know in the grand scheme of things it’s a small theoretical problem at the moment.

>VHS, DVD, and BD were much more accessible. Region issues aside

That's a quite large thing to push aside. Physical media also suffered from "as long as rights holders play ball", with media availability varying wildly based on expected commercial success.

At least streaming leads to faster and better availability outside complete legality and it is easier to argue abandonment when it's not available on streaming services vs technically available as low-run optical media.

The region issues may be a bigger issues for some than others. It’s not something I’ve ever personally had to deal with or think about, as I’ve never looked to get obscure movies from other countries.

While the availability of physical media can be in short supply with some games from right holders, once you get it, the game is over. With streaming there is always some low level anxiety waiting for the rug pull. It’s the “what if” of streaming that I really hate. That didn’t exist with physical media, unless it broke and a new copy needed to be sourced, which was fairly rare (for me at least).

I'll contrast with other commenters here and agree with you. The notion that private ownership of the arts is a good thing is very much a modern idea born of mass production. Most people prefer paintings and sculptures to be in museums, and the notion that live performers of theater or opera could ever be "owned" is abhorrent. The best means of financing the arts has always been a membership or patronage model, which very much depends on recurring subscriptions. What streaming services have done is make patronage happen on a massive scale, the sheer volume of which ensures a stable stream of financing for content that has produced what many people call the Golden Age of Television.

It's not all good; the fracturing of availability of content across streaming services impacts affordability, not to mention the return of regional releases impacts availability. Ideally copyrights would be shortened and there would be some kind of publicly funded streaming framework to provide free access to works that enter the public domain. But these are momentary challenges of what is a more widely successful model and improvement over what came before.

> Most people prefer paintings and sculptures to be in museums, and the notion that live performers of theater or opera could ever be "owned" is abhorrent.

People aren't talking about personally owning a Wagner opera or a painting in the Louvre.

People just want to be able to watch the movie or play the game that they already paid for, without being nickel-and-dimed or having ads shoved in your face.

> without being nickel-and-dimed or having ads shoved in your face.

Or, increasingly, both!

I have to imagine that spinning a disc is awful for battery life.

Running programs is also awful for battery life. /s

My computer's battery lasts so much longer if I just don't use it.

You can still buy an Apple USB “SuperDrive” today. Getting a large, rarely used part out of the laptop chassis is a good thing.

Except most Macs no longer have USB-A ports, so you'll need an A-to-C adapter if you do buy this.

I’d be shocked if there are many long-time Mac owners who own a recent model and don’t also own an adapter.

The dongle life, chosen for us by Apple.

    It's a dongle life, for us  
    It's a dongle life, for us  
    Chosen for us by apple  
    'Stead of charging, we tangle  
    Through our dongled life

    No more ports to use, oh no  
    No more ports to use, oh no  
    USB-C, we discuss  
    Grab a dongle, yes you must  
    It's a dongle life!

    It's a dongle spree, for us  
    A new accessory, trust us  
    A new device, a new surprise   
    A tangled mess, no compromise  
    It's your dongle life!

giggles

Trust this computer?

Apple forums abound with frustration at this issue [1].

[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254972128?=undefined&pr...

I'm surprised apple or anyone else hasn't created a laptop-form-factor case, think of the briefcase in pulp fiction, that you open...and it's rows of dongles.

Apple would never make such a case. They'd have Belkin do it so as not to sully the Apple brand.

You're right, it would call attention to the dongle problem. :)

There are newer external dvd players models that come with usb-c cable.

I was in the market last year and chose against the SuperDrive. From what I was reading it seemed like they were basically selling old stock from years ago and there were a lot of issues and poor reviews as a result. It’s obviously not a product Apple cares about anymore.

I ended up going with an LG drive, which worked on the Mac without issue and should also work with other operating systems.

Happily. I have more access to content now than I have ever had before; we live in a golden age of access to video content. I can't imagine a rational argument for going back to the era of physical media.

The weirder thing to me is "owning" a particular movie. There are so many movies, why would I want to lock myself into a particular library of them? I read an article about John Carpenter's Lovecraft influences the other day, and that night watched The Thing for the first time. Didn't have to burn a moment's thought about whether it was likely to be worth the investment and a slot on my shelves.

If I feel like watching The Thing again next year (probably with friends and some kind of drinking game attached), I'll just pay to "rent" it again. I have paid to watch episodes of The Office that I already own simply to avoid the hassle of clicking over to the other app on my Apple TV, and while I might be one of the few people to think that's funny enough to brag about, I'm confident I'm not the only person ever to have done that.

Meanwhile: we're talking about... a laptop?

Come on. Apple should not be selling a laptop with an optical drive in 2024.

Good luck watching a show that got pulled iff as a tax write off.

https://www.thegamer.com/hbo-max-infinity-train-ok-ko-mao-ma...

Good luck finding the DVD for it! Net net, the current configuration affords drastically more access than the physical media era ever did.

This argument is especially ironic because the shows we're talking about would never have existed outside the streaming era.

We watch Elf each Christmas.

Before December starts it's is consistently moved off any subscription service and the price is jacked up.

My DVD has been the same price to view after the initial purchase for a long time now.

I pay to stream Elf like, every other Christmas, when I forget that I bought it on iTunes over a decade ago and don't have to pay anything for it at all.

It's not a meaningful amount of money, is my point. To anybody. It's $3.99 on Prime Video. It's like price shopping for chewing gum.

Groundhog Day anyone?

I'm pretty sure I watched it on HBO Max two of the last three years, both times in December.

Edit: in fact I'm quite sure - I have it on letterboxd from December 24, 2021 and I know we watched it on Christmas Day this year

> Good luck finding the DVD for it!

You're missing the point. If you bought the DVD, you have it. Forever.

No licensing change, or rights dispute, or publisher whim can ever take it away from you. In the streaming world things disappear in a puff all the time, never to be seen again.

When I find it, I can get it.

If you find on a streaming service, who knows if it's still there when you want to watch it.

They weren't still selling it in 2024, the "obsolete" designation means they stopped selling it 7 years ago.

I don't buy many movies, just ones I want to watch more than once (and don't want to deal with the disappointment of finding it's moved to yet another streaming service whose additional monthly payment I can't afford). What I do much more often is rent DVDs, or borrow them from my local library.

Believe it or not, it's still more convenient for some of us in the year 2024 C.E. to go out and borrow a physical copy of a movie or TV show than deal with the hassle of giving out payment details to the streaming service flavor of the month. And this laptop is among the last to enable that convenience without being shackled to an external drive. It's old news but (apparently) some people still care.

Movies and shows are pulled from steaming services never to be seen again. Sometimes really good shows. Sucks for fans AND the people who created them

Digital media can also disappear. There's Doctor Who episodes that are missing from streaming services as well because the licensing for the music also ran out. Spec Ops: The Line was just pulled from various games services because the license for the music ran out as well. Thankfully they didn't make the pull out retroactively existing libraries. But I do worry that the next time it happens, that the lawyers may see that end users still having access to digital copy of some media is undesired.

As you say, having a DVD drive on everything may not be a priority. But I wouldn't go so far as to say that there's no value in owning physical media.

Stuff can absolutely disappear. But stuff got impractically difficult to find in the physical media era too, and, much more importantly, we have vastly more access in the normal case to stuff now than we did then. The thought of going back to a time where I can watch whatever is in my zip-up DVD case or what's currently broadcasting on TV is almost suffocating --- that's how much better off we are now.

How could the music rights run out? That seems like a horrible way to license music for use in a TV show. I find the idea of this very upsetting.

This was the case also for Beavis and Butthead on MTV.

> Happily. I have more access to content now than I have ever had before; we live in a golden age of access to video content. I can't imagine a rational argument for going back to the era of physical media.

Please show me where I can access The Witches (2020) by Robert Zemeckis?

Or the Willow TV show from 2022

Or Final Space

Or Star Trek: Prodigy

Or Westworld

The shows and movies just disappear off streaming because some executive did the math and they'll save money by just taking things off the internet.

This is why you buy anything you want to see again or even show to your kids later on as a physical copy. (Or do the yarr-thing and hold on to the digital copy on your own hardware)

Sure: The Witches is $3.99 on Apple TV.

The Willow TV show is a perfect example of something that would simply not exist without streaming. Also, as a member of a family that celebrates Annual Willow Day in early January, you're not missing much.

Streaming also killed the mid-price movie, because there's no long tail of DVD sales any more.

Now we only get "indie" movies with tiny budgets and massive AAA blockbusters with billion dollar price tags.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/26/entertainment/mid-budget-...

Look, I don't agree with GP, but to measure 'owning' as 'locking yourself into a particular library' is dumb and uncharitable. IMO, when you consider people that only have the budget for one streaming service you see who is _actually_ locked into one particular library today.

Streaming didn't win this round because it saves us shelf space... it won because it's instant and the average internet goer didn't consider the downsides. Most people in my circle now are pretty bitter with the state of things.

---

All of that said... flash memory is just better than spinning media.

Not only are we locked into a particular library, but that library is constantly changing based on somebody else's whims. It feels like every time I start watching something it gets pulled off the next month.

> we live in a golden age of access to video content

It's the very opposite of that!

Yes, mainstream and a few sigmas from mainstream is easier to access than ever (if you have all the subscriptions, that is).

The obscure stuff? Good luck today. Try to find someone with the DVD or VHS.

In the VHS days you could find video rental clubs with a vast library of niche movies (such as local productions that never got distributed widely). Today those are not available anywhere, unless they happen to be selling the DVD somewhere.

No: I have more access to obscure stuff than I did in the DVD era. I read Tarantino's book a few months ago and went to go watch Escape From Alcatraz. No chance in hell that Blockbuster would have had it in the 90s, took 15 seconds to pull up online. The Kurosawa films. Come And See. People have weirdly either weirdly idolized or motivated perspectives on what was easy to get access to in the physical media era.

Whatever weird niche local productions you had access to back then with "video rental clubs" I put up against Vimeo, certain that it's unlikely to be much of a contest.

Tarantino isn't exactly an obscure persona. But in general, perhaps your obscure stuff is known to the streaming platforms.

Was coincidentally just talking about this last weekend with some people. A lot of regional indie movies that we remember from youth are not available for streaming anywhere at any price. Movies that reached the theaters but only locally (one city or a few neighboring cities).

At the local video club places there used to be a whole rack dedicated to these local movies. Now, they're gone forever.

Occasionally someone finds an old VHS in a storage box and takes the time to upload it to youtube and things resurface, but that's the only hope.

I didn't say I went looking for a Tarantino movie!

Presumably you can still plug in an external usb HDD. That's a spinning disk, that can store movies.

... you can still buy most stuff outright? Blu-ray exists?

You can buy Blu-rays but your Mac won't play them because it doesn't have a drive.

You can get a drive for the cost of a few Blu-rays. Works well for backups of said disks.

my toaster doesn't have a blu-ray drive either

Literally just get a NAS if this is such a big deal for you. For everyone else, spinning disks are an absurd antiquity

Sony has shipped >40 million PlayStation 5s, most of which have a disc drive.

You will own nothing, and be happy.

Hey userbinator,

This comment is a little off topic (but related to Apple somewhat) but I saw in a 4 year old thread a comment from you that said you were in the cracking scene 10 years ago (I guess that would be 14 by now). Anyhow, I am trying to get into reverse engineering iOS apps / ARM64 and would kill to acquire the skillset. It's incredibly hard to find information anywhere about this niche. The discord channels I've found have a couple nice folks but ultimately no one really knowledgeable. And the game hacking forums seem totally dead on this topic.

Would you happen to know any good resources or groups where I can network with the right people to get into this scene? Thanks

ARM64 and iOS were after my time, so I wouldn't know any specifics to point you to. Those who work on jailbreaks and the like might be a good start, although not surprisingly they tend to be a very insular crowd.

You could rip those streams if you really wanted to. Even an analog rip could have better quality than a DVD. (Analog rips don't really circumvent the DMCA and would be legal at least in Japan (my jurisdiction), where copying stuff (including rented stuff) is legal as long as it's for private purposes). (IANAL)

It is very annoying that I can't get a DRM-Free movie anywhere other than the high seas.

I was really hoping the movie industry would learn from the pain the music industry went through. Put all the content in every digital store, make it DRM free, and call it a day.

I mean Apple's iTunes is at this point one of the only services that lets you "buy" TV shows and movies, and download and "archive"[1] them (for whatever that means, when the sony/playstation network is allowed to say "we couldn't agree on licensing terms so you can no longer play what we said you bought"). DVDs are super annoying, I have plenty that I can no longer play because they've physically decayed without even being used in years. Of course a bunch are also region coded so I used to have to have two players, one for my home country, and one for the US. I have no reason to believe Blu-ray is any better in those regards.

[1] The iTunes DRM scheme requires your playback device to have a key, so if you don't have a device with that key you'd have to sign in, and then if apple's contracts prevent them from providing new ones maybe they get stuck in the same position.

DRM is what prevented me from buying movies on iTunes. Music I bought there, because it was DRM free.

As long as DRM exists, it’s only worth renting, imo. “Buying” media with DRM is essentially an expensive long-term rental. It will last as long as the company decides to keep the servers up to support it.

iTunes music isn't drm free?

It depends. In most cases, if purchased, it is DRM free.

iTunes music is DRM free. This is for the iTunes Store, not Apple Music (which is for streaming).

It looks like DRM removal might be a post-2009 thing?

(from wikipedia) Music on the iTunes Store was the original use case for the development of the FairPlay DRM scheme (such friendly naming!). It was apparently the SJ "Thoughts on Music" letter that started the end of DRM for purchased music, but my somewhat cynical opinion is that was also the point where streaming was becoming more plausible and streaming services complete undermine everything by explicitly removing the option to buy music.

Regardless of the reason, removing DRM was a good thing. The DRM free store is still available, and it was done years before Apple got into streaming.

Carefully stored CDs and DVDs retain their contents for far longer than hard drives.

I have several external HDs that are no longer readable. Yet DVDs burnt on a 2009 MBP still read fine with an external DVD drive.

I have some early USB keys that no longer work, so I doubt that flash sticks or even SSDs are useful for backup for more than 10 years.

Blu-rays are underrated for archival. 25GB or 50GB broadly available, almost impervious to scratches, even more resistant to degradation. Alas, the DRM for the movie side left a foul taste everywhere…

100GB Blu-Rays are pretty easy to find as well.

They’re expensive as fuck though thanks to no investment in disc media.

You can get them for what $12.50 a piece if you’re lucky and I’ve heard it’s only worse in Europe.

That’s 12 times the cost of hard drives. Buy just 6 or 7 and store them offsite and you have something that is more robust.

Once you hit the 50TB level it becomes economical to look into late gen LTO (tape), perfectly good LTO-7 drives can be had for cheap.

You can get them for what $12.50 a piece

That’s 12 times the cost of hard drives

Where are you seeing $1 100GB hard drives, or $10 1TB ones?

Nowhere, of course -- but 20TB drives can be had for a bit over $300 these days, that's $15/TB, not too far off.

Ok granted since last time I bought prices have shifted significantly, HDD prices up. A reputable (verbatim) brand of 25 BDXL is $250, and a Seagate 20TB $320 (tho $280 if you’re willing to go OEM). I did not mean to exaggerate, but this is still a crazy per GB cost differential for what is basically some plastic and dye.

Verbatim BDXL 100GB M-DISC 25 pack for $260.

https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-98914-M-Disc-100GB-Surface/d...

$260 / 25 = $10.40/disc. $10.40 / 100 = $0.104/GB.

A decent 2TB HDD can be had for as low as like $60. $60/2000 = $0.03/GB. 10.4 / 3 = 3.46, so pretty far from 12x the cost. So realistically you could get three and a half-ish hard drives per gig compared to 100GB Blu-Rays.

I do agree, 100GB Blu-Rays do seem to be overpriced in some ways. I often end up using 25GB or 50GB discs as they're a lot cheaper and I often find I don't have another 100GB of data needing to backup. I mostly just wanted to point out its an option.

I wouldn't really compare them to hard drives in the end though. With optical media, its a disc that if stored even halfway decently will hold your data for longer than your great grandchildren's lives without needing to touch it or think about it again. A magnetic HDD has moving parts that will eventually wear out, magnetic surfaces that will lose their charge, need to be validated and re-checked and eventually copied over before failure. They're very physically resistant and very light weight. Dropping my CD case on the ground isn't likely to harm any of the data stored within, dropping a hard drive is likely to cause irrecoverable damage. Its way easier to mail to a distant family member to hold on to for long term distant storage. I can't easily mess up while copying the data and corrupt or delete it. The data is physically, permanently etched into the media. So no, I wouldn't say having 6 or 7 hard drives is more robust to having two burned Blu-Rays stored in two physically different locations in terms of trying to store the data for 50+ years.

There's a lot of things to like about using optical media for archival storage.

And yeah, if you're truly dealing with many dozens of TBs of storage you're needing to archive tape starts to make some sense, but I'd be more worried about procuring a tape drive able to read my tapes in 25+ years compared to finding some random Blu-Ray drive on eBay. Blu-Ray drives have been pretty mass market for a long time and will probably still be widely made for the next several years, meanwhile LTO drives are only really sold to enterprises in much smaller numbers. Also, lots of issues with backwards compatibility with LTO, so your options for getting the right drive is trickier. I'd imagine most home users are nowhere near there, and even a 25-50GB Blu-Ray a year/quarter would cover most of their data they actually care about.

A 20TB drive can be had for $280 now.

I do think in these discussions Blu-ray resilience tends to be overstated:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/LhUnX4i3L6

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/res-2017-0016...

> The data is physically, permanently etched into the media

This is hyperbole. Conventional Blu-Rays recordables and even M-Discs do not work this way, they work via phase change in an inorganic compound (or cheaper versions use organic dyes). Etched into the media makes it sound like a pressed product, which it is not, but that is another thing that needs to be considered: the substrate is not impervious to breakdown. These are also subject to QC problems.

https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/s/Na6F6lUFiL

There are very few suppliers of actually worthwhile Blu-ray media, and it is difficult to sort out what is real vs marketing mumbo jumbo.

Verbatim (CMC) changed their M-Discs in 2019 with a “it’s just as good, trust us”.

In any case if you need reliable optical backups you should be testing the burn quality. Many don’t do this, but then how do you know the disc has sufficient signal margin? This is specialist knowledge, which is why let’s be honest, most home users are going to best be served outsourcing this to a 3rd party. Perhaps make some Blu-ray’s as a supplement, but it is too easy to overstate the reliability of any one backup method, or losing sight of the big picture for one simple solution. Joe average home user should be considering a 3rd party service and even nerds can use tarsnap or something. Backup and preservation are systems, not a method. People underestimate the difficulty, effort and expertise, “home” users suck at it (as they should), most people need to outsource it. It doesn’t matter that the Blu-ray has 1000 years theoretical longevity if you burned garbage, and just getting people to the 10 year mark is tough. The only reason shorter time horizons are reliable is because of the massive uptake of cloud storage.

Blu-ray’s have their place I agree but it’s limited as a primary backup.

> In any case if you need reliable optical backups you should be testing the burn quality. Many don’t do this, but then how do you know the disc has sufficient signal margin?

I've got some original and new Verbatim M-DISCs that I burned full with a few hashes. Every now and then I leave them in the patio for a few weeks but they often get used as coasters in my office. When it gets time to test I rinse them in the sink with soap and water and dry them with the kitchen towel. I test them every few quarters. So far they've lasted a decade and haven't lost a bit. One of them has some slow spots but so far they're all perfectly fine. Good luck storing a hard drive through thunderstorms and in 100F days in the sun for a decade and reading the data off them. I'm not too worried about their durability. And since it's $10 or less for a replica I can make a few and still not spend a ton.

And sure, that 20TB drive is $280. For redundancy I'll need to buy at least two. But I've only got maybe a terabyte or two I actually care about, so per terabyte it's a terrible price especially after buying 2-3.

And then when syncing new stuff I'd need to move the drives around as I'm talking offline archives. Kind of a pain to go copy all the data at a relative's place hundreds of miles away, I'd need them to plug it in. Otherwise they can just stash the discs in a box for me when I mail them every quarter or so.

Enterprise is moving away from tape to optical for archival (or so I've heard). It is rumered that AWS S3 glacier is mostly optical storage, for example.

> It is rumered that AWS S3 glacier is mostly optical storage, for example.

Really? I heard that about a decade ago, the analysis barely made sense then but it seems even less sensible now. At Amazon scale tape is 0.5 cent/GB or less, hard drives are more expensive but easier to work with. Data storage on Blu-ray is tiny, still needs robotics.

>hard drives are more expensive but easier to work with

But maintenance is much lower for optical. You can't just put those hard drives in a warehouse and forget about them. And BDXL is 100GB per disk. I don't know if the cost benefit makes sense here but it does seem somewhat possible.

Most optical archive products seem to have been discontinued.

I'm not sure I'd go out of my way to use a laser to etch bits onto optical media for a measly 50gb. Maybe I'm jaded with my fiber internet, 1tb sd cards, and 20tb hdds but 50gb feels like an incredibly small amount of data.

It matters how important the data is. It looks like my entire google photos archive is only 45gb and it would feel nice knowing it was saved somewhere else in a very stable format.

If it's really important you'd have multiple copies in different regions and regularly check integrity and the storage medium isn't a large concern.

> Alas, the DRM for the movie side left a foul taste everywhere…

4.7 GB was worth the cost and effort in 2004. 25GB in 2008? Not really.

Burned CDs/DVDs/BDs have a pretty long shelf-life, but the pressed ones (that you can still buy at stores!) will last much, much longer.

The question will be how long can we keep buying players/readers.

Are you sure? Most studies have shown the oppsoite. Or at least there’s a lot resting on the phrase “Carefully stored”. There are lots of ways CDs can rot in storage, not all of which are controllable or preventable.

My oldest CD-Rs are from 1994 and they still read perfectly.

Factory pressed CDs should last longer than CD-Rs (I've read).

Last time I looked into it there was a lot of variability. It seemed some of it came down to care, and some of it was just luck.

If you care about the stuff in those 1994 CD-Rs and don’t have a backup, it may be worth making a copy while they still work. It could last the rest of your life and be fine… or not.

Yes, the contents of those CD-Rs are definitely on my zfs pool, so don't really care if the CDs die.

But I keep them around and occasionally read them out of curiosity to see how long they last.

2009 is very recent... I have HDDs from that era that are still readable...

Does anybody have a recommendation for a slightly newer laptop (obviously not Apple) with an integrated DVD drive? My SO uses her 2012 MBP13 daily and a big advantage of that computer is that it's compact and can comfortably watch DVDs anywhere while she's working on her computer. We do have an external drive which works fine on a table but it's really cumbersome when trying to hold the computer on your lap, on a chair, on the couch, etc... you know, normal places where one might try to use a portable computer.

I've been contemplating a Thinkpad T440p but I do realize that's only two years newer (though almost infinitely more upgradable). Is there anything else with a 13-14” screen, DVD drive, and decent build quality? Or are we the only people who ever watch DVDs any more?

Why not just rip the DVDs to files and watch them whenever from wherever. DVDs are cumbersome and dated.

Have you contemplated ripping the DVDs and/or using a streaming service?

I wouldn't limit my options to just having a DVD if that means compromising everything else, especially if the computer is for work.

I've considered ripping which is fine for my own discs, but I'm not going to do that every time we go to Redbox or the public library. (Yes I'm aware Redbox also does streaming, but last I checked some things were only on DVD and they were cheaper anyway.)

We use a streaming service but things seem to be spread out across five or more of them. (And as soon as I find something I like on there, it goes away!)

I agree with the issue of compromising everything else, which is why we've stuck with a 12-year-old computer. Obviously we'd have to settle a little, I was just wondering if anyone had ideas to avoid having to change our workflow too much.

Depending on your setup, you might could stream the DVDs over your network. Surely you could somehow share the drive.

I appreciate the suggestion. I tried that a few years ago, but Mac OS' built-in DVD sharing only works on discs without copy protection. Then I spent a few nights trying to get VLC to stream a disc from my PC but couldn't get that working either.

If anybody's got experience along this line of thought I'm interested; it could be a viable way forward as I have several desktops (Win/Lin/Mac) with optical drives.

My guess is that sharing from Linux would give you more options in terms of how to work around the copy protection.

I don't know if you use Docker, but a seriously weird sharing workaround could be to use a Samba share to mount in Finder, pointed to your drive on Linux... I made a Docker repo that could probably be modified to fit this use case: https://github.com/jzombie/sshfs-mac-docker

Another solution, that would most definitely work, would be using something like NoMachine or Parsec to just stream the desktop to your other computer. Parsec would probably give you really good quality as well.

Newer laptops have far, far better displays, so DVD Video (which is 480p/576p) looks jarring compared to the rest of the UI.

I tried it with an external drive and it's really not a great visual experience.

> "watch DVDs anywhere while she's working on her computer"

Wait, what?

Seems that Thinkpad e570 has a drive in it: https://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkPad-Performance-Business-...

and it has some upgrade possibilities: https://www.ifixit.com/Device/Lenovo_ThinkPad_E570

Thanks! I was starting to look at those too. The *70 Thinkpads seem to be the last ones with optical drives, but that's at least fairly recent compared to this MBP.

I'm typing this reply on this

https://junocomputers.com/product/nyx-17-v3/

which I use for DVD watching every day.

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll check it out. It's been a while since I've tried a 17 inch laptop but it sure does look nice.

I remember swapping the optical drive out for an SSD, and also swapping out the RAM sticks to double my 2012 MBP's memory. I think this was shortly before they soldered all of those things in place.

Heck yeah I did the same and thought I was so clever, huge upgrade at the time!

Yes, this was the last MacBook with upgradable RAM. The pre-retina Unibody MacBooks were refreshingly repair-friendly compared to what came before and after them.

Perhaps an interesting note is that Apple should have added this particular model to the obsolete page when they updated it on 5 December 2023 [1] and 2 January 2024 [2] (as both were more than 7 years past the 27 October 2016 discontinuation date), but they forgot to add it until yesterday. They also never had it on the 'vintage' list at any point, as they have with other macs; instead it went straight from not listed to 'obsolete'.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20231206074005/https://support.a...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20240107224531/https://support.a...

It was a curious holdover and I was surprised at the time that they kept selling it as long as they did. After the retina Macs came out the writing was on the wall.

It's also worth noting these were also the last MacBook with upgradable RAM, and we're still seeing issues with insufficient stock RAM on the newest MacBook models.

For those who want to read physical discs still for whatever reason I highly recommend the Pioneer BDR-XS07UHD. It does CD/DVD/Blu-Ray, can run off external power or over the USB-C connection at slightly slower speeds, is compact and lightweight. Yes, the reign of dongles is well upon us but the upside is that your best optical drive is no longer tied to one machine. I just keep the drive next to my movies and grab it whenever I want to watch something, ripping for future viewing.

I still have an older MacBook Pro with optical drive but: it doesn’t do Blu-Ray, it’s loud and thick, it’s a path for dust ingress, and another moving part that can fail in a laptop on the go.

If we ever get disc readers back, I hope it’s less spinning platter and more microscopic lidar where you just wave the disc in front of the holoscreen and it instantly reads whatever day it contains. Burning would be a different story I guess…

Hope they're not gonna kill my Mid 2015 MBP anytime soon. With Open Core Patcher, it's still running the latest macOS.

Seeing as you're already running OpenCore Legacy Patcher, would you really be affected by them "killing" support for your machine? I guess getting official parts/repairs seems to be what you'd lose. Maybe you could stock up on the most likely to fail parts ahead of time. I'm sure third party repair shops would still be able to fix the machine even after Apple gives up on it, though.

Ultimately they will stop supporting x86_64 arch so even Open Core Patcher might not help you at some point.

this makes sense... but I don't think they should have removed the audio jack from any of their product

USBC headphones make more sense. Unified port for all accessories.

If that were to be the reasoning, the least they could do is provide 2 ports on phones so nobody needs a dongle to listen while charging.

This is the sole reason I own a wireless charging pad.

sometimes you want to not only charge but also pass data via cable to macbook. Wifi has latency, airpods bluetooth also has latency.

It the past it was easy when you could still connect iphone/ipad to macbook via cable and still connect headset for mic and speakers. I tested a lot of splitter adapters and they allowed only to use headset speakers (no mic) and charge (no data)

Phones should have 2 ports, but Macs have 3 already

Why though? Audio jack delivers pretty much all you need functionality for headphones and plenty of existing hardware. iPod Shuffle 3d gen was tiny, had only 3.5mm for data transfer and charging.

They remove headphone jack in iPhone 7 and added USB-C in iPhone 15. So for almost a decade the only option was proprietary lighting or bluetooth, probably resulted in a significant amount of e-waste.

What would make even more sense is a round USB plug to make it even easier to plug it in.

I'm just tired of losing my Bluetooth earbuds

The current MacBook Pro has an audio jack…

yep, wouldn't have bought it without it. that and the lack of touch bar make the latest models awesome

Yes but the GP's point still remains, they shouldn't have removed it from ANY device.

The lack of audio jack in my iPad Pro is the main reason why I abandoned music production on iOS and just do it with my Macbook Pro.

I think there’s only one real reason they removed the audio jack.

This is so gross:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/n5m2xp/oc_...

I’m sure that removal of the headphone jack helped drive sales, but it’s worth remembering that AirPods were also some of the first bluetooth earbuds that were good enough for mass market appeal, and for usage with phones especially wires can get pretty irritating. A lot more people probably would’ve switched years earlier had other companies released bluetooth headphones on par with first gen AirPods.

They were definitely motivated to sell more AirPods, but Bluetooth has been a clear quality of life improvement for most people (except when using the microphone, where Bluetooth has been a quality downgrade), and the 3.5mm jack takes up a lot of space inside phones.

I'd have preferred they made a true replacement - a new wireless standard for example.

I don't think I believe these numbers... I know they are way overpriced because I paid $30 for my "clones" but still...

I also hate them because they are too easy to lose

So that is what happens when a manufacturer forgets to stick that "never obsolete"-sticker on the case of the PC.

Does anyone have a recommended drive I could attach to my desktop PC that could rip UHD Blu-Rays, DVDs, and CDs? With the death of the mass market optical drive, I think it’s worth being able to directly convert my content to digital.

M1 made apple obsolete. Cant repair my $3k computer? fuck you, you're never getting a cent from me again. 40 year Apple user, now happily a Linux user. never ever going back.

Eh. From what I've seen, needing an optical drive is pretty rare for most users these days. And when you do need one, the external USB cable variety is really cheap and works fine.

It is nice that on older laptops, like pre 2012 MacBook pros and ThinkPad T400s, you can swap the optical drive with an additional drive caddy and put multiple SSDs in the machine.

A large chunk of the remainder who still keep an optical drive around do so for personal media archival, in which case they’d want specific drives known to be well suited to that purpose (feature support, high accuracy[0], etc), and the drives built into laptops usually aren’t amazing in this regard.

[0]: https://forum.dbpoweramp.com/showthread.php?48320-CD-Drive-A...

I've held on to my external DVD drive for years, but I don't think I've plugged it into any of my Macbooks for 7? 8? more? years.

I think having an external optical drive is acceptable? How often do you need to read a CD/DVD/BR on the run?

Meanwhile, they still sell the SuperDrive brand new on their website.

Worth noting that these won’t work with the usual garden variety USB-C hubs sporting USB-A ports; instead, you need to use an adapter as opposed to a hub[0] - maybe because of power issues? Source: I have a SuperDrive and have experienced this first hand on a USB-C-only port Mac.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102181

Correct, the SuperDrive requires 5V at 1.6A while most hubs only provide the standard 5V at 1A. Any fast-charging USB-A port will work though and that are hubs that support that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com