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 ended up going with an LG drive, which worked on the Mac without issue and should also work with other operating systems.
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!
Apple forums abound with frustration at this issue [1].
[1] https://discussions.apple.com/thread/254972128?=undefined&pr...
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or, increasingly, both!
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...
https://medium.com/world-economic-forum/welcome-to-2030-i-ow...
(The original article has disappeared but the archive.org doesn't forget.)
[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.
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.
(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.
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.
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)
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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.thegamer.com/hbo-max-infinity-train-ok-ko-mao-ma...
This argument is especially ironic because the shows we're talking about would never have existed outside the streaming era.
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.
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.
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
If you find on a streaming service, who knows if it's still there when you want to watch 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.
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.
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.
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