That was a quickie list I threw together, that drive was the first one that came up on Newegg. I personally prefer to buy boxed(retail packaging) drives over a bare oem. Now if you are patient you can find 1tb-1.5tb boxed drives on sale that the price per gigabyte is close to the one I listed. For back up drives I have no problem using green drives (slower rotation and performance) as they are cheaper and use less power.
To my way of thinking if you have more then one or two drives then the price of the hot swap enclosure becomes moot, but maybe thats just me.
100 disks for $20. So that works out to be 100x4.3Gb=430Gb $20/430Gb=.0465 per Gb.
Using a better rated drive on new egg (4 out 5 eggs) it's a 2 Tb Western Digital green for $99.
That is $99/2000Gb=$.0495
So the cost per gigabyte is very similar even though buying two drives (one for back up and one for off site storage) does make you spend more up front.
Lets add the one time cost of an Newertech usb hard drive dock of 34.99.
$34.99+$99=$133.99/2000Gb=.066996 Gb.
That is pretty close to the price you pay for the disks, and drives are only getting cheaper. I have no problem if you prefer dvd's. I just find using hard drives so much easier and convenient with virtually no cost penalty.
Also, I am pretty sure I saw somewhere an older style dock that works with ide drives. Perhaps dig around on Newegg.
For a bit more reliability that bare drives plugged into an adapter - you might look into something like this: http://www.imation.com/en-us/Imation...le-HDD-System/ where the docking station can be internal or external with various options for the interface on the back end. The "cartridge" is made to be removable - so a bit safer and more reliable than handling and transporting a bare drive. the trick is finding media small enough or at the right price/GB to make it competitive. It also depends on just what you mean by Archival - are you making a distinct backup set once and archiving that for a long time or are you updating or refreshing the same data set over and over? if you have a keep (essentially) forever for each back up set then Optical media with 50 year or something shelf life is likely better than any magnetic media. On the other hand if you are replacing the archival data with updates every so often then having a few rotating magnetic storage devices with something like 5 year shelf life is not so bad - you can still make optical every so often - but the magnetic should be faster. really depends on all the factors affecting your data retention requirements.
It would be awesome if I could install lion without a cd. Maybe system update with app store as a payment layer. On the other hand, sometimes having a cd is quite useful especially for os and office software. Ms could ban you from downloading twice for example or make you pay for the second download. Even though I just wanna do a clean install for example.
When's Apple coming out with the seamless home server product - we've all got two or three Macs at home nowadays and need to keep all of them in check.
I know it requires a little work, but if you have that many computers you essentially have a network and could probably just use one of your computers as the server.
If you need a new central computer, just get an Mac Mini. Add a little 4 bay sata/ usb chassis and you have a server. It's not difficult to set up when all you have to do is share the computers and they'll instantly show up under network in the finder window. Time Machine will backup to network drives as well.
It is pretty seamless. I have 3 ATV's, Iphones, Ipods etc networked in my house and all backup to and stream from a mac mini server.In my office things are a little more robust, but for a home server it couldn't be easier IMO.
Hopefully I'm encouraging you and not stating the obvious.
I know it requires a little work, but if you have that many computers you essentially have a network and could probably just use one of your computers as the server.
If you need a new central computer, just get an Mac Mini. Add a little 4 bay sata/ usb chassis and you have a server. It's not difficult to set up when all you have to do is share the computers and they'll instantly show up under network in the finder window. Time Machine will backup to network drives as well.
It is pretty seamless. I have 3 ATV's, Iphones, Ipods etc networked in my house and all backup to and stream from a mac mini server.In my office things are a little more robust, but for a home server it couldn't be easier IMO.
Hopefully I'm encouraging you and not stating the obvious.
I was thinking about this in the context of getting a macbook air as a "satellite" computer and to take around. i have an imac only right now, and if i got an air i would want to be able to access all the music files, movie files, etc, that are on the iMac from the macbook air. i say air because in that scenario i really only need one computer with an optical drive. anyway, is this possible in the same way you're talking about -- just share that computer? What i really want to do is to be able to fire up iphoto on either computer and access the same library. i was originally thinking i would need an airport base station and a big f'in external drive attached to it, and then just redirect my libraries to that. however, then i realized that would only work inside the house... any suggestions?
to respond to the real thread -- i use an optical drive all the time to watch dvd's that we get on netflix, and to play cd's that my i buy, that my friends bring over, that people send as a gift and i copy to my itunes...
i mean, optical drives are pretty necessary in my computing day to day. this doesn't seem that far fetched to me.
For on-site backup, a RAID array or something more flexible like a Drobo is the way to go. For off-site storage, you could use a HD dock with drives you rotate for redundancy, but that's a huge hassle. I know you poo-pooed this earlier, but online backup like Carbonite or Mozy.
Drobo is very cool, but expensive!. Doubly so for maintaining offsite archival. Remember, the comparison is to DVD-Rs, and the question about DVD usage for archival if/when Apple stops including the drives in new machines.
And yes, I pooh-poohed the online solutions, not only from a long-term trust standpoint (this is archival, so by definition, very long term), but for price. But you got me looking again to price things out. Do you have any idea what it costs to store even 1TB of data on Mozy? Basic account is 125g @ $10/mo. But every additional 20g is another $2/mo. That's almost $100/month, or $1200/year! No thanks!!
With DVD-Rs providing 5-8g each, at less than 30 cents/pop, and FOREVER (well, maybe 40-50 years), I don't see anything like Mozy even in the running.
I'm not sure if you looked at what Carbonite is/does, but it doesn't provide any kind of archival. Rather, it's a backup/mirror system for your (internal-only!) drive.
I appreciate the response, but nothing here to help...
There is no way this is going to happen in the near or medium term.
As someone mentioned, there is the issue of software on discs, which is still a thriving secondary market, then there is the issue of bandwidth. Most of the country does not have broadband.
Although many of the readers seem to think anything made five minutes ago should not be in there household, many of us still have old DVDs and CDs we still want to use. I've got plenty of even VHS tapes of material I don't care to repurchase at the moment. Plus, we don't all have infinite internal hard drive space to *store* all of our stuff upon (although I did upgrade my internal drive recently, since I was running out of room and couldn't store all of the stuff I had downloaded).
In other notes, Apple offers Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite in bundles with systems, so at least Microsoft and Adobe hope they sell systems (or systems sell their software). Adobe Creative suite is over 8 GB, so over most Internet connections, that would take *hours*. Of course, Blizzard is happy to push a multiple GB update for World of Warcraft over the Internet...
For a bit more reliability that bare drives plugged into an adapter - you might look into something like this: http://www.imation.com/en-us/Imation...le-HDD-System/ where the docking station can be internal or external with various options for the interface on the back end. The "cartridge" is made to be removable - so a bit safer and more reliable than handling and transporting a bare drive. the trick is finding media small enough or at the right price/GB to make it competitive. It also depends on just what you mean by Archival - are you making a distinct backup set once and archiving that for a long time or are you updating or refreshing the same data set over and over? if you have a keep (essentially) forever for each back up set then Optical media with 50 year or something shelf life is likely better than any magnetic media. On the other hand if you are replacing the archival data with updates every so often then having a few rotating magnetic storage devices with something like 5 year shelf life is not so bad - you can still make optical every so often - but the magnetic should be faster. really depends on all the factors affecting your data retention requirements.
The imation product looks neat, but again that's very expensive. Quite a bit more so than bare hard drives.
Anyway, I think you intended the response for me, and yes, what I'm asking about is for long-term archival. Imagine a home or small office with lots of photos, some videos, etc. Digital media storage is growing leaps and bounds for everyone these days. We have 70-80 thousand photos at this point, growing all the time. We generally don't even use full-HD video yet, but gigs of stuff keep building up. What are people using these days to archive their kids' soccer game digital footage, for example? That stuff eats up storage!
I agree that optical is the best option for archival right now, and that's what we use. From a longevity and cost standpoint, including redundancy, it seems to make the best sense to me right now (although we need higher density!)
However, the question/discussion was about what we're going to do when DVD-R drives are no longer standard fare. Maybe SD cards or thumb drives will finally get cheap enough on a per/gig basis to be feasible storage? Dunno. Not sure what will replace optical drives, but as far as I'm concerned they are still a necessity.
I think this is ultimately going to happen whether people like it or not. Optical discs are a thing of a particular time, not a permanent fixture of humanity.
The solution for apps is already here in terms of the App Store. As for OS upgrades, perhaps they could be sold on 8GB flash drives, which are only $25 retail, probably a lot less for Apple.
Or you download Lion and install it on a Flash drive of your own.
Or Software Update in OS X could be improved to allow full upgrades instead of just point upgrades.
Or a combination of the above. I really don't think optical discs are critical, and if they are well I'm sure Apple will continue to sell USB optical drives for years to come.
Optical drives should die NOW... Besides a good number of optical drives have already died inside their hosts. Apple just replaced the one in my MBP (12 months out of warranty, but that's because they failed to fix it at the end of my warranty when it was acted funny and I'd asked them to look at it). The one in my other MBP hasn't been able to burn for years... Even the one in my Mini is having issues, and I know I'm not alone having tech support clients with the same issues and from reading Apple's support forums.
Options to optical drives are myriad. In addition to Network installs, flash drives (which are still orders of magnitude more expensive than an optical discs), and others think about this one....
If one has decent broadband and download 10.7... then maybe Apple will have it create it's own temporary partition on your primary drive to boot and install from (think Boot Camp).
Personally I haven't installed OS X 10.4/10.5/10.6 from an optical drive in years, and I re-install/upgrade systems _very_ frequently. Long ago I created two bootable installation drives out of old 40-80GB hard drives. One is FW 400/USB and partitioned APM with 10.4/5 installers on it and the other is FW800/USB partitioned GUID with 10.5/6 and 10.6 Server). Each has another partition with Disk Warrior/Drive Genius/etc... on it and sometimes other software read to install it's all WAY faster than installing anything from an optical drive.
Further I still argue that Apple won't wholly eliminate boxed software or optical media from their stores, they'll just be moving it off the showroom floor. If you walk in and ask for Office 2011 they'll just grab it out of the back for you. They just need to better utilize all that display space.
Finger's still crossed for a MacBook Pro Air with Sandy Bridge, USB3, and a Hybrid SSD/HDD configuration in place of the optical drive.
I don't doubt that optical drives will become less important over time, but DVD-R is the most feasible (cheap/reliable) way to backup large, critical datasets. How the hell would you replace that?
Currently, my still photos alone take 2-3 DVD-Rs a month, and we make 2 copies, 1 for offsite. This is not stuff I'm going to store in the cloud; I am not willing to pay monthly fees for that when I can buy blank DVDs for 30-40 cents each, ONE TIME COST. No monthly costs, no connectivity requirements or download time. But more than that, I don't trust cloud services with data or photos that you need to keep indefinitely. There's no guarantee that any of these (especially the smaller) firms will even be around 5-10 years from now, and there have been cases where companies just went offline and data was gone.
I do think that eventually optical drives will slowly disappear (although it will be quite some time). I have no interest in putting family photos/video online, but I am concerned about changing media formats. What else do people use now? What are we going to be using 5 years from now? Flash/SD card keep increasing in density, is it possible that they become used for both capture and archival? Is anyone else concerned about this?
You do realize that at the moment you could get 4 Terabytes (2x 2 Terabyte Seagate Barracudas, recently on Amazon for 79.00/each), and sync them far easier and efficiently than multiple DVDs, and the time to burn them.
At least you're making 2 DVDs right away. I know some people that think they are safe with only 1.
HINT: also, in my experience, don't purchase 2 hard drives of the same make and manufacture at the same time and use them in a synced, mirrored situation together. Always staggered purchase dates or serial numbers, and/or mixed drive manufacturers. Just in case a batch of drives has the same flaws. I had a client that had 4 drives die within hours of each other. Sure enough, all from the same production batch.
The software I can live with but they need to keep the family pack or it's equivalent.
But what ever they do DON'T remove the optical drive from the larger systems, i.e., the MacBook Pro's, iMacs and Mac Pro's.
Removing them from a secondary system like the Macbook Air is fine. Removing them from a primary system too early could be a disaster.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Robin Huber
Well, not for now anyway. But I can see a day in the future when optical drives are as quaint as gramaphones.
That see has been seen for a while. If it wasn't for a the greed of the movie studios, it would be already here. Digital music caught on because you could import your CD library DRM free. You can't say that about your movie library and that's keeping optical discs are the primary medium for movies.
Several people have pointed out that it's something that customers would want to get in their store (Office), but I think you're looking at it wrong when you talk about how popular it is. As the main article tells us, even if it was at the top of the list, the total amount of sales is minimal in dollars and cents. The only reason to keep it is for the customer assurance, not the money or the sales.
That being said, I know Microsoft has talked (and talked and talked) about delivering their software online for many years and I remember reading articles from five years ago that talked about it being just around the corner. Now that Apple has beaten them to it (again!), I would expect that even if they aren't in the Mac app store, they will find some way to offer it online.
Microsoft Office is a key (and profitable) application for Apple to sell... because it's a key program for millions of their customers... and Apple (rightly) wants happy customers.
Apple's share of the WW computer market while growing, is still small, so to attract new customers Apple need them to be confident that they can continue to access and share their documents. Office gives them that assurance (and certainly in the new Office 2011 version, is way better at doing so than using iWork).
Apple make money from Office, both by selling it... (their cut of the margin) and more importantly to them, by selling Mac's.
NB. you're incorrect to say Apple beat MS (or many other firms) to downloadable software - you have been able to buy Office and many other programs online for years (visit the Microsoft Store for example:
What Apple has done is combine SW sales into one single (Apple controlled) store - tightly integrated to the OS. That has benifits in terms of ease of access - but drawbacksa in terms of product range and choice. (the current Apple licencing prevents bundles like Family packs etc).
All in all, the Mac App Store is a good idea, but still in it's early stages and needs time to evolve (and Apple needs to lighten up on some of the restrictions to convince vendors that it's actually a good thing to support it).
One final thought, Mac App Store isn't available everywhere in the world - so it's a no go for many markets Apple wants to grow in... and bandwidth isn't freely available either to many... not everyone has the luxury of living in West Cost USA.
Boxed software will continue to co-exist with download for some time.
final final comment!.. spare a thought for the poor specialist Apple reseller... Mac App Store takes away a significant part of their sales revenue... and makes offering good service harder. That does not help Apple (or customers) in markets where they have yet to develop much of a direct store chain. (which is most of the world outside USA & UK).
I haven't read all of the posts on this thread, so this may have been stated before. Didn't we have this same discussion when the 5 1/4" floppy was replaced by the 3 1/2 " floppy and when that was replaced by the CD and when that was superceded by the DVD?
Did you know every app purchased from the Mac App Store is essentially a family pack? You can legally install and run it on any machine that you have an account on. And it isn't restricted to one user on each machine.
Can you explain further? Besides copying the application from one computer to another, are you saying that once purchased through the App Store, if you access the App store from another computer with the same account it will know that you have alrerady purchased the app and let you download for free? Have you tried this?
Apple could continue to "sell" third party software in their stores through a keycard system. Microsoft already does this with installations of Office 2010 for Windows. Instead of buying a boxed product, you buy a giftcard like card, download and install the software, scratch off silver stuff to reveal the install code, and input the code to license the product. With Microsoft Office, you wouldn't even need to download as, I believe, Apple includes a demo version of the program on all their machines.
If Apple were to begin discontinuing optical drives from their machines, I expect you'd also see many very large products, including Apple's own Final Cut Suite, move to a thumb drive installation method, which could also be physically sold in stores without taking up near the room of the current boxes.
So long as Apple handles consumer education well, which they've gotten pretty good at, and doesn't try to strong arm everyone into the Mac App Store (particularly since many key Mac software titles would have to be extensively, and expensively, reworked to comply with the App Store's somewhat fiddly rules), this could be a positive and smooth transition.
Why would you want to keep something so large, so slow, so limited and so unused in 2011 compared to the internet and other forms of data transfers? If people need an optical drive on a notebook they can buy one that has it like people did in the past when technology made the inevitable change over or use an external one for the few times they need it, but why should everyone else suffer for it? Somehere has posted an x-ray pic of a MacBook Pro with the optical drive taking up 25% of the entire internal space. That’s a lot!
An optical drive is still faster than most internet connections. An optical disc serves as a backup and proof of purchase. And a DVD and especially a Blu-ray (not that Apple supports Blu-ray) is far easier, quicker and higher quality than a download. Plus, I don't want to be forced to "double dip" on movie software purchases. In my particular case, I have a standalone CD-R attached to my stereo system that enables me to do complex editing and mastering on uncompressed audio files. I then take those discs and load them into the Mac for import into iTunes and conversion to MP3. Without the optical drive, I'm screwed. And I prefer it not be external. In addition, I import music CDs into the Mac for iPod listening. Without the optical drive, I can't do that. It's not progress if the computer stops me from doing things I used to be able to easily do. And for all the hype, the CD market, as bad as it is, is still bigger than the downloads market.
If Apple removes the optical drive from the MacBook Pro line, they will probably lose me as a customer and I've been an Apple customer for over 30 years. If you don't want an optical drive, buy an Air -- that's what they're for.
And what's Apple going to do with the space now reserved for software? It's going to be something stupid like more iPad/iPhone cases or stylish computer bags.
The one thing I do like about the elimination of physical software is the positive environmental impact. If they don't eliminate physical software, I think they can greatly reduce the amount of packaging - they tend to be large empty boxes. The boxes can be made much smaller and use much less paper. I think most are kept large because of security concerns and so they fit in standard racks.
An optical drive is still faster than most internet connections. An optical disc serves as a backup and proof of purchase. And a DVD and especially a Blu-ray (not that Apple supports Blu-ray) is far easier, quicker and higher quality than a download. Plus, I don't want to be forced to "double dip" on movie software purchases. In my particular case, I have a standalone CD-R attached to my stereo system that enables me to do complex editing and mastering on uncompressed audio files. I then take those discs and load them into the Mac for import into iTunes and conversion to MP3. Without the optical drive, I'm screwed. And I prefer it not be external. In addition, I import music CDs into the Mac for iPod listening. Without the optical drive, I can't do that. It's not progress if the computer stops me from doing things I used to be able to easily do. And for all the hype, the CD market, as bad as it is, is still bigger than the downloads market.
If Apple removes the optical drive from the MacBook Pro line, they will probably lose me as a customer and I've been an Apple customer for over 30 years. If you don't want an optical drive, buy an Air -- that's what they're for.
And what's Apple going to do with the space now reserved for software? It's going to be something stupid like more iPad/iPhone cases or stylish computer bags.
The one thing I do like about the elimination of physical software is the positive environmental impact. If they don't eliminate physical software, I think they can greatly reduce the amount of packaging - they tend to be large empty boxes. The boxes can be made much smaller and use much less paper. I think most are kept large because of security concerns and so they fit in standard racks.
My iPhone and Mac apps re-download without issue because there is proof of purchase.
Most apps aren?t that large and download in a very short time, even on slower connections.
Those who have slow connections or need/want an optical drive can use one. No one is removing that ability. You can even hook up a Zip drive to your Mac if you really want to.
Why ignore a flash drive that is smaller and faster than an optical disk. Consider the cost of an 8GB flash drive and the USB plug, and a DL-DVD and a DVD burner found in Macs guess which one is cheaper? Guess which one is the future? Guess which one is faster? Guess which one has no moving parts? Guess which one doesn?t take up a quarter of the internal space?
You?ve missed the point of the MacBook Air. it?s an ultra-portable notebook. You?re saying that because the average user doesn?t use optical drives that much anymore that they should be forced to pay a premium for a slower, ultra-low voltage processor, have less RAM options, and have less storage options. Why can?t they simply want to have a powerful notebook without the wasted optical drive space? This will happen whether you like it or not. The question isn?t if, but when.
Comments
That was a quickie list I threw together, that drive was the first one that came up on Newegg. I personally prefer to buy boxed(retail packaging) drives over a bare oem. Now if you are patient you can find 1tb-1.5tb boxed drives on sale that the price per gigabyte is close to the one I listed. For back up drives I have no problem using green drives (slower rotation and performance) as they are cheaper and use less power.
To my way of thinking if you have more then one or two drives then the price of the hot swap enclosure becomes moot, but maybe thats just me.
100 disks for $20. So that works out to be 100x4.3Gb=430Gb $20/430Gb=.0465 per Gb.
Using a better rated drive on new egg (4 out 5 eggs) it's a 2 Tb Western Digital green for $99.
That is $99/2000Gb=$.0495
So the cost per gigabyte is very similar even though buying two drives (one for back up and one for off site storage) does make you spend more up front.
Lets add the one time cost of an Newertech usb hard drive dock of 34.99.
$34.99+$99=$133.99/2000Gb=.066996 Gb.
That is pretty close to the price you pay for the disks, and drives are only getting cheaper. I have no problem if you prefer dvd's.
Also, I am pretty sure I saw somewhere an older style dock that works with ide drives. Perhaps dig around on Newegg.
For a bit more reliability that bare drives plugged into an adapter - you might look into something like this: http://www.imation.com/en-us/Imation...le-HDD-System/ where the docking station can be internal or external with various options for the interface on the back end. The "cartridge" is made to be removable - so a bit safer and more reliable than handling and transporting a bare drive. the trick is finding media small enough or at the right price/GB to make it competitive. It also depends on just what you mean by Archival - are you making a distinct backup set once and archiving that for a long time or are you updating or refreshing the same data set over and over? if you have a keep (essentially) forever for each back up set then Optical media with 50 year or something shelf life is likely better than any magnetic media. On the other hand if you are replacing the archival data with updates every so often then having a few rotating magnetic storage devices with something like 5 year shelf life is not so bad - you can still make optical every so often - but the magnetic should be faster. really depends on all the factors affecting your data retention requirements.
When's Apple coming out with the seamless home server product - we've all got two or three Macs at home nowadays and need to keep all of them in check.
I know it requires a little work, but if you have that many computers you essentially have a network and could probably just use one of your computers as the server.
If you need a new central computer, just get an Mac Mini. Add a little 4 bay sata/ usb chassis and you have a server. It's not difficult to set up when all you have to do is share the computers and they'll instantly show up under network in the finder window. Time Machine will backup to network drives as well.
It is pretty seamless. I have 3 ATV's, Iphones, Ipods etc networked in my house and all backup to and stream from a mac mini server.In my office things are a little more robust, but for a home server it couldn't be easier IMO.
Hopefully I'm encouraging you and not stating the obvious.
I know it requires a little work, but if you have that many computers you essentially have a network and could probably just use one of your computers as the server.
If you need a new central computer, just get an Mac Mini. Add a little 4 bay sata/ usb chassis and you have a server. It's not difficult to set up when all you have to do is share the computers and they'll instantly show up under network in the finder window. Time Machine will backup to network drives as well.
It is pretty seamless. I have 3 ATV's, Iphones, Ipods etc networked in my house and all backup to and stream from a mac mini server.In my office things are a little more robust, but for a home server it couldn't be easier IMO.
Hopefully I'm encouraging you and not stating the obvious.
I was thinking about this in the context of getting a macbook air as a "satellite" computer and to take around. i have an imac only right now, and if i got an air i would want to be able to access all the music files, movie files, etc, that are on the iMac from the macbook air. i say air because in that scenario i really only need one computer with an optical drive. anyway, is this possible in the same way you're talking about -- just share that computer? What i really want to do is to be able to fire up iphoto on either computer and access the same library. i was originally thinking i would need an airport base station and a big f'in external drive attached to it, and then just redirect my libraries to that. however, then i realized that would only work inside the house... any suggestions?
i mean, optical drives are pretty necessary in my computing day to day. this doesn't seem that far fetched to me.
For on-site backup, a RAID array or something more flexible like a Drobo is the way to go. For off-site storage, you could use a HD dock with drives you rotate for redundancy, but that's a huge hassle. I know you poo-pooed this earlier, but online backup like Carbonite or Mozy.
Drobo is very cool, but expensive!. Doubly so for maintaining offsite archival. Remember, the comparison is to DVD-Rs, and the question about DVD usage for archival if/when Apple stops including the drives in new machines.
And yes, I pooh-poohed the online solutions, not only from a long-term trust standpoint (this is archival, so by definition, very long term), but for price. But you got me looking again to price things out. Do you have any idea what it costs to store even 1TB of data on Mozy? Basic account is 125g @ $10/mo. But every additional 20g is another $2/mo. That's almost $100/month, or $1200/year! No thanks!!
With DVD-Rs providing 5-8g each, at less than 30 cents/pop, and FOREVER (well, maybe 40-50 years), I don't see anything like Mozy even in the running.
I'm not sure if you looked at what Carbonite is/does, but it doesn't provide any kind of archival. Rather, it's a backup/mirror system for your (internal-only!) drive.
I appreciate the response, but nothing here to help...
There is no way this is going to happen in the near or medium term.
As someone mentioned, there is the issue of software on discs, which is still a thriving secondary market, then there is the issue of bandwidth. Most of the country does not have broadband.
Although many of the readers seem to think anything made five minutes ago should not be in there household, many of us still have old DVDs and CDs we still want to use. I've got plenty of even VHS tapes of material I don't care to repurchase at the moment. Plus, we don't all have infinite internal hard drive space to *store* all of our stuff upon (although I did upgrade my internal drive recently, since I was running out of room and couldn't store all of the stuff I had downloaded).
In other notes, Apple offers Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite in bundles with systems, so at least Microsoft and Adobe hope they sell systems (or systems sell their software). Adobe Creative suite is over 8 GB, so over most Internet connections, that would take *hours*. Of course, Blizzard is happy to push a multiple GB update for World of Warcraft over the Internet...
For a bit more reliability that bare drives plugged into an adapter - you might look into something like this: http://www.imation.com/en-us/Imation...le-HDD-System/ where the docking station can be internal or external with various options for the interface on the back end. The "cartridge" is made to be removable - so a bit safer and more reliable than handling and transporting a bare drive. the trick is finding media small enough or at the right price/GB to make it competitive. It also depends on just what you mean by Archival - are you making a distinct backup set once and archiving that for a long time or are you updating or refreshing the same data set over and over? if you have a keep (essentially) forever for each back up set then Optical media with 50 year or something shelf life is likely better than any magnetic media. On the other hand if you are replacing the archival data with updates every so often then having a few rotating magnetic storage devices with something like 5 year shelf life is not so bad - you can still make optical every so often - but the magnetic should be faster. really depends on all the factors affecting your data retention requirements.
The imation product looks neat, but again that's very expensive. Quite a bit more so than bare hard drives.
Anyway, I think you intended the response for me, and yes, what I'm asking about is for long-term archival. Imagine a home or small office with lots of photos, some videos, etc. Digital media storage is growing leaps and bounds for everyone these days. We have 70-80 thousand photos at this point, growing all the time. We generally don't even use full-HD video yet, but gigs of stuff keep building up. What are people using these days to archive their kids' soccer game digital footage, for example? That stuff eats up storage!
I agree that optical is the best option for archival right now, and that's what we use. From a longevity and cost standpoint, including redundancy, it seems to make the best sense to me right now (although we need higher density!)
However, the question/discussion was about what we're going to do when DVD-R drives are no longer standard fare. Maybe SD cards or thumb drives will finally get cheap enough on a per/gig basis to be feasible storage? Dunno. Not sure what will replace optical drives, but as far as I'm concerned they are still a necessity.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g_tcdR_pQU (jump to 1:40)
"do not put bits in card box !"
The solution for apps is already here in terms of the App Store. As for OS upgrades, perhaps they could be sold on 8GB flash drives, which are only $25 retail, probably a lot less for Apple.
Or you download Lion and install it on a Flash drive of your own.
Or Software Update in OS X could be improved to allow full upgrades instead of just point upgrades.
Or a combination of the above. I really don't think optical discs are critical, and if they are well I'm sure Apple will continue to sell USB optical drives for years to come.
Options to optical drives are myriad. In addition to Network installs, flash drives (which are still orders of magnitude more expensive than an optical discs), and others think about this one....
If one has decent broadband and download 10.7... then maybe Apple will have it create it's own temporary partition on your primary drive to boot and install from (think Boot Camp).
Personally I haven't installed OS X 10.4/10.5/10.6 from an optical drive in years, and I re-install/upgrade systems _very_ frequently. Long ago I created two bootable installation drives out of old 40-80GB hard drives. One is FW 400/USB and partitioned APM with 10.4/5 installers on it and the other is FW800/USB partitioned GUID with 10.5/6 and 10.6 Server). Each has another partition with Disk Warrior/Drive Genius/etc... on it and sometimes other software read to install it's all WAY faster than installing anything from an optical drive.
Further I still argue that Apple won't wholly eliminate boxed software or optical media from their stores, they'll just be moving it off the showroom floor. If you walk in and ask for Office 2011 they'll just grab it out of the back for you. They just need to better utilize all that display space.
Finger's still crossed for a MacBook Pro Air with Sandy Bridge, USB3, and a Hybrid SSD/HDD configuration in place of the optical drive.
I don't doubt that optical drives will become less important over time, but DVD-R is the most feasible (cheap/reliable) way to backup large, critical datasets. How the hell would you replace that?
Currently, my still photos alone take 2-3 DVD-Rs a month, and we make 2 copies, 1 for offsite. This is not stuff I'm going to store in the cloud; I am not willing to pay monthly fees for that when I can buy blank DVDs for 30-40 cents each, ONE TIME COST. No monthly costs, no connectivity requirements or download time. But more than that, I don't trust cloud services with data or photos that you need to keep indefinitely. There's no guarantee that any of these (especially the smaller) firms will even be around 5-10 years from now, and there have been cases where companies just went offline and data was gone.
I do think that eventually optical drives will slowly disappear (although it will be quite some time). I have no interest in putting family photos/video online, but I am concerned about changing media formats. What else do people use now? What are we going to be using 5 years from now? Flash/SD card keep increasing in density, is it possible that they become used for both capture and archival? Is anyone else concerned about this?
You do realize that at the moment you could get 4 Terabytes (2x 2 Terabyte Seagate Barracudas, recently on Amazon for 79.00/each), and sync them far easier and efficiently than multiple DVDs, and the time to burn them.
At least you're making 2 DVDs right away. I know some people that think they are safe with only 1.
HINT: also, in my experience, don't purchase 2 hard drives of the same make and manufacture at the same time and use them in a synced, mirrored situation together. Always staggered purchase dates or serial numbers, and/or mixed drive manufacturers. Just in case a batch of drives has the same flaws. I had a client that had 4 drives die within hours of each other. Sure enough, all from the same production batch.
The software I can live with but they need to keep the family pack or it's equivalent.
But what ever they do
Removing them from a secondary system like the Macbook Air is fine. Removing them from a primary system too early could be a disaster.
Well, not for now anyway. But I can see a day in the future when optical drives are as quaint as gramaphones.
That see has been seen for a while. If it wasn't for a the greed of the movie studios, it would be already here. Digital music caught on because you could import your CD library DRM free. You can't say that about your movie library and that's keeping optical discs are the primary medium for movies.
Several people have pointed out that it's something that customers would want to get in their store (Office), but I think you're looking at it wrong when you talk about how popular it is. As the main article tells us, even if it was at the top of the list, the total amount of sales is minimal in dollars and cents. The only reason to keep it is for the customer assurance, not the money or the sales.
That being said, I know Microsoft has talked (and talked and talked) about delivering their software online for many years and I remember reading articles from five years ago that talked about it being just around the corner. Now that Apple has beaten them to it (again!), I would expect that even if they aren't in the Mac app store, they will find some way to offer it online.
Microsoft Office is a key (and profitable) application for Apple to sell... because it's a key program for millions of their customers... and Apple (rightly) wants happy customers.
Apple's share of the WW computer market while growing, is still small, so to attract new customers Apple need them to be confident that they can continue to access and share their documents. Office gives them that assurance (and certainly in the new Office 2011 version, is way better at doing so than using iWork).
Apple make money from Office, both by selling it... (their cut of the margin) and more importantly to them, by selling Mac's.
NB. you're incorrect to say Apple beat MS (or many other firms) to downloadable software - you have been able to buy Office and many other programs online for years (visit the Microsoft Store for example:
http://store.microsoft.com/microsoft...e/category/203)
What Apple has done is combine SW sales into one single (Apple controlled) store - tightly integrated to the OS. That has benifits in terms of ease of access - but drawbacksa in terms of product range and choice. (the current Apple licencing prevents bundles like Family packs etc).
All in all, the Mac App Store is a good idea, but still in it's early stages and needs time to evolve (and Apple needs to lighten up on some of the restrictions to convince vendors that it's actually a good thing to support it).
One final thought, Mac App Store isn't available everywhere in the world - so it's a no go for many markets Apple wants to grow in... and bandwidth isn't freely available either to many... not everyone has the luxury of living in West Cost USA.
Boxed software will continue to co-exist with download for some time.
final final comment!.. spare a thought for the poor specialist Apple reseller... Mac App Store takes away a significant part of their sales revenue... and makes offering good service harder. That does not help Apple (or customers) in markets where they have yet to develop much of a direct store chain. (which is most of the world outside USA & UK).
Did you know every app purchased from the Mac App Store is essentially a family pack? You can legally install and run it on any machine that you have an account on. And it isn't restricted to one user on each machine.
Can you explain further? Besides copying the application from one computer to another, are you saying that once purchased through the App Store, if you access the App store from another computer with the same account it will know that you have alrerady purchased the app and let you download for free? Have you tried this?
If Apple were to begin discontinuing optical drives from their machines, I expect you'd also see many very large products, including Apple's own Final Cut Suite, move to a thumb drive installation method, which could also be physically sold in stores without taking up near the room of the current boxes.
So long as Apple handles consumer education well, which they've gotten pretty good at, and doesn't try to strong arm everyone into the Mac App Store (particularly since many key Mac software titles would have to be extensively, and expensively, reworked to comply with the App Store's somewhat fiddly rules), this could be a positive and smooth transition.
Why would you want to keep something so large, so slow, so limited and so unused in 2011 compared to the internet and other forms of data transfers? If people need an optical drive on a notebook they can buy one that has it like people did in the past when technology made the inevitable change over or use an external one for the few times they need it, but why should everyone else suffer for it? Somehere has posted an x-ray pic of a MacBook Pro with the optical drive taking up 25% of the entire internal space. That’s a lot!
An optical drive is still faster than most internet connections. An optical disc serves as a backup and proof of purchase. And a DVD and especially a Blu-ray (not that Apple supports Blu-ray) is far easier, quicker and higher quality than a download. Plus, I don't want to be forced to "double dip" on movie software purchases. In my particular case, I have a standalone CD-R attached to my stereo system that enables me to do complex editing and mastering on uncompressed audio files. I then take those discs and load them into the Mac for import into iTunes and conversion to MP3. Without the optical drive, I'm screwed. And I prefer it not be external. In addition, I import music CDs into the Mac for iPod listening. Without the optical drive, I can't do that. It's not progress if the computer stops me from doing things I used to be able to easily do. And for all the hype, the CD market, as bad as it is, is still bigger than the downloads market.
If Apple removes the optical drive from the MacBook Pro line, they will probably lose me as a customer and I've been an Apple customer for over 30 years. If you don't want an optical drive, buy an Air -- that's what they're for.
And what's Apple going to do with the space now reserved for software? It's going to be something stupid like more iPad/iPhone cases or stylish computer bags.
The one thing I do like about the elimination of physical software is the positive environmental impact. If they don't eliminate physical software, I think they can greatly reduce the amount of packaging - they tend to be large empty boxes. The boxes can be made much smaller and use much less paper. I think most are kept large because of security concerns and so they fit in standard racks.
An optical drive is still faster than most internet connections. An optical disc serves as a backup and proof of purchase. And a DVD and especially a Blu-ray (not that Apple supports Blu-ray) is far easier, quicker and higher quality than a download. Plus, I don't want to be forced to "double dip" on movie software purchases. In my particular case, I have a standalone CD-R attached to my stereo system that enables me to do complex editing and mastering on uncompressed audio files. I then take those discs and load them into the Mac for import into iTunes and conversion to MP3. Without the optical drive, I'm screwed. And I prefer it not be external. In addition, I import music CDs into the Mac for iPod listening. Without the optical drive, I can't do that. It's not progress if the computer stops me from doing things I used to be able to easily do. And for all the hype, the CD market, as bad as it is, is still bigger than the downloads market.
If Apple removes the optical drive from the MacBook Pro line, they will probably lose me as a customer and I've been an Apple customer for over 30 years. If you don't want an optical drive, buy an Air -- that's what they're for.
And what's Apple going to do with the space now reserved for software? It's going to be something stupid like more iPad/iPhone cases or stylish computer bags.
The one thing I do like about the elimination of physical software is the positive environmental impact. If they don't eliminate physical software, I think they can greatly reduce the amount of packaging - they tend to be large empty boxes. The boxes can be made much smaller and use much less paper. I think most are kept large because of security concerns and so they fit in standard racks.
My iPhone and Mac apps re-download without issue because there is proof of purchase.
Most apps aren?t that large and download in a very short time, even on slower connections.
Those who have slow connections or need/want an optical drive can use one. No one is removing that ability. You can even hook up a Zip drive to your Mac if you really want to.
Why ignore a flash drive that is smaller and faster than an optical disk. Consider the cost of an 8GB flash drive and the USB plug, and a DL-DVD and a DVD burner found in Macs guess which one is cheaper? Guess which one is the future? Guess which one is faster? Guess which one has no moving parts? Guess which one doesn?t take up a quarter of the internal space?
You?ve missed the point of the MacBook Air. it?s an ultra-portable notebook. You?re saying that because the average user doesn?t use optical drives that much anymore that they should be forced to pay a premium for a slower, ultra-low voltage processor, have less RAM options, and have less storage options. Why can?t they simply want to have a powerful notebook without the wasted optical drive space? This will happen whether you like it or not. The question isn?t if, but when.