Mac Notebooks have SD- are the bells tolling for Superdrives?

hmurchison

Well ever since Apple announced the new Macbook Pro lineup and added SD cards a new discussion has popped up.



We now know via an Apple Technote that SDHC slots in the new Macbook Pros are bootable. We also

know that Apple has done very little to push the DVD format, ignoring iDVD in iLife and adding no significant updates. DVD Studio Pro was largely ignored

during the last Final Cut Studio refresh that delivered Color.



Snow Leopard now has options to save video to iPhone/iPods or Apple TV. In turn you can also post to Youtube. I'm of the belief that the end of "integrated"

Superdrives in the Macbooks is rapidly approaching. Once the infrastructure is in place for faster distribution of content it will only be the diehards and curmudgeons

who cling bitterly to their spinning plastic and lasers.



The infrastructure: - fueled by the Internet or "Cloud"



1. MobileMe with iDisk sharing. Your recipient doesn't even have to own a MobileMe account.

2. DropBox- 2TB per free account and highly addictive for its syncing and sharing properties

3. YouTube - free hosting for your more public videos

4. Apple TV and iPhone/iPod - No longer must you encode to DVD to view on your TV.

5. Plain ole email - with Gmail accepting large attachments there's a lot you can transfer via email



And the good ole ubiquitous USB Flash drive



I get these things now from vendors that used to lug around boxes of datasheets and collateral. Now they just smile and hand you a silkscreened USB Flash drive preloaded with their collateral

in digital form. Eventually you'll develop such a cache of these drives you'll just give'em away with the files you need to give to someone



So where does the Superdrive fit in?



1. For times when you don't have Internet access or your recipient does not and you need to deliver in a ubiquitous format.

2. Ripping your CD and DVD media

3. Taking up an annoying amount of space in your Macbook



I think the Superdrive is getting yanked soon. In its place I'd love to see more sophisticated cooling to that when quad core mobile nehalem chips come Apple doesn't have to go thicker on the design.

I'd love to see another 2.5" bay. It'd be great to have a Macbook Pro in 2010 that could hold 1.5TB of data (assuming Seagate, Hitachi and Western Digital ship 750GB drives next year). As an advantage the

ability to run two drives in a Macbook Pro puts some more grunt back into the "Pro" moniker. The Macbook would stay with a single drive. I know I'd never even consider a Macbook if the Pro had dual drives.

From mirroring to tiering your storage (boot drive SSD, data files 7200rpm HDD) the Macbook Pro dualie would instantly give options. There maybe even room to return ExpressCard slots. Who knows?



So stick a fork in the Superdrive. It's served us well but it's time to move on to greener pastures. What do you think?

sennen

I can probably get by with the superdrive in my old pb.



As I will most likely be getting one of the new 17" mbps, I'll be interested if down the track I can swap in an extra hard drive or ssd and use an external b-r/dvd burner...

Marvin

Quote:

Originally Posted by hmurchison


I think the Superdrive is getting yanked soon. In its place I'd love to see more sophisticated cooling to that when quad core mobile nehalem chips come Apple doesn't have to go thicker on the design.

I'd love to see another 2.5" bay. It'd be great to have a Macbook Pro in 2010 that could hold 1.5TB of data (assuming Seagate, Hitachi and Western Digital ship 750GB drives next year). As an advantage the

ability to run two drives in a Macbook Pro puts some more grunt back into the "Pro" moniker. The Macbook would stay with a single drive. I know I'd never even consider a Macbook if the Pro had dual drives.

From mirroring to tiering your storage (boot drive SSD, data files 7200rpm HDD) the Macbook Pro dualie would instantly give options. There maybe even room to return ExpressCard slots. Who knows?

Apple's superdrives are absolutely terrible IMO. They are by far the worst drives I've ever used. They are Pioneer drives too so I don't know why they perform so badly. I can't burn discs faster than 4x in almost any superdrive I use and they are so noisy.



Replacing it with an extra drive would be nice just to be able to get RAID-0. A laptop with two SSDs in RAID-0 would help get round SSD size limits and the performance would be great. Plus as you say they could have something in place to use the drive as a Time Machine drive transparently.



750GB 2.5" drives should come anytime now as they are due to ship mid-2009.



Given the size of the optical drive, it could get a spare HDD as well as a bigger battery. Although even just a price cut would help. These guys charge $145 for a superdrive upgrade:



http://store.mcetech.com/Merchant2/m...=MB15DVDR8DL-A



I think Apple themselves used to charge $100 for the desktop upgrade. The laptop superdrive is an expensive addition and if it's not used that much, you'd be as well just buying a cheap 3rd party USB one. Every little bit helps to get the cheapest 13" Aluminum MBP under $1000 and they can just wipe out the white one.

tonton

well for one thing they need to protect the lens from dust better in the drives. But as someone who buys physical media and hates buying music from iTunes that I can't actually hold in my hand (and have limited, albeit improved quality), I absolutely need my optical drive, and I almost exclusively use my laptop on my lap, not on a desk, so I don't want an external drive.

tonton

And what the hell is taking them with Blu-ray support in the OS? Even if they don't want to make a half-assed player app and they're waiting to perfect it, at least they could release an SDK so that someone else can write a half-assed player.

sdw2001

Personally, I need my SuperDrive. DVD support is still needed for everything from watching movies on the machine to makiing DVDs for use outside the home. I just finished an iMovie project that I made into a DVD for my school children. I don't have an Apple TV at school, nor is viewing online or on my personal machine very practical.

hmurchison

It's getting close (meaning the ratio of people who need and who don't need internal optical drives)



I certainly won't dispute the need for optical drives but my usage is so low I'd actually do better to have a secondary storage bay and use external drives and as Marvin said I shudder when thinking about using my Superdrive heavily because of its poor performance.



External full size drive for me.

sequitur

I have no use for a SuperDrive other than for installation DVD's. Therefore, I'm forced to have one. I used to be able to use a combo drive to install CD's, but ... If there were another way to install software, I'd gladly relinquish the SuperDrive for another HDD or a discount.



Please, Apple and other software mfrs., put your installation software on a thumb drive or SD card.

mac voyer

The best of all possible worlds would be to have no optical or digital input drive. Once everyone has the equivalent of cable broadband, everything can be downloadable. By that time, we should also have a pervasive connection in all devices. I give it ten years. Till then, I do not want to have to buy all my content on yet another format. SD fundamentally has the same problem as DVD. It is a separate piece of plastic that will be lost, damaged, or obsoleted.

Marvin

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mac Voyer


SD fundamentally has the same problem as DVD. It is a separate piece of plastic that will be lost, damaged, or obsoleted.

Except that it has the major advantage of only taking up a fraction of the space. Compare the largest silver block attached to the motherboard on the left to the optical drive on the right:







You don't have to buy your content all over again on another format, with storage devices you can simply transfer them. You can rip DVDs into video_ts folders onto an SD card, though it's cheaper to put them on a HDD.