End of an era: Apple's SuperDrive has finally sold out after 16 years
The 2008 MacBook Air didn't have an optical drive, so Apple sold a separate SuperDrive accessory, which has finally seemingly been discontinued from sale.
RIP Apple USB SuperDrive
Visit Apple's website, and you'll see the SuperDrive is sold out. That may signify that the ancient device has finally been pulled from sale.
Apple has never been shy when ditching ports, peripherals, or drives in favor of more modern standards or thinner devices. The MacBook Air is one of the more significant examples, being among the first consumer laptops sold without a disk drive.
Apple's solution was one it has gone to many times over the years -- sell it as a dongle. The USB SuperDrive started life as a $99 accessory to the MacBook Air.
The device has remained available and in the Apple Store for the 16 years since its introduction. The price dropped slightly to $79, and no updates were ever made to the product.
Despite Blu-ray being a thing since 2006, Apple didn't support the format with SuperDrive. It also used a USB-A connector, meaning users needed an adapter to use it with modern Macs. And, power provided by that port is a consideration, so most hubs and docks can't drive it.
Technology around optical drives got cheaper and more widely available, so it is safe to say the SuperDrive outlived most of its usefulness more than a decade ago. Users have been able to get much more powerful external drives with USB-C for years and at a much lower price.
The product has sold out on Apple's website, but it is still available elsewhere while supplies last. It can be purchased from Amazon for $77.99.
Read on AppleInsider
Comments
When I was in the market for an external optical drive close to 20 years ago, I ended up picking up an inexpensive (~$25) Slimline CD-R drive that also worked with PCs. There was no reason to buy the SuperDrive as these were already commodity devices: all the drive mechanisms came from the same 2-3 companies.
A few years later I found myself in need of a Blu-ray compatible drive. Once again I spent little (~$30) for a commodity PC-compatible Slimline drive.
There was no justifiable reason why the SuperDrive had to be restricted to Macs. Sometimes Apple peripherals have features or quality superiority that make them worthy of a higher price tag. The SuperDrive never fell into this category.
That said, as an indirect Apple shareholder (and at one time a direct AAPL shareholder), I am glad some people bought this device which helped pad Apple's fat gross margins.
Speaking of which, Apple really needs to consider how to get more involved in the home theater market. Two Homepods operated by an Apple TV 4K has a lot of promise to unseat sill soundbars from their lofty thrones, but the cost is two homepods plus Apple TV 4K is too high, and add to that it doesn't support DTS formats, which are big on physical media. Yeah, Apple is into streaming, but like I said, there's a lot of content that isn't streaming yet, and the fact remains a lot of us in our 50's have a good amount of content already purchased on disc as it is.
The only thing I am glad about is that our DATA isn't on disc formats at all anymore. Optical drives are plainfully slow when it comes to that. But playback for audio or video stuff is still perfectly acceptable.
And if your wondering about the UB820, yeah, it's top notch, especially for upscaling DVD and 1080p Blu-ray content to 4K.
I have found some drives seem to work better on some discs, so having a choice of drives from different manufacturers is quite beneficial.
To each their own.
4K blue ray movie disc is dirt cheap once it passes 1 year later released.
At least you don't have to scroll or search Netflix or Hulu for what you want to watch.
For data storage, single blue ray disc holds 20-25GB. You can store all your pictures in single disc. And you can make couple of copies and stash on different places.
At least you don't have to worry about cloud storage outage occurs when you need it.
This is the tech that Steve Jobs famously described as a big "bag of hurt" back in 2008.
https://www.engadget.com/2008-10-14-steve-jobs-calls-blu-ray-a-bag-of-hurt.html
excluding it from the Mac but leaving the door open for future addition. There were multiple factors that led to the decision but one of the main ones was the required license fee for the software media player which Steve didn't want to add to the Mac COGS. Of course, the cost of the Blu-ray license would be passed off to the consumer even if most people opted to not adopt Blu-ray. Even to this day legit Blu-ray player software all hovers around $30 because it's mostly the Blu-ray license fee.
Steve was gung-ho to kill off optical media (many predicted at the time that Blu-ray would be the end of the road for optical media). In the end, these people -- including Steve -- were correct. Streaming video is the de facto standard in 2020s. Downloadable files don't require the Blu-ray license either (there may be other DRM though but not something that the end user needs to pay extra for). Remember that the iTunes Music Store essentially hammered a bunch of nails in audio CD's coffin. Steve wanted to do the same to Blu-ray.
Note that one can still use Blu-ray writers on Macs just fine as a data storage device. Blu-ray movies on disc can often be ripped using the right software. I'm using a Pioneer slimline Blu-ray player from 2009 (about $30) on my Mac mini M2 Pro. It still works fine, the only thing I don't do is play movies directly from disc. That's fine, these commodity PC slimline optical drive mechanisms are rather noisy, it's not a very good end user experience. Better to rip, optionally transcode to a more useful file type, and play back from the file.
Please do better fact-checking.
LOL, maybe they're imminently releasing an autonomous electric vehicle that they'll call SuperDrive.
The original Apple SuperDrive was the 1.44mb HD floppy drives found in early Macs (after the original 800k floppy) and also external version that fit on later Apple II etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SuperDrive