Apple Says Optical Drives Were Holding It Back
Senior VP of global marketing stressed that competitors are afraid to ditch optical drives technology.
Apple's senior VP of global marketing, Phil Schiller, has explained the firm's reasons for removing the optical drive from its new iMac system.
As it has done with the MacBook Air and the new Retina Display MacBook Pro, Apple also decided to drop the optical drive in its new 5mm-thin iMacs. According to Schiller, older technologies such as disc drives are holding the industry back and have ultimately done their time. He also noted that competitors are afraid to lose optical drives.
"These old technologies are holding us back. They're anchors on where we want to go," he said. "We find the things that have outlived their useful purpose. Our competitors are afraid to remove them. We try to find better solutions - our customers have given us a lot of trust. In general, it's a good idea to remove these rotating medias from our computers and other devices. They have inherent issues — they're mechanical and sometimes break, they use power and are large. We can create products that are smaller, lighter and consume less power."
Schiller also stated that consumers have stopped asking Apple about Blu-ray. Having never integrated the technology into its products, he said: "Blu-ray has come with issues unrelated to the actual quality of the movie that make [it] a complex and not-great technology…So for a whole plethora of reasons, it makes a lot of sense to get rid of optical discs in desktops and notebooks."
The Apple executive also said, naturally, that it's better to buy movies through iTunes, subsequently having them available to watch on all of a user's Apple devices.

Hmm... okay
"........ naturally, that it's better to buy movies through iTunes,........"
now, i see where it's going...
Plus, my DVD / Blu-Ray provides great archiving, have had way too many backup harddrives fail on me to trust them without some form of redundancy.
Hmm... okay
"........ naturally, that it's better to buy movies through iTunes,........"
now, i see where it's going...
Just one small issue: Compatibility... but then again Apple is bearly compatible with anything but apple products.
In ohter word, Apple is giving me even more reasons not to buy their products.
Either way, leave it to Apple to tell people what they want. It worked with the floppy drive, but I don't think they'll be able to pull it off with optical drives. If they're so confident in this decision, maybe they should stop selling their grotesquely overpriced USB optical drive too.
still blinded by the Apple name and look.
Hahhahah. No S#!t. Pure genius. Evil that is.
Apple is a horrible company. Seeing them make so much money makes me lose hope in the future.
And 50GB of cloud storage are not useful for those purposes, you have to continue using backups.
Nice try to get people tied to their iTunes store.
I do the same, plus with a physical music CD you can sell it if you want (I used to buy used CDs), give it to someone if you don't want it, or pass it to another generation. With a digital download you don't have the same rights.
Avatar used 43GB of BluRay space. I use NETFLIX and the quality is "okay" but when I want a CHOICE of high quality for great movies like Avatar, Avengers, LOTR, Harry Potter etc, then I want the BEST quality available.
Oh, and how is my SISTER going to borrow my movies if they're stuck in digital world.
And I finally tried an Apple to see what the hype is all about. Not impressed. I'm going back to Windows 8 (yes, I said it... Sigh.. )