MacBook Air Proves Optical Media Is Dying

A few months back Franklin opined about how the titanic battle between Blu-ray and HD-DVD will ultimately end with both optical media formats losing out to the digital distribution of media. Well, the announcements at yesterday’s MacWorld of iTunes movie rentals and new Apple TV software that leverages iTunes rentals and serves up HD content seems to put some oomph behind Franklin’s arguments. While the rental prices are going to be steep at least in the short term (3 to 4 dollars for standard definition content and 4 to 5 dollars for HD movies), the MacBook Air . . . puts some nails in optical media’s coffinmany of the major studios are on board and the price is likely to drop once the studios stop dragging their lead feet and realize the direction entertainment distribution technology is leading. But, the biggest announcement at yesterday’s Mac World, the MacBook Air, really puts some nails in optical media’s coffin. The MacBook Air doesn’t even have an optical drive. While the device has the ability to hijack another computer’s optical drive (pretty damn awesome if you ask me), Rest in peace optical media; you had a great run.the fact that it doesn’t have a drive itself indicates that Apple believes such drives are not longer necessary for cutting edge computing ability. This isn’t the first time that Apple has led the way toward the decommissioning of a technology. While Apple took a lot of flack for not including a floppy disk drive with the iMac in the late 90’s, history (and Apple’s bottom line) proved that this was a shrewd and forward-looking decision. Rest in peace optical media; you had a great run.