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[eastmen]

At this point you can just email it or send it over aim for free. Upload speeds are shit in the US, but it's usually quick enough to send some files in a reasonable time period.

Yes how long would it take to upload 25GB to someone ? How long would it take to send multiple 25GB folders to someone ?

With my bluray drive each disc is about 20 minutes to burn and i can just hand them off .

I've actually backed up my hardrives of all my ripped dvd's and blurays to 25GB blurays. Now if i have hardrive problems its all backed up . I put them in a big disc binder and put it in the closet . Smartest thing I ever did .

Until Flash is cheap enough so that I can do the same thing optical can't be replaced.

Imagine the cost of backing up 1TB to flash vs bluray

 

[PhoncipleBone]

While we're at it, wtf is with digital copies that come with Blurays expiring?

That is bullshit. Of course, digital copies will be harder to use once the ODD are gone from Macs. Some companies put the copy on a disc, others just have a code to download it. I guess things will move more to a code then.

 

[dream]

I just don't understand why a key to unlock a movie on a disc (so I don't even have to download anything) would ever expire.

 

[Tedesco!]

A lot of my clients still want a copy of their projects on DVD, as does the University I work for. I know in the future I can just purchase an external DVD burner for my MBP; but to be honest I would prefer to minimize the clutter. I prefer to have everything in one box.

It's also a shame that they removed the SxS readers in the MBP in favor of the SD reader. SD readers are insanely cheap. Not so much with the SxS.

 

[Tobor]

Yes how long would it take to upload 25GB to someone ? How long would it take to send multiple 25GB folders to someone ?

With my bluray drive each disc is about 20 minutes to burn and i can just hand them off .

I've actually backed up my hardrives of all my ripped dvd's and blurays to 25GB blurays. Now if i have hardrive problems its all backed up . I put them in a big disc binder and put it in the closet . Smartest thing I ever did .

Until Flash is cheap enough so that I can do the same thing optical can't be replaced.

Imagine the cost of backing up 1TB to flash vs bluray

You actually do this? What a colossal pain in the ass. I bought a 2TB external HDD for $100 and it backs up everything automatically.

Why would anyone mess around with optical discs for backup at this point?

 

[Marty Chinn]

Err, I didn't recommend buying movies on iTunes. I don't buy movies on iTunes. You said there wasn't a DRM-free digital movie store, and I'm pointing out that the world's largest digital movie store is DRM-free if you run a simple, lossless, once-over pass on the files. You're right, buying cheap retail DVDs is cheaper than buying on iTunes. That's why I do it. I wasn't answering the point you didn't make in your original post, I was answering the point you did make in your original post.

But it's not really because you have to jump through hoops to get to that point. Anything is piratable and DRM strippable but that doesn't mean we can claim that something is DRM free.

 

[Stumpokapow]

Yes how long would it take to upload 25GB to someone ? How long would it take to send multiple 25GB folders to someone ?

With my bluray drive each disc is about 20 minutes to burn and i can just hand them off .

Depends on the use-case. If you're doing personal backups, then yes I'd say blu-ray beats flash for personal backups... but I'd say that doing a hard drive backup to an external drive beats both.

If you're burning 25GB of misc data for someone, I would think it depends on the person. Most people don't have a PC blu-ray drive so if it was just any random person, I think you'd run into a lot of playback issues.

But yeah, it's true that if the data amount is exactly 25GB and you know the person has a blu-ray drive, optical is still the fastest and cheapest way to get it to them. I'd say it will be for about 2-3 years until flash catches up to the point where 32-64GB flash keys are about the price of 4-8GB keys now.

 

[Freezie KO]

Well, since Final Cut Pro sucks now, I guess they figure nobody needs to burn DVDs anymore.

 

[eastmen]

Err, I didn't recommend buying movies on iTunes. I don't buy movies on iTunes. You said there wasn't a DRM-free digital movie store, and I'm pointing out that the world's largest digital movie store is DRM-free if you run a simple, lossless, once-over pass on the files. You're right, buying cheap retail DVDs is cheaper than buying on iTunes. That's why I do it. I wasn't answering the point you didn't make in your original post, I was answering the point you did make in your original post.

Actualy buying Bluray's is cheaper than buying on itunes and offers you much higher video and audio quality.

Bluray is still the standard for quality in videos . CD is still the standard for music.


I can buy a Bluray + DVD + digital copy , rip my bluray to whatever quality settings I want for normaly less than the DD only verison on Itunes.

I can buy a cd for the band I like for $15 which is close to what apple charges and then rip them into various quality levels all greater than what apple allows me to buy

 

[Marty Chinn]

You actually do this? What a colossal pain in the ass. I bought a 2TB external HDD for $100 and it backs up everything automatically.

Why would anyone mess around with optical discs for backup at this point?

Mechanical drives are much more likely to fail even if left idle than putting something on disc and keeping it safe. It's not unknown or uncommon to have a cascading failure of a series of HDDs in a short timeframe.

 

[Tobor]

Where are you guys buying your DRM free Blurays from?

 

[=HERO=]

Some of the writing's kinda bad in that one ("pep in it's step" made me gag a bit), but the very general sentiment of "totally getting rid of physical is bad" is one I agree with. Internet is getting better, granted, so downloading a game that's several GBs in a few hours is not bad. but with movies coasting around that 50 GB, and even more games (than there already are) getting there in a few years, that's an unreasonable download size for most people when a physical copy is an alternative. When it's faster to bring home a physical movie from a retailer...from out of state, than it is to download on even nice connections, it's a bad time for things to be "digital only".

 

[evil solrac v3.0]

Mechanical drives are much more likely to fail even if left idle than putting something on disc and keeping it safe. It's not unknown or uncommon to have a cascading failure of a series of HDDs in a short timeframe.

oh, that's being a bit too paranoid. I have a blu-ray drive on my PC and aside from the few games that I have on disk and some movies I watch. I'd say 80-80 % of my movies/games are digital.

 

[Tuck]

I've used the optical drive on my Macbook Pro like... twice. On my desktop... nearly as few times. Honestly, the only reason I'm upset is because I really wanted a blu-ray supported iMac, so I could watch blu-rays on it. But I guess Apple just wants to pass right on by that.

 

[outunderthestars]

Some of the writing's kinda bad in that one ("pep in it's step" made me gag a bit), but the very general sentiment of "totally getting rid of physical is bad" is one I agree with. Internet is getting better, granted, so downloading a game that's several GBs in a few hours is not bad. but with movies coasting around that 50 GB, and even more games (than there already are) getting there in a few years, that's an unreasonable download size for most people when a physical copy is an alternative. When it's faster to bring home a physical movie from a retailer...from out of state, than it is to download on even nice connections, it's a bad time for things to be "digital only".

and let's not forget about bandwidth caps....

 

[Blackface]

Just wait until they are done with USB ports.

 

[Raistlin]

What I'm more pissed is that they never included a BD drive.

As many have posted, a popular use for Mac Mini's is as an HTPC. While I think a majority of people that utilize HTPC's have already ripped most of the DVD's they care about to a network drive or external HDD, most people haven't done the same with their BD's. As has been stated for years, a Mini with a BD drive and then-current HDMI specs would basically been the perfect HTPC. Unfortunately Apple never listened to that community.



To be honest, I think this could ultimately kill off the device long-term. It's not like the thing sells a ton to begin with, but I suspect they're basically saying goodbye to their largest community. Not simply because of the omission of any optical, but because of where this places them versus the competition.

The problem is it's losing features at a time when the competition is getting much better ... even from their own devices. For people that need an optical drive there are more and more good alternatives showing up and they're typically cheaper. Intel's continued push with new media-centric SoC's and now AMD's APU was already going to eat into the Mini. This will only strengthen that trend for those the see optical as a want or need.

Possibly the biggest competition may come from Apple themselves however. The majority of HTPC users are pretty tech savvy. The problem for Apple is where does this get positioned versus iTV? For $99 you can throw XBMC on the current iteration and handle SD and 720p content with no issues. While still somewhat early, the UI and functionality is already decent. So what happens with the next iTV iteration? Unless Apple purposely gimps it, it will have more than enough power for 1080p given the current iPhone and iPad SoC's.

So once we see a stable XBMC build for it ... what's the point of a Mini as an HTPC versus iTV unless you absolutely require on-board storage? For $500 less, you get something that functions just as well as a HTPC. Basically they'll be cannibalizing the Mini's biggest market since there will no longer be anything clearly differentiating the products as far as HTPC usage goes.

 

[Stumpokapow]

Actualy buying Bluray's is cheaper than buying on itunes and offers you much higher video and audio quality.

This is true, which is why, again for the third time, I don't buy movies on iTunes.

But it doesn't change the fact that if you want to purchase a movie digitally, you can do so, and in a matter of seconds, remove the DRM from it, thus functionally allowing you to purchase a DRM-free digital copy, which was the original point (not the subsequent point about price or convenience or which one I personally choose to use)

 

[-Pyromaniac-]

Can't remember the last time I used my CD drive lol. I think it was in the XP days.

 

[Game Guru]

I've check Amazon and the lowest price USB Drive (which I would assume to be the most likely replacement for an optical drive) is $8 for 1 4GB drive. I can get a 50 pack of DVD-R for $11 on Amazon as well.

Bad move, Apple. When floppies were outdated, CD-Rs were already established and could do everything a floppy drive could beside be reused with more space. CD-RWs fixed the reusability issue. USB Drives cannot realistically replace optical drives at this point in time, as far as disposability is concerned.

Personally, I will stick with physical media as my preference for as long as I can.

 

[BlueTsunami]

Why would anyone mess around with optical discs for backup at this point?

Unless you've got a sweet RAID array going its usually for having another form of redundancy. I wouldn't trust my personal digital photos to non-mirrored mechanical devices. Feels even safer archiving them to optical media.

 

[eastmen]

Depends on the use-case. If you're doing personal backups, then yes I'd say blu-ray beats flash for personal backups... but I'd say that doing a hard drive backup to an external drive beats both.

If you're burning 25GB of misc data for someone, I would think it depends on the person. Most people don't have a PC blu-ray drive so if it was just any random person, I think you'd run into a lot of playback issues.

But yeah, it's true that if the data amount is exactly 25GB and you know the person has a blu-ray drive, optical is still the fastest and cheapest way to get it to them. I'd say it will be for about 2-3 years until flash catches up to the point where 32-64GB flash keys are about the price of 4-8GB keys now.

I have 3 copies of everything . Primary hardrives in raid , External hardrives and then optical discs .


A bluray drive is $30 right now , I can give the person a 25GB disc of misc data and they can use it whenever , cost to me is $1 cost for 25GB in flash is what $30-$50 depending on what way you buy it.

Same with dvds , I can go to costco and get 200 blank 4gig dvds for $18 bucks . Thats 9 cents a disc , how much are 4 gig flash drives ? Micro center sells them for $5 I believe.

On a deal i can get 8.4GB DL dvds 25 for $10 , thats 40cents per disc , a 8 gig flash drive is still $12 bucks from what i can see .


Even if flash drives drop to $5 for a 32 gig drive that will still be greater than the cost for bluray , since bluray will continue to drop in cost. Just look at the price drops in past optical formats .

The formats aren't dead yet and in the future we will have the BD XL discs giving us 100, 200 gigs of storage.

I can understand perhaps the average person doesn't have a reason to use a bluray or dvd drive, but most likely its because they are uneducated about the quality diffrences between the mediums

 

[Marty Chinn]

oh, that's being a bit too paranoid. I have a blu-ray drive on my PC and aside from the few games that I have on disk and some movies I watch. I'd say 80-80 % of my movies/games are digital.

It's not paranoia though. It does happen. I've seen it happen. I've heard it happen to others. Is it most likely to happen? No, but if you have data that's important enough, a physical media like an optical disc is definitely more secure for your data archiving than multiple HDDs. This is coming from someone who is very backed up with a storage server that has 14TB of storage and has offsite backup storage setup as well. So trust me, I understand backing up to HDDs, but you can't dispute the secure nature of an optical disc over a mechanical drive that can fail.

 

[Warnen]

Haven't used a CD/DVD in over a year. Super drive is all ya need

 

[eastmen]

You actually do this? What a colossal pain in the ass. I bought a 2TB external HDD for $100 and it backs up everything automatically.

Why would anyone mess around with optical discs for backup at this point?

Alot of my stuff is a one time burn. My ripped dvd collection ( i still own the original dvds which are sitting in my attic ) . I can fit about 22-23 dvd rips per bluray. If my server's raid drives failed or my hardrive back up failed it would take alot of effort to get those dvds out of the attic and then rip them all. It takes me 2 minutes to drag the files into nero to burn and after 10 minutes or 15 minutes i come back and switch out discs. With these files its a one time thing.

Other stuff like family photos or videos i do in batches when they hit close to 24 gigs.


A few years bad lightening storm took out my server and the back up usb hardrive i had in another part of the house. It was not fun at all.


Actually , its not a one time burn but it might as well be. I have back ups on cd that when dvds came out i transfered to dvds and when bluray came out i transfered to bluray. Each time I of course condensed the amount of discs due to capacity increases and it allowed me ot have fresh copies incase rot started to happen

 

[Tobor]

Unless you've got a sweet RAID array going its usually for having another form of redundancy. I wouldn't trust my personal digital photos to non-mirrored mechanical devices. Feels even safer archiving them to optical media.

If I was really concerned, I'd sign up for a cloud backup service. That's dual redundancy with no active work on my part.

Any backup solution that requires manual effort on the part of the User tends to break down over time. "I'll do it tomorrow" turns into "I'll do it next week", and on and on. No thanks.

 

[Deleted member 22576]

But eastmen, what do you plan to do about disc rot in the future?

 

[Aesius]

My DVD-RW drive hasn't been connected to my computer since 2007.

 

[Squash]

I won't miss the internal drive in portables. I haven't had one laptop cd rom that has lasted. The one in my Santa Rosa MBP barely reads anymore and wont even try to burn. Luckily I have an external writer that saved my ass a couple times.

 

[Deleted member 22576]

The one in my Santa Rosa MBP barely reads anymore and wont even try to burn. Luckily I have an external writer that saved my ass a couple times.

Yeah, thats another thing. My MBP's dvdrw drive is completely broken. Has been for YEARS.
It can read some stuff fine, but it can't write to anything. I'd say thats a lot more common that most people realize.

 

[tedtropy]

Just wait until they are done with USB ports.

A USB port is considerably more versatile and 3.0 is backwards compatible, so I don't see that happening anytime soon.

 

[eastmen]

But eastmen, what do you plan to do about disc rot in the future?

As I said , back up cds were transfered to fewer back up dvds , which were trasnfered to fewer back up blurays , when BD XL or whatever the next big optical format comes out , I will transfer the SL blurays to them. 200 gig BD XL discs will let me condense 8 discs into one. If home HVD happens with 1.5TB discs I can condense it all again .


I also use cloud back up , but sometimes the internet isn't avalible , i wouldn't want to have to download multiple TB of data to new drives and if one day my services have caps, i wouldn't want to have to pay to redownload my data

 

[Sydle]

I'm not a fan of Apple, but I have to give them kudos for this move. I want to get rid of all my physical media and that will require that more companies embrace digital distribution.

 

[Marty Chinn]

If I was really concerned, I'd sign up for a cloud backup service. That's dual redundancy with no active work on my part.

Any backup solution that requires manual effort on the part of the User tends to break down over time. "I'll do it tomorrow" turns into "I'll do it next week", and on and on. No thanks.

There's bandwidth caps though. I agree in general that the second you remove automation out of it, it has a higher chance of not happening, but there are still advantages to having a large physical non mechanical media that stores your data for pennies per unit.

 

[Dr.Palutena]

you know....I'm ok with this, especially for laptops .

 

[B!TCH]

Just wait until they are done with USB ports.

Not happening any time soon but I do wonder why they included Thunderbolt but not USB 3.0 as well in their recent refreshes.

Not including Blu-Ray early on should've been an early indication of their eventual intentions to forgo physical media. The success of the App Store model only accelerated it further.

 

[Osiris]

I've got about 1.5 Terabytes of HDD on my current PC, no way in hell I'm sitting and feeding it DVD's to back everything up, external HDD or go commando! (no backup) That's what I say

I think the only time I've used the DVD drive on this PC in the last 2 years was a Windows 7 reinstall, and that was only because I haven't sorted out an emergency flash drive for reinstalls yet. (thanks for the reminder).

Might be a little premature to dismiss optical drives outright right now for all, but for some, they are quite easy to dismiss.

 

[Raistlin]

Not happening any time soon but I do wonder why they included Thunderbolt but not USB 3.0 as well in their recent refreshes.

Thunderbolt is more useful as it's basically a super-set of what USB 3.0 can do.

I'm sure they'll be more than happy to offer you their Thunderbolt to USB 3.0 cables though

Not including Blu-Ray early on should've been an early indication of their eventual intentions to forgo physical media. The success of the App Store model only accelerated it further.

Yeah it was. Just always seemed strange that Apple was part of the BDA. That's why people held out hope for a while.

 

[sk3]

So I guess instead of putting decent working dvd drives in their computers they are going to just get rid of them. My "superdrive" won't burn anything anymore and has difficulty reading. I know a couple other people with the same issue.

 

[NGAMER9]

Surprised at how many people just don't use physical media anymore. I know I use it all the time, ripping CD's in better quality, watching Netflix DVD's, etc.

 

[Al-ibn Kermit]

Is it that crazy to think that the Mac mini will be closer to the size of the current AppleTV than the current Mac mini within a few years? I think not.

It didn't "make sense" for the original iMac to not have a floppy drive but in a way it led the charge in the demise of it

For laptops, it's usually better if they don't have an optical drive. But with a Mac mini, which is usually used as a desktop replacement or as a home theater pc, it would make sense to have media playback be a priority so an optical drive just makes sense.

 

[Azzurri]

Just wait until they are done with USB ports.

Made me lol.

 

[dallow_bg]

I rarely ever bust out my external disc drive for something.

And the idea of backing up to optical media.......... wow.
I used to do that 10 or so years ago.

 

[ampere]

Hm, I don't think it's a good idea to eliminate optical drives from larger laptops or desktops. It obviously makes sense with the MacBook Air and smaller, portable devices.

 

[Ninja Scooter]

Apple users are used to getting less for their money.

This is just another step in their AOL styled "walled garden" philosophy.

Do new PCs come with 3.5 and floppy drives? In that case EVERYONE is getting less for their money. And hey my flat screen monitor is smaller and lighter than the old CRT! WHAT A RIPOFF!

 

[Jesus Carbomb]

No slow jamz mix cd for you, Steve Jobs.

 

[outunderthestars]

Do new PCs come with 3.5 and floppy drives? In that case EVERYONE is getting less for their money. And hey my flat screen monitor is smaller and lighter than the old CRT! WHAT A RIPOFF!

Is the vast majority of software, music, and movies put out floppy? No.

 

[Ninja Scooter]

Is the vast majority of software, music, and movies put out floppy? No.

the vast majority of software, music and movies are now available as DD.

 

[waxer]

I have only used my drive a couple of times. Cant say I care.

 

[ampere]

Do new PCs come with 3.5 and floppy drives? In that case EVERYONE is getting less for their money. And hey my flat screen monitor is smaller and lighter than the old CRT! WHAT A RIPOFF!

I don't think that argument works, a 1.44MB floppy can't hold any media relevant today.

A 50GB dual layered Blu-ray, or even a 9GB dual layered DVD can hold a good amount of modern media. Eliminating the drives is a relevant utility loss.