In revamping the iMac line this year, Apple has finally phased out one component that it has steadily been removing from its entire notebook line for the past few years – the optical disc drive.
In an interview with
Time, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Phil Schiller explained why his company felt that the optical disc drive had to go, adding that Blu-ray was never on their list of priorities.
“It actually comes from similar thinking as with the portables,” Schiller said. “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.”
He pointed out that software distribution is almost entirely digital nowadays, and the same trend is becoming ubiquitous for video, 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,” according to Apple’s SVP of Worldwide Marketing. “So for a whole plethora of reasons, it makes a lot of sense to get rid of optical discs in desktops and notebooks,” he noted.
Schiller obviously favors iTunes when it comes to downloading high-definition video, and he suggested to Time’s Harry McCracken that customers are beginning to do so as well.
With ever greater storage capabilities and cloud services, it’s really a no-brainer for Mac users to do away with discs, which are not only prone to getting damaged, but also sport low reading speeds.
During the interview, Schiller also suggested that the new iMac (late 2012) was really the paramount Mac Apple had always envisioned.
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