Seeking compatible CD/DVD burner for M1 and M2 Macs

optical drives are a commodity like RAM and hard drives. Any USB drive is compatible but there is a catch. Most optical drives you find at big box stores are USB powered and the amount of power the USB bus can provide isn’t always enough. Back in the good (bad?) old days when computers had several USB 3 ports the solution vendors seemed to prefer was to ship with a strange USB cable that you plugged into 2 USB ports of the computer. I have an LG optical drive I bought about 5 years ago and within the last year bought an Asus drive for my wife. Both are powered with a USB C cable and they are compatible with our M2 MBAir computers.

I agree with all that our friend @dwb has posted.

Most any USB powered optical drive will work with your M1 & M2 Mac. Even drives with the ubiquitous USB-A connector can be used if you simply use a USB-A to USB-C plug adapter or cable.

I have an Apple SuperDrive and an ASUS optical drive and each works just fine with both my M2 MBA and several older Intel-based Macs.

It looks like OWC's desktop optical drives (which had their own power supply) are no longer available, either. Not even the enclosures. I hope that the one that I bought back when they were still available never "goes the trip".