Quickly: Someone warn Apple!
They forgot to add a CD drive to their new iMac. ( At least that's what's apparent from the coming soon pictures )
iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
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22 replies
In all seriousness though :
I'll start by being fair to Apple: My own Optical Drive died 2 months after I purchased my iMac, and I just don't have the 4 days the Apple Support in Brazil asks me to leave it with them for. So ever since then, I've had no OD. It's been 2 full years now and I haven't exactly had a need for it. On the other hand, it may be because I mainly use sourceforge applications rather than disk ones (I'm looking at you, microsoft office ) and have a PS3 for the movie discs.
So yes, some of us can live without the OD. And from a business standpoint, I will take malicious pleasure from watching physical media like CDs and DVDs die. I'm not even a big fan of pendrives.
....but.
Removing the OD to make the iMac thinner as much as they did will have serious consequences when it comes to overheating issues. I notice how Apple subtly refrained from mentioning the temperature control system even though they advertised even the color of the aluminum. I wonder just how many iMacs will suffer from serious overheating damage and will die out within a year of purchase.
Seriousness ??
I haven't seen it yet myself, but I'm thinking thinner might run cooler since the interior volume of air will be less & "turned over" faster with the same amount of fan, that and the Aluminum being closer to the heat generators & likely "offing" more heat.
I hope apple jumps in and starts to pitch why we will all love this missing feature months from now, I will give them the benefit of the doubt, but CDs are still common place Photographers use them, brides want them, companies pass information with them. Yes one day they will go away, but it is not happening that soon.
That said.... WAAAAAAAAAA ! I have been saving for this new Imac and now, I am not sure about getting it.
Apple, Please show us why this move was made???
Well ... floppies were once commonplace too ... and were replaced by CD/DVD ...
In my mind, speaking as a fellow photographer ... I think the advanced performance of the new ssd/hdd combo will more than make up for adding an external optical drive for the interim ...
BD, when I get back to my lab I'll try a couple experiments to see where we're headed with that line of thought.
Butch, at the price they're charging, and given how small an external drive is, they could VERY well ship it with the iMac for free. It even fits nicely on top of the stand, right under the Apple logo.
Furthermore, advancing in one direction ( in this case, performance ) does not give them the right to go back in another. The whole point of new, more modern models, is precisely to keep everything going steadily forward. As I said, I'm all for CDs being gone, but that's just not 2013. Or 14, I'd dare say. It's nice that Apple wants to be progressive and all, but it's not for them to take away something from the customer and then charge them for it, considering it was already present in previous models.
Furthermore, you'll notice that the whole marketing point of this new iMac is "how thin it is" - And you'll see that all the pictures in the Design gallery of apple.com suspiciously do not show a profile view of the machine. If you look online for that picture from the apple presentation, you'll see why: It's not slim at all. Just around the very edge of the machine. Not very honest to keep that away from a customer looking at their design page if you ask me, especially because they make it look like it's slim all over the body.
Personally, when my iMac bites the dust, I'm going back to normal Desktop PCs with a Linux distro.
Yep someone peed in the pickles.đ A fully loaded iMac will run at 4k and leaving out the cd/dvd drive IMHO is a mistake.I'm sure there are more people that require one than those that do not.
Not good news for the audio enthusiast either by the looks:
Want use a third party Mic on line-in? Or (whisper it) rescue audio from those old cassette tapes?
Looks like you'll be spending more dosh with Griffin.
Go back and look at online discussions (circa 1998) when Apple omitted the floppy drive from the original iMac ... you would see many of the same arguments that we are seeing today about the optical drives ... I don't think that Apple or Apple users are going to suffer from the absence ...
In my last four computers ... with the exception of one power supply ... all my hardware problems were with the optical drives of one form or another ... I'm not going to lose sleep if I have to work with an external ...
This was also the most heated topic of discussion with the introduction of the Retina Macbook Pro ... doesn't seem to have hurt sales so far ...
Butch
But you remember that most machines had both cd and flop and now a days there are many options. Many clients have limited FTP delivery and right now disks are the common method of delivery. Many firms will not allow jump drives to be connected without encription. I don't know what you shoot butch but the fortune 100 is not dropping disks soon. I'm guessing apple is giving drives for free like Nikon did with x.
Well ... though I have been a full time pro shooter since 1976 ... I rarely get to swim with any Fortune 100 clients ... however, the lowly (very sub-fortune 500) clients I do serve have no issue with digital delivery either FTP, or directly through their own network when I shoot on site ... In fact I have only one commercial client that requests their images on CD/DVD ... the rest just want the files in any efficient manner I can deliver them ... I can't imagine that the Fortune 100 are still working with dialup internet access ...
This whole issue is a tempest in a tea pot ... it's quite simple ... if the new Macs don't sell because they lack an optical drive ... I suppose Apple will go back to the drawing board ... but if I were you, I wouldn't hold my breath ... especially considering you can pick up a quality external USB/Firewire optical drives for less than $60 ... It's really a non issue when you consider the big picture ... Time and technology move on ... you adapt or get left behind ...
I want my DVD burner. There is no alternative that is better yet. This was a stupid move on Apples part.
I can't run my business off of jump drives and FTP. Just wont work.
My old mac just died. Was considering getting a new one, but not now. I have to think about it more. Don't want to go back to PC's, but that may be the next best alternative.
And let the games begin - some will say Apple has made a terrible mistake, others will say it shows Apple's arrogance while still others will point out that Apple is almost always ahead of the curve. And yes, while my photographer brother in law is still burning DVDs I've burned maybe 3 in the last 2 years. I'm happy to let him pay for a feature that he needs.
Quickly: Someone warn Apple!