Q: No DVD drive in new iMac ???

I thought point of an All-In-One isnt really to have various things hanging out the back

of it.

Right, the new imac is not an "All-In-One".

I gathered that..But Apple marketed the iMac originally and for many years as the ultimate all in one machine, but its becoming less and less of that..whats next, a screen so thin there's no room for the motherboard and we'll have to buy an outboard one..oh yer thats a Mac Mini isn't it!!!

Neil.Dynamix wrote:

But Apple marketed the iMac originally and for many years as the ultimate all in one machine ...

It still does that. But ever since CRT displays were replaced by flat screen ones, it has also marketed it on the merits of thinner, lighter, quieter, & more energy efficient & eco-friendly designs.

Part of that process dictates a "less is more" approach: the more you cram into the box, the bigger the power supply & the noisier the cooling system must become. Including things not all users need or want needlessly increases its ecological footprint, compromises raw performance, & makes it less suitable for use where looks are important.

If none of these things matter that much to you, by all means choose something else.

This doesn't make sense...

Why does a desk top have to be so thin and light. It's not going anywhere. It sits on your desk. (duh)

Quieter? It can be designed to be just as quiet with a DVD/BluRay burner. It's all about engineering. Maybe Apple has lost that talent. And don't give the "Oh, it will need bigger fans for cooling the laser in the optical!" crap. None of the portable optical drives have fans. They don't need it. They don't produce that much excess heat.

Need's a bigger power supply? Ummm... so I'm powering 3 USB portable drives and a thunderbolt drive off of the ports on my iMac with no trouble. You can't add a stinking optical drive, that uses as much power as one USB2 port, to something that is producing that much power internally? I call BS on that.

Ecological footprint? What the crap is that? Are we growing endangered species on this thing? The raw performance comes from the design of the motherboard and the circuits it accommodates (i.e. CPU, PCI, CPU, etc.). Not the shape of the machine.

"less suitable"… how about less stable? We have one in shop. We bought it for the thunderbolt port to use with specific peripherals. The design of this machine for a working environment *****. As people have said, the location of the SD card port is atrocious. We don't even use the onboard SD port so there is another thing you can take off the machine to make it thinner if thats your goal. It's a pain in the butt to reach behind the machine and find the port. When you do you inevitably move the machine or screen out of alignment and you have to reposition the computer after you have plugged in the card. Same on removing the card. To save time and hassle we have attached a USB3 card reader to one of the USB ports and Velcro it to the pedestal so it's in front of the machine and assessable. Saves time and hassle.

To think the optical is going away on "real" computers is just burying your head in the sand. In the production world optical will continue to be used and refined because of it's archival longevity and it's ability to store vast amounts of data cheaply and in a small physical footprint. Apple doesn't want you there. They want you to pay them an outrageous price for cloud storage from both your computer and your IOS device.

justamacguy wrote:

This doesn't make sense...

But it does. For example, a high performance DVD/BluRay burner consumes more power than you seem to think. Even the medium performance USB-powered ones typically require 2 USB bus connections to burn at their maximum speeds, & none of the high performance ones are bus powered. They are all full height units designed for tower bays with amble cooling systems or self-powered external enclusures that don't add any heat load to the computer itself.

R C-R... You better get up to date on the new specs and devices. You don't need 2 power sources to use a fast BluRay portable drive with the iMac or the new Macbooks. They have USB 3.0. The means a power bump from the old 500 mA output of USB 2.0 to the current USB 3.0 900 mA... almost double the power on one connector. We are using 6X and 8X burners off of them just fine.

Not even the full size BluRay burners come with fans in them anymore. The heat in prior units comes from the chipset, not the laser. Just as the chipsets in the computer have become more efficient and use less heat generating power so have the chips in optical drives.

justamacguy wrote:

We are using 6X and 8X burners off of them just fine.

I don't doubt that you are. However, current high performance units burn BD-R media at up to 15X. The faster the disc spins, the less time the laser is over any part of it & the more powerful it has to be to do reliable burns. It isn't uncommon for these units to draw more than 2 amps (2000 ma) at the higher burn speeds.

We take our hardware very seriously... and the mess they make on our workspace. The full size burners you are mentioning are not meant to go in an all-in-one. They are meant to go into external powered cases, tower computers or stack burners. If Apple wants to bring back the tower, I'd be glad to put one in it just like we have in our current Mac Pros. If you want to burn a disc from an iMac there is no sense in having a 5.5" drive with it's accompanying power cable. That makes 2 cables on your desk instead of just one USB cable and a whole bunch of clutter to pack away when you are done with it (power cable, power brick, large drive case). With the portable drives you just unplug it and put it in your desk drawer... The second best alternative to having the drive in the computer. Let alone the hassle of using all the extra cables on a large drive on a remote job.

Also, the speed of the big drives is relatively unimportant to us. The only time we would push a drive to it's 16x maximum would be if it were time critical, like say a news broadcast. For reliability (despite manufacture's claims that speed in not an issue in current production drives) we burn at 4x or 6x. Well, within the reliability range of the machine.

The argument here is an optical drive for the convenience of the user. Not the biggest, badass hardware. That is not what the iMac is because there are plenty of machines out there that will blow it's doors off in benchmarks. The goal of the iMac is, or should be, to be a respectable computer that gets work done. If it's going to be a disc less web terminal I'd just as well skip it and use an iPad.

Well the DvD drive has been taken out as CD and DVD media is gradually dying out. I can see why this is a bummer. it's useful having the drive. You can also do CD sharing...yes across PCs too.

justamacguy wrote:

If you want to burn a disc from an iMac there is no sense in having a 5.5" drive with it's accompanying power cable.

There is if you want to burn disks quickly & reliably.

That makes 2 cables on your desk instead of just one USB cable and a whole bunch of clutter to pack away when you are done with it

Why would I want to do that? I keep things neatly arranged on my desk & my power bricks out of sight, including for the back up drives I consider an essential part of the system.

With the portable drives you just unplug it and put it in your desk drawer... The second best alternative to having the drive in the computer.

So now you are saying built-in drives are the second best alternative? I'm confused.

Let alone the hassle of using all the extra cables on a large drive on a remote job.

If you are saying you haul around iMacs for remote jobs, I would think the light weight of new ones would be a plus for you. But earlier you said, "Why does a desk top have to be so thin and light. It's not going anywhere." So which is it?

Also, the speed of the big drives is relatively unimportant to us. {…} For reliability (despite manufacture's claims that speed in not an issue in current production drives) we burn at 4x or 6x.

Just a guess, but I think burn speed is a fairly important consideration for most users. The only reason they would not burn at maximum speed is if the drive could not do that reliably. That's why high speed burners are not bus-powered & require more cooling than the portable ones, as already explained. That's also why they are normally the preferred choice in production environments, where both time & reliability matter.

The goal of the iMac is, or should be, to be a respectable computer that gets work done.

I consider the performance of my 2012 iMac considerably more than "respectable." It doesn't just get work done, it gets even very resource intensive work done very quickly & quietly, without heating up appreciably. This is an important consideration for me because heat shortens service life of all electronics, particularly in all-in-one type devices where multiple high performance systems operate in close proximity. Adding several fans to remove all that heat is not the best solution for a number of reasons; it is much better to avoid generating it in the first place.

But all that said, I understand where you are coming from. Avoiding clutter is a very high priority for you, apparently a higher one than raw performance or long service life. But I doubt that Apple thinks many potential iMac buyers have the same priorities as you do, which is why it is targeted at them instead of you.

That being the case, the new iMacs are obviously a poor fit for you & you should look elsewhere for a better fit.

R C-R wrote:

With the portable drives you just unplug it and put it in your desk drawer... The second best alternative to having the drive in the computer.

 

So now you are saying built-in drives are the second best alternative? I'm confused.

Apologies for that. I misread "best alternative to" as "best alternative is" -- on rereading that line more carefully, I am no longer confused … about that, anyway!

Just deal with the facts:

More cables = more clutter in the workspace.

You might have your bricks out of sight, but you still have 2 cables running to your computer when you don't need to have any.

No. We don't haul around iMac unless a job demands something special. We use MacBooks. And after trying the new retina MacBook our next one will be the conventional Macbook with the optical in it. They have the same motherboard specs as the retina, plus they are serviceable and we don't have to carry the optical separately.

As I stated before, the burn speed of the drive is only important in rare cases where sloppiness doesn't count. Such as getting a car wreck to a news station. What it important is the reliability and compatibility of the burned media. The faster you spin the drive the more likely you are to get errors on you media. We are not going to put 2 or 3 months into a project and then have a customer come back 6 months later and tell us his wedding video won't read anymore. We will take the extra minute or two and do a burn at a speed well within the limits of the drive so we have a quality product out the door for the customer.

Heat. Please get off the heat thing. The current crop of full sized optical drives do not develop any more heat than the small ones. They are just cheaper to build and you can put humongous motors in them and spin them a little faster. The lasers are the same as the lasers in the small drives. NONE of the current crop of optical mechanisms come with fans in them anymore. It they have a fan, it's on the case they are in to cool the internal power supply circuitry.

You may consider the iMac more that respectable for what you do, and it does have a place for some of the things we do, but if you really want to see what a tinker toy it is try encoding a few 4K Red videos with it. You might even get to check you email some time next year when it gets done.

What Apple doesn't tell you is that 75% of the commercial video market is still on optical. Digital music sales just barley beat CD sales by .3%. People aren't giving up there optical media very fast. And that is just the US. In Japan optical still kills digital because of the value added features it gives.

It is ironic that the drop in Mac sales in the first quarter, and the anticipated additional 5% drop in Mac sales projected in this coming quarter are right on the heals of eliminating the optical drive. Maybe Apple should take another look at what they are doing. That is if they tend to be anything besides a phone store.

justamacguy wrote:

Heat. Please get off the heat thing. The current crop of full sized optical drives do not develop any more heat than the small ones. They are just cheaper to build and you can put humongous motors in them and spin them a little faster. The lasers are the same as the lasers in the small drives. NONE of the current crop of optical mechanisms come with fans in them anymore. It they have a fan, it's on the case they are in to cool the internal power supply circuitry.

I don't know where you are getting this information from but none of it is right. The laser assemblies are not all the same, as an examination of different units should immediately make obvious.

The laws of physics have not been suspended inside optical drives: the faster the disc spins the less time there is to burn any part of it & the greater the power necessary to do that; the greater the power consumed the more heat is generated; laser diodes' wavelength vs. temperature dependencies make temperature stabilization a critical factor in high speed burn performance.

A little research will turn up even USB bus powered units that include fans, for instance this one. Even iMacs that have built-in SuperDrives typically have fans dedicated to cooling them, & they are hardly high performance units by current standards. All the high speed burners require more cooling than the lower speed ones; that can be accomplished by larger cases & passive dissipation through aluminum cases or by fan cooling, but one way or another you have to get rid of the heat or they simply won't be reliable.

This has nothing to do with "sloppiness," it is simple physics. If you can't get reliable results at higher burn speeds then your drives are not designed for that.

Similarly the commercial video market here is also running at ca.75% ( odd that figure also applies to the US and Japan ) but what that figure does'nt say is sales of digital music, video & games increased by ca 12% yet disc sales ( cds',dvds' blue ray, video ) fell by ca.18% so the trend will gradually consign optical drive media to the bin. Obviously this will not  happen even in the near future years but it will be phased out and end users  re-educated.

I can't think Mac sales would suffer a 5% drop due to the ommission of a simple optical drive as it wrongly implies that pc sales would thereby increase by a similar amount as they presumably also include optical drives. Worldwide pc shipments of 76million units reflects a 10.9% drop.

All pc,mac and indeed laptop volumes have been adversely affected by the growth of tablets and that is the major contributor to falling sales.

Yea, Apple is trying to phase out optical drives because they want to force you to purchase content from them.  End users re-educated?  You make it sound like an indoctrination.

In 2012, there was a 6.5 percent increase in Mac sales, even though tablets were selling like hotcakes.  Now in 2013 a 5% drop in Mac sales?  It's definitely because of the omission of an optical drive.  Just read this lengthy thread to see how many have said they refuse to buy a new iMac!  No optical drive, coupled with the fact that ALL of the ports are inconveniently located on the back, have turned off many, including myself.  A step backwards in usability.  But hey, at least it's thin!

http://techcrunch.com/2012/10/25/apple-hardware-sales-in-fy-2012-125-04m-iphones -58-23m-ipads-18-1m-macs-and-35-2m-ipods/