We Still Need Optical

This morning, I was reading through one of my favorite sites, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, and came across the following sentence in a story by Michael Grothaus about the possibility of new Mac hardware next year:

"Personally, I'm hoping Apple drops the optical drive from at least one of the 15-inch MacBook Pros and throws in 512 GB solid-state drives across the line."

I've noticed the clamor for dropping optical (CD & DVD) drives is starting to ramp up, and I want to weigh in on the debate. We need optical. DVDs aren't dead, and neither are CDs. In a MacBook, which is intended for travel it's especially important because the whole reason for having a laptop is to be able to do any (or most) of the kind of work that you would be able to do on a desktop, but away from your desk. Sometimes that includes mastering a DVD or burning a CD. Many times that simply means watching a DVD on a plane or in a hotel. "But broadband..." is the cry. "Streaming!" I hear. You can't stream a movie on a plane, affordably. And many, many hotels I've been to - including some really, really nice $300-a-night hotels - technically have broadband, but it's either so spotty or so slow that it's impossible to stream movies or much data. And it's important to note upfront that people still watch DVDs. Redbox is booming because of it. Then there are freelancers like me who video events and other functions and sell the DVDs. How would that entertainment be delivered if not for DVDs?

Look at this also - how is information delivered most easily and cheaply? Optical. Optical media has gotten so inexpensive that it's easy and painless to throw it away. The same can't be said for flash media.

For example, earlier in the year I shot portraits of each of the fourteen members of our Board of Directors at work. While they were in meetings I edited and retouched their photos and gave each of them their photos on disc before they left at the end of the day. I burned the images to a CD-R, and most of the discs contained only about 50MB of data. The discs cost about $.25 apiece. Easy and cheap. If I had had no optical drive, I would have been forced to to do one of three things:
1. put the images on separate flash drives and give them the drives to take with them
2. put the images somewhere on an FTP server for them to download
3. connect their laptop to mine and copy the files over

But each of these options is horribly flawed. First, flash media is still expensive, and you can't buy tons of flash drives at a time like you can buy CDs or DVDs on a spindle pack. A quick check at Amazon.com shows that the cheapest flash drive is about $5.00, which makes the cost of giving each of the Directors their images $70.00, instead of $3.50 on CD.

FTP is a great digital option, assuming that you have a fast internet connection. Many of our Directors (and still much of the country in general) live in areas where internet services are still painfully slow. That, and downloading from an FTP server requires technical knowledge that many people just don't have (especially some of our 70-year-old Board members.) You don't want to ask your Board of Directors to have to go out and download their photo - it causes friction. And causing friction is a great way to be forced to find a new job.

Then there's the file sharing option. That first assumes that the Director has their laptop with them at all times. Many times, they leave it in their car or in their hotel room. Then there's the issue of time. It takes seconds to hand each Director a CD with their photos on it. To hook up each Director's laptop to mine would take quite awhile. Let's assume that the connection process goes flawlessly for each of the fourteen Directors (which is a huge and peril-filled assumption to begin with). It would take about a minute or so to copy the files to their hard drive and disconnect. So what only took seconds with optical media has now turned into something that requires 15 minutes of time of some of the busiest people in the company. And how many top executives do you know that want to sit around and wait for 15 minutes for something? See my friction comment above and then see the unemployment line.

Then there's data archiving. Optical media is still the best way to simply and quickly archive something. I have a drawer full of DVDs with old production files that I don't want to have to keep on my hard drive. But I know I have them just in case I ever need them. And I want an optical drive to be able to read them if I need to.

I find the people who say that it's time to sell computers without optical drives very short-sighted and somewhat selfish. It comes mostly from tech writers and people for whom it wouldn't cause much inconvenience. It's not the same argument as removing floppy drives in favor of optical a decade ago. That was replacing an antiquated technology with a newer, better one. The problem is that optical media is still relevant today, and if they could find a new optical technology that would hold more data, it would be even more so. Removing optical drives from computers gives the user no good alternatives except digital delivery, and I've shown that in the real-world work environment - especially in laptops - sometimes that's just not a viable choice.

The time for killing optical is coming, but it's not now, and it's not in 2011.