Signs That Apple Is Phasing Out Optical Discs

Signs that Apple is phasing out optical discs:

1. Apple releases iPod in 2001, touting "10,000 songs in your pocket."

2. In 2003, the iTunes Music Store opens. It now has 14 million tracks, 2500 TV shows, and 3000 movies available for download.

3. Blu-ray Disc, the successor of DVDs is officially launched on 2008. Steve Jobs says licensing it is a "bag of hurt." As of now it's not officially supported in Macs.

4. SD Card support in almost all Macs as of last year. Alternative to CDs/DVDs?

5. iDVD as not been updated since iLife '09, though still part of iLife '11.

6. Mac App store opens; Lion and most Apple software no longer available thru retail DVDs.

7. New Mac Mini update drops the DVD drive in favor of optional additional internal Hard Disk or SSD.

8. Lion Recovery feature in Mac OS X 10.7 lets you recover and install the OS without a DVD, through the Internet.

Does this mean we should panic and throw away all our CDs and DVDs? Not really. Optical media will be here for still quite a while. Apple has had an external USB SuperDrive available since the MacBook Air first appeared, and it will probably be available for some time as well.

This does mean that a big chunk of our storage will eventually be migrating to smaller, faster, higher-capacity devices like SD Cards, USB Drives and portable, wireless hard disks. It will also be moving faster towards the Internet, with solutions and services from Google, Microsoft, and Apple going the way of the Cloud.

What do you think?