Originally Posted By: artie505
(Is Time Machine Apple's justification for its "no disc" policy, even in the face of no high-speed Internet?)

I think Apple's justification for doing away with internal optical drives has several arguments and Time Machine is not part of any of them…
  1. The lifespan of complex optical drives such as the SuperDrive is often shorter than the lifespan of the computer and it is a lot easier and cheaper to replace an external drive
  2. The lifespan of recorded optical media is not all it was cracked up to be and users are finding CDs and DVDs are unreliabel for long term storage
  3. In a time where TeraByte drives are common, the storage capacity of optical discs is ludicrously small
  4. As our computing devices get smaller there simply is not room for optical drives
  5. The internet is turning out to be the only practical media for sharing data between OS X and iOS devices and the big money is in iOS devices
  6. Even though SSD devices are a lot more expensive than a CD/DVD media they are a lot easier to use, not to mention being orders of magnitude faster. I haven't run the numbers but I would venture that when all things are considered using SSD devices is cost coompetitive with optical drives
  7. CDs and DVDs are disappearing in the commercial market place and being replaced by downloaded content.
  8. With satellite broadband connections there are very few locations where high speed internet is not available. In fact the United states is lagging the industrialized world in the availability of broadband servcie.
I could go on but I think you get the point by now. Optical drives are a trailing edge technology soon to join 8 track tapes as historical footnotes and as always Apple tries to remain on the technological leading edge.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein