Apple computers no longer ship with any optical drives
Really? This shocks me. Over the summer I bought my parents a Dell tower which includes not only an optical drive but bays for other drives. As is often the case, I don't know what the chiefs at Apple are thinking. The Dell runs quite well, Windows 8.1 is so far a pretty good OS, though of course it still has many Windows drawbacks. I don't know why Apple continues to marginalize itself in the name of innovation.
I've been re-reading the book Perfecting Sound Forever which, though flawed, really is a fine book for anyone interested in the history of audio technology. I would like to read more books like it but there don't seem to be any similar. You can still listen to Edison cyclinders, Edison's Diamond discs, and 78s. Edison thought about long-term durability, about composing for the ages. But he was an idealist and tinkerer more than a businessman. Although vinyl is still inferior in sound, unless perhaps you have an expensive system, it will still last longer than CDs.
You can still watch early film. At the same time, Martin Scorese is on a campaign to conserve old movies. You can still see daguerrotypes, which are startling in their realism, to me often sharper than what today's cameras produce. I asked my sister, who knows something about phtography, about digital cameras. She says they still don't compare to film.
All of this to say formats interest me.
