Apple's plan to wipe out disc drives

With only a single machine that still has a DVD drive, Apple is close to finishing something it began nearly six years ago.

The disc drive is dead -- or it's at least issuing a triumphant death rattle.

Not in PCs just yet, but certainly in Apple's Macs. Earlier this week Apple introduced updated versions of its MacBook Pro with Retina Display, alongside an all new Mac Pro. What wasn't updated was Apple's line of non-Retina MacBook Pros, the only Apple devices that were still sporting a disc drive. In fact, Apple axed the 15-inch version and trimmed the non-Retina line toa single, 13-inch machine. The company has whittled away at product lines like this in the past, and it's usually a sign of imminent extinction.

All this started with the arrival of the MacBook Air in 2008. The specialty computer trimmed the MacBook Pro's inch-thick size by getting rid of the disc drive and many of the ports.

A high price tag kept most people from snapping up an Air over one of Apple's less expensive notebooks. But as time went by, slimmer, cheaper, and more powerful models came out, and it eventually replaced Apple's plastic MacBooks as the entry level notebook.

But rewind back to 2008, and Apple was making a gamble. It was a whole three years before the company would introduce its Mac App Store for distributing software -- both its own, and apps made by other companies. It was also years before some major third-party companies, namely Adobe and Microsoft, were pushing their biggest products as cloud subscriptions. Even Netflix's streaming service -- now used by more than 40 million subscribers worldwide -- was still in its infancy.

There were some stopgap measures though. One was a new feature built into OS X, Apple's desktop operating system, as well as a utility for PCs that let Air users tap a working disc drive from another computer using Wi-Fi. Apple also sold a standalone external disc drive for $79, as well as offering its OS recovery tools on USB sticks. Those USB dongles were later replaced by a recovery tool that could download a fresh copy of the OS over a broadband connection.

VIA