There have been MANY notebooks in the past that do NOT have Optical Disk Drives, the MacBook Air doesn't have one because they were intending to make it small. You won't see ODD media go away until there is a Media in place that can replace it. Downloading a movie currently still takes a very long time to do, even with the fastest connections. Until I have fiber running to my house to with that kind of bandwidth you can't expect ODD to go away, the infrastucture has to be available EVERYWHERE. There is still a huge percentage of people out there without a High speed internet option that doesn't cost hundreds of dollars a month. I have a fast connection at home but is still takes a couple hours to download a movie. If I want to watch something right now, it is much faster for me to run to the video store to grab it.
Hard drives ARE getting cheaper, unfortunately they are also far less reliable as a stable media than they have been for years. I remind people all the time when they tell me they just purchased a terabyte hard drive that they should have bought 2 because a Terabyte of data is a lot of data to lose at one time. And that they need that second drive to backup the first one.
Yes, I agree that ODD will go away, but not tomorrow, and certainly not in the time a new MacBook Pro WITH a BluRay drive is going to be obsolete. I can only see ODD going away AFTER hard disk technology has been replaced as well. Flash memory perhaps? Maybe, but the number of times you can re-write flash memory is still very finite, and data is even harder to recover when flash memory has gone bad.
For Archiving purposes you need a media that has a lower Failure rate than the current hard disk technology has and certainly something that doesn't require it's own Power Supply.
There have been MANY
There have been MANY notebooks in the past that do NOT have Optical Disk Drives, the MacBook Air doesn't have one because they were intending to make it small. You won't see ODD media go away until there is a Media in place that can replace it. Downloading a movie currently still takes a very long time to do, even with the fastest connections. Until I have fiber running to my house to with that kind of bandwidth you can't expect ODD to go away, the infrastucture has to be available EVERYWHERE. There is still a huge percentage of people out there without a High speed internet option that doesn't cost hundreds of dollars a month. I have a fast connection at home but is still takes a couple hours to download a movie. If I want to watch something right now, it is much faster for me to run to the video store to grab it.
Hard drives ARE getting cheaper, unfortunately they are also far less reliable as a stable media than they have been for years. I remind people all the time when they tell me they just purchased a terabyte hard drive that they should have bought 2 because a Terabyte of data is a lot of data to lose at one time. And that they need that second drive to backup the first one.
Yes, I agree that ODD will go away, but not tomorrow, and certainly not in the time a new MacBook Pro WITH a BluRay drive is going to be obsolete. I can only see ODD going away AFTER hard disk technology has been replaced as well. Flash memory perhaps? Maybe, but the number of times you can re-write flash memory is still very finite, and data is even harder to recover when flash memory has gone bad.
For Archiving purposes you need a media that has a lower Failure rate than the current hard disk technology has and certainly something that doesn't require it's own Power Supply.