Hi, I have a MacBook Air and also have the matching optical drive. I received my MBA on February 1 - and have it fully loaded and operational. While it is not my primary computer, I still use it everyday and have a hoard of apps loaded on it. The surprise is that to date, I have not had the need to use the optical drive at all. Nada. Zip. For movies we always rip them anyway for iPods and AppleTV - so any I want to watch I have used a CF Card or wireless N to transfer. The N is really fast using a Airport Extreme and other N enabled cpus around the house. No complaints. No issues. Love it. My experience has convinced me more than ever that the cd/dvd format is on it’s way out sooner than most predict.
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A small clarification: You imply by omission that the Macbook Air’s remote disk option is limited to sharing the optical drive of another Mac when in fact, it works with Windows PCs too.

Prior to my MBA, I had a Lenovo Thinkpad X60 for almost 3 years.  The X60 only has a optical drive in its optional base/dock which weighs almost as much as the X60 itself.  For the first year or so, I carried the base with me.  I soon realized that I only used it when someone gave me a CD, which was very very rare.  At work, everyone passed items via email or usb drives. So it was clear when the MBA was announced that it was perfect for me.

The optical drive is not going away anything soon. The MBA is NOT intended to be a primary computer, and as such, an ODD is not essential. Wanna watch an HD or DVD movie with all the special features? How about giving a homemade movie to a relative who doesn’t have a computer? How about installing a mutltigig program without a internet connection? All those things are can only be done COST EFFECTIVELY with optical drives. That’s not gonna change.

I recently visited my uncle, who enjoys digitizing videos and TV shows. He stores them on a hard drive, which he can view several different ways. He then burns them to DVD disks. I asked him why, he had no idea. He watches his TV on his phone with a slingbox. Optical media? Why? For myself, I sometimes buy a music CD so i can burn the entire collection to iTunes. From there, it goes to the family’s respective iPods, my iPhone, laptops, so on. The actual CD? Archived in the garage. I’m very much interested in eliminating ‘stuff’. Optical media is just ‘one more thing’, so to speak. Another physical object to clutter up my home, my life and demand my attention. As a Creative professional, I use flash drives to deliver files when I don’t use my web server or FTP. I stopped burning CD’s years back, and abandoned DVD’s a couple of years ago. My laptops rarely use their optical drives. Getting rid of ‘em for more battery or more memory would be just fine by me. Archivists have told me for quite some time CD’s and DVD’s degrade over time anyhow. Who needs a fugitive storage solution?

I s’pose there is a psychological aspect to the delivery of software or media… an actual, tactile, physically manifest representation of what one might be purchasing. Personally, I honestly don’t need three or four ‘bonus’ disks or elaborate packaging. Less is more for me. I truly don’t need more stuff to take care of. These days, when I come across a disk that has been mishandled, I simply toss it in the garbage.

Optical media at this point is nothing more than a security blanket. It won’t last past this decade. Flash media seems to be popular. I can imagine a myriad of alternatives. Faster networks schemes? Better encryption/compression schemes? Organic media storage? Nanotechnology?

The problem with anticipating future tech just at this moment is paradigms are changing exceedingly rapidly. Commercial forces, the 20th century drivers of innovation, are becoming severely fragmented. The human condition seems to be having a hard time keeping pace with the human experience. Because of that dynamic, floppy disks still pop up, optical media (realistically obsolete) is still viable commercially. Who truly needs optical media? Nobody. But the security of having a physical object in hand is still strongly desired.

Don’t have a Macbook Air. Don’t want one. Have an optical drive on all my computers. I use them only to convert the data to my current archiving scheme.

My computers these days are laptops. I’d love to have a few new options on my laptops, I want smaller, less obtrusive, more durable laptops. If sacrificing a DVD drive would give me more RAM or a longer battery life or a solar charger or a faster, larger external bootable flash drive or a powerfully fast satellite ‘net connection… then by all means, bring it on. How great would it be to only have to carry a small hard drive and plug my entire workflow into a kiosk or some sort of slave computer? Or hey, how ‘bout an external bluetooth drive i could exploit with my iPhone? hey, how ‘bout a personal pocket device that serves all of these purposes?

CD/DVD drives are just the smallest part of the changes ahead. We are officially in the computer revolution V 2.0. The Macbook Air is only the roughest sketch of what’s coming soon.

People need to stop thinking in terms of what’s established. What’s established may have been a huge source of revenue for some, but actually computing to date is nothing more than a basic proof of concept.

I have more on my pocket sized phone than any CD or DVD ever dreamed of. Why the hell can’t i just transfer the print file off my damned phone?

Truth is, I can do it right now. And heaven knows, it would certainly be a convenience and a service to me.

Gizmodo told me ‘bout a bluetooth phone mic designed to be installed in a person’s teeth. Soon enough, the entire phone will be installed in a person’s skull. (Snow Crash, Neil Stephenson).

Critics of the Macbook Air’s lack of optical drive are already obsolete, they simply don’t know it and have enough capital to make their collective voice matter.

They’ll be ground under by the nimble clever minds who can exploit new ways to use existing and nascent tech. It won’t take long.

I have a MBA and use a mobile external USB HD to move large files (i.e. DVD images) between my two Macs.

I also use a SD card in my digital camera which transforms into a usb card through folding. Like this I don’t need a card reader anymore.

I’m sitting here on my MacBook that is almost one year old. This article made me think: when did I last insert a disk in the drive? Must be a couple of months ago. This is my only computer so I’m not ready to do away with it but obviously I don’t use it all that often.

Don’t forget that there are also privacy and cost concerns with using the internet for archiving, and reliability problems with hard disks and flash drives.

You probably won’t find a good storage site that doesn’t have a monthly fee. That would make the cost of long-term storage online much higher than with DVDs, regardless of Internet speeds.

More importantly (to me, anyway), who can you trust with all your data? I would not be comfortable transferring my entire hard disk over the internet for permanent storage anywhere. Call me paranoid. It’s not a matter of speed, it’s a matter of privacy and security.

DVDs are the cheapest and safest archiving method. The cost per byte of hard disks and flash drives are still much higher, and even if they drop below DVDs (I guess it’s bound to happen eventually), I’d still prefer using read-only media like DVDs for archiving than read/write media. With read/write media like hard disks and flash drives, all your data is vulnerable to software failure. That’s not a risk I’m willing to take. Bugs happen; there were even several Apple-supplied software updates in recent years that erased entire volumes. (I remember an iTunes update that erased volumes with certain naming patterns, and two or three incremental Panther updates that fried FireWire HDs using a certain chipset, for example.)

I can’t imagine not using optical drives anytime soon. However, not using INTERNAL optical drives is easy to imagine — I always wind up buying external drives before they become standard internally, and they’re always faster than Apple’s internal drives for years to come, too. So I rarely use my internal drive as it is.

[quote comment=“454”]Don’t forget that there are also privacy and cost concerns with using the internet for archiving, and reliability problems with hard disks and flash drives.

You probably won’t find a good storage site that doesn’t have a monthly fee. That would make the cost of long-term storage online much higher than with DVDs, regardless of Internet speeds.

More importantly (to me, anyway), who can you trust with all your data? I would not be comfortable transferring my entire hard disk over the internet for permanent storage anywhere. Call me paranoid. It’s not a matter of speed, it’s a matter of privacy and security.

DVDs are the cheapest and safest archiving method. The cost per byte of hard disks and flash drives are still much higher, and even if they drop below DVDs (I guess it’s bound to happen eventually), I’d still prefer using read-only media like DVDs for archiving than read/write media. With read/write media like hard disks and flash drives, all your data is vulnerable to software failure. That’s not a risk I’m willing to take. Bugs happen; there were even several Apple-supplied software updates in recent years that erased entire volumes. (I remember an iTunes update that erased volumes with certain naming patterns, and two or three incremental Panther updates that fried FireWire HDs using a certain chipset, for example.)

I can’t imagine not using optical drives anytime soon. However, not using INTERNAL optical drives is easy to imagine — I always wind up buying external drives before they become standard internally, and they’re always faster than Apple’s internal drives for years to come, too. So I rarely use my internal drive as it is.

What he said.