Pioneer will soon offer a recordable DVD drive thin enough for inclusion in laptops. From a CNET News.com article:
The electronics maker expects to launch a recordable DVD drive for notebook PCs in the fourth quarter, according to Andy Parsons, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Pioneer. The drive will read and re-write DVD discs at 2X speed, record CDs at 16X speed and rewrite CDs at 10X speed.
The article talks about DVD recording and speculates that video will provide the next surge in PC sales.
"The cycle of replacing PCs every year has pretty much exhausted itself," [Andy Parsons, senior vice president of sales and marketing at Pioneer] said. "We think that digital video is the next frontier for the PC, because it requires a lot of memory, storage capacity and a pretty powerful processor to encode and decode video."
The drive is expected to debut at a high price point due to the small form factor.