I think the time has come to kiss the optical disc goodbye.
\n
\nFace it, the optical disc — a generic term I apply to CDs and DVDs — was a stopgap measure anyway, designed to provide high-capacity software distribution, multimedia, backup, and eventually file exchange. I was never happy with it, so I’d be glad to see it go.<\/p>\n
Seriously: When was the last time you bought one of those huge spools of 100 discs? When was the last time you burned a CD? Anyone really backup their files onto a DVD?<\/p>\n
See? The optical disc is dead, but like the floppy drive’s death march before it, you won’t see CDs and DVDs parade sullenly into the sunset any time soon.<\/p>\n
Optical drives first appeared in PCs in the early 1990s, about a decade after CDs trumped LPs as the ideal form of music storage.<\/p>\n
At first, CDs were read-only, hence the moniker CD-ROM. Eventually, optical burning technology took hold, and CD-R\/RW (and so on) took over. You could create your own CDs! Woot!<\/p>\n
Then came DVDs, with a higher capacity, but even then they were playing catch-up; file sizes grew and grew and optical disc capacity wasn’t growing anywhere.<\/p>\n
Blu-Ray on a computer? Not happening.<\/p>\n
Software still comes on optical disks, but more and more people are getting used to downloading software over high-speed Internet connections. The last program I purchased came on an optical disc, but when I went to install it, a notice appeared. It explained that the lastest version was available on the Internet and would I like to download it? I never used the installation disc.<\/p>\n
Burning optical discs is even more rare: My car has a CD player, and I have on occasion burned a disc for car music. But it’s far easier to connect my Android phone to the car’s audio input jack and just listen to its music instead. No CD necessary!<\/p>\n
Recently, I updated PCs For Dummies<\/em> and I cut way back on the optical disc information. It’s truly obsolete. I mean, I had to work through the steps myself because I’ve not burned a CD or DVD in months — if not years. I madd a note for the next edition to drop optical drive coverage or scale it back to a sidebar.<\/p>\n While new PCs still come with an optical drive — and I don’t recommend not getting one — I think they’ll soon fade away. My latest laptop doesn’t have an optical drive, neither did my previous laptop. In fact, I don’t miss the optical drive on the laptop at all.<\/p>\n As with the floppy disk, my advice would be to watch Apple lead. If Apple drops the optical drive from their next round of desktop computers, then the Optical Disc End Times are upon us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I think the time has come to kiss the optical disc goodbye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[16,15],"class_list":["post-3977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main","tag-laptop","tag-pc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3977"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3977\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4184,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3977\/revisions\/4184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}