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Lack of a DVD drive option is terrible. Agree?

Stimulants?

aziatiklover said:
@ OP wow dude just go ahead and write a novel/blog damn son I ain't reading all that. We know you got your point and we got our point as well. If you are not happy don't get a mac mini instead get an iMac then or whatever windows PC that have a optical drive pretty simple. Life goes on brah.
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....He does have a point though!!
 
I now have 3 Mac Minis. The only thing I can see that would see me consider replacing one of my older Minis with a newer model anytime soon would be a built in Blu-Ray drive (preferably a region free one), but I can't see this happening. I'd settle for an Apple developed Blu-Ray player software but it appears apple won't even give us that.

As for the lack of a DVD drive option that is disappointing, but what's more disappointing is that Apple doesn't understand that outside the US, most people don't have unlimited internet quotas and that a number would be prepared to pay good money to get a Mac with Apple developed software that enables them to play higher quality video than what's available on iTunes, video which is already available on optical media
 
darkgoob said:
I have also sent this message to Apple.
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As a consumer, you are supposed to educate yourself about what you should buy. If Apple sells a version of the Mac that isn't suitable for your needs, then the solution is very simple: Don't buy it!

Apple has a website that very clearly shows the features of every Mac you can buy, and it clearly shows that the Mac Mini has no DVD or CD drive. Same with the MacBook Air. So if you want to buy a Mac with a DVD drive, get an iMac, Mac Pro, or MacBook Pro.
 
The next refresh of the MBP will be much better without the optical with that extra free space for a battery or storage. Also the iMac's vertical optical is too slow and it should be an external device. The optical drive needs to be an external option. Having no optical is a pain mostly for Bootcamp users.
 
gnasher729 said:
As a consumer, you are supposed to educate yourself about what you should buy. If Apple sells a version of the Mac that isn't suitable for your needs, then the solution is very simple: Don't buy it!

Apple has a website that very clearly shows the features of every Mac you can buy, and it clearly shows that the Mac Mini has no DVD or CD drive. Same with the MacBook Air. So if you want to buy a Mac with a DVD drive, get an iMac, Mac Pro, or MacBook Pro.
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I have to agree. I never understand people whining about a product that performs exactly as the manufacture said it would.

I like not having the optical drive. CD drives were great in the 90's, but its really is time to move on. The cloud is the technology of today, and I long ago gave up thumb drives, plastic disks and such. I do have an old external DVD drive that I keep around should I need it. It was a refurb I got from HP about 6 years ago....
 
darkgoob said:
It's wrong of Apple to inflict its will upon us by forcing people to buy a computer without a DVD. My friend wanted to buy a Mac because our band records using Digital Performer, which is only on Mac. But he also needs to run Windows due to his work. He only had $800, so he chose the Mac Mini because that is the only option that Apple offers if you have less than $800.

So my friend was essentially given no option but to buy a Mac with no DVD drive, and not because Apple couldn't afford to put a DVD drive in the computer, but because Apple wants to inflict its vision of the future on the rest of us who are living in the present. Apple wants to force us to use online software, music, and movie distribution because Apple makes more money when we do that. So Apple then removes the DVD drive as an option, which is a terrible thing to do to your users who cannot afford an iMac or MacBook Pro. Terrible!
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Apple's computers have never been considered inexpensive or marketed towards 'joe average consumer'. When you buy a Mac, you're paying a premium over the average PC for superior build quality, unmatched customer service, and Mac OS X. Nobody forced your friend to buy a Mac. Doesn't want to pay the 'Apple tax', then don't buy a Mac. He needs both Windows and OS X to run software and needs an internal DVD drive--get an older model of Mini (2010 refurb models often available at Apple online, second hard market), save more money for an iMac or change your software.

darkgoob said:
The real truth is that Apple wants to force us to buy software, music, and movies from its online store. It does not care what users want. It thinks it knows what is best and wants to force us to go wherever it knows is best.

And I'm starting to get mad.

Apple could really care less that my friend, who made a big leap to switch to Mac from using Windows his whole life, has have an existing library of software, movies, and music on DVD and CD, and only switched to Mac under the belief he could install Boot Camp and use these. He actually did not even know his computer lacked a DVD drive because he just assumed that was a basic feature that ALL computers included.

Adding an external DVD drive would not have even been THAT big of an issue except for the fact that Windows 7 cannot be installed from it, and in the process of attempting this, it resulted in the reformatting of my external hard drive due to a bug, and then I learned that many users have been having tons of problems just trying to get Boot Camp set up on their Minis.

Apple is shooting itself in the foot because many PC users refuse to pay more than $1000 for a Mac. Even $700 or $800 seems high to them compared to PCs. So when these people switch, then have to go through the trouble that I've been having to go through today, I suspect that they will simply return it or sell it on craigslist rather than deal with the hassle. Seriously.

There was a time where Apple seemed to get it, and it wasn't that long ago. They really seemed to be moving forwards, and supporting standards like USB and DVI, including SD readers in computers, even thought they might go to Blu Ray.

But now it's obvious that Apple is reverting back to being the Apple of the early 90s, with inbred, retarded software ideas (CoverFlow in the Finder? reverse the scroll bars? Eliminate scroll arrows? It's like a nightmare!), lack of good support for standards like SLI, USB-3, HDMI, AVCHD, introduction of proprietary ports like ThunderBolt and MiniDisplayPort, failure to have interoperability with PC hardware (there are almost NO options for PCI-E graphics cards that Apple will allow to work with the Mac, because Apple refuses to let those companies like NVIDIA write graphics drivers for the Mac), lack of games for the Mac (Apple went back to not caring), the list goes on and on.

With the cash that Apple has in the bank, it could utterly destroy the PC market if it wished. It could introduce a mid-level, modular Mac with PCI-E slots, USB-3, Blu-Ray support. It could work with game developers and GPU developers to bring world-class gaming to Mac. It could even sell Mac Minis for a loss at Wal Mart and Best Buy for a couple of years and simply take over the marketplace entirely, then raise its prices back up.

But Apple continues to play this silly game... with their recent success, who is to criticize them? Who is to say they are on the wrong path? Look, my view of things is simple: whenever a company stops serving its customers, and starts becoming greedy and self-serving, when it tells its customers they are wrong for having the needs they have, and when it offers shoddy solutions for those needs, then that company has a problem.
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Yeah, Apple's customers are really pissed off and showing them by not buying their computers:

New MacBook Air and Mac Mini Models Driving Record Mac Sales for 3Q 2011

You want Apple to adjust to fit your needs, believe that your needs are the same as everyone else's and you criticize them when they don't. Who seems to be little out of touch in this scenario?
 
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darkgoob said:
... You don't live in the real world, you live in Techieverse. You live in an isolated reality that VERY few people have access to. It's a reality where you don't have to deal with regular people.

Every single day I have to deal with the general public. Old people. Kids. People that are on vacation. People with dogs. People that come in with bikes. They bring in their digital cameras and need to clear off their memory card to a CD or DVD, a format they can take with them. They bring in old 8mm movie film or VHS tapes to be converted to DVD so they can watch them on their TV. Or they bring in digital files on a CD or DVD that they need to print out. Or they bring in a roll of film (yes it still exists) and they want it developed onto a CD.

Never, NOT ONCE, has ANY of those people EVER said to me, "Oh, I don't use DVDs anymore, in fact my computer can't read them. Can't you just upload them to my Cloud?" Seriously. It takes about 5 minutes to burn someone a 4.4 GB DVD of their files, and I can have three or four burning at once if I really have to. It's not uncommon to have to burn two or three DVDs for a customer, since digital camera files take up so much room now.

Do you have any idea how long it would take to upload a 16GB SD card to a server somewhere? Do you have any concept of this?

My customers expect me to be able to give them a DVD in about an hour. It would take almost an entire day of maxing out my cable modem internet at work to upload that kind of data at our shoddy 250 k/sec upload speeds that we get. Even if it was ten times that fast, it would still take nearly two hours.

The internet and cloud storage are totally impractical for regular people to store all their files. You will find this out when the nightmare of Apple's iCloud begins... just wait. If you bought everything from iTunes, it won't even sync it... it will just sync a list. But if you're like me, and you have 1.5 TB of photos and music, how's that going to work exactly? I routinely add 50 or 60GB of photos to my computer at a time, not to mention each recording session of my band is about 4-7 GB of multitrack, uncompressed audio.

I just don't know what kind of weird Techieverse some of you people live in where optical media just "can be done away with" with a flick of the magic wand. But it seems like you're living in a world with no music, no photos, and no movies... or at least none that you don't store in low resolution or highly compressed forms...

How on earth do you deal with 1080/60P video? LOL. Even Blu-Ray barely has the capacity for that, but it's a standard feature on many digital cameras sold today. Most DSLRs have such high quality video now that you are lucky to barely hold 30 minutes on an 8GB card -- and that's at a fairly high compression rate. It's not going to get any less.

Apple is content to assume everyone is taking pictures only on their little iPhone cameras and shooting highly compressed 720P video with that. If that's you, then OK. iCloud to your heart's content.

But anyone who shoots video, takes pictures with a real camera, or is a musician -- i.e. Apple's main demographic, creative people -- we need optical media. Macs should all come standard with Blu-Ray so you can burn your HD movies from iMovie into a format that can actually play back in HD. (Otherwise how exactly do you send them to your relatives in HD?)

I mean really the Mac Mini should have built-in Blu-Ray, not DVD. But the Blu-Ray argument is such a dead horse around here that I wasn't even going to go there.
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Wow - don't even know where to start here.

Change is hard - I get it, but guess what... its changing if you like it or not.

The bottom line is - if the world isn't willing to accept this new paradigm (and I mean by not buying Apple products because of the lack of DVD drives) then Apple would probably go back to including optical drives. I don't see that happening.

A few years from now we'll all be saying - remember when we used DVDs?
 
Portables no, desktops yes

In general I'd like my road warriors to be as lightweight as possible. As I hardly ever use the optical drive, I don't want an optical drive in my MacBooks.

Desktops is a different story. Although optical media will be gone within a few years, I still need them from time to time. Therefore I want to have at least one system with an optical drive in my household. As size and weight are less relevant on desktop systems, these would be the designated optical drive carriers.

I understand Apples choices, but as I said, I'd like to have my desktops equipped with an optical drive.
 
darkgoob said:
I told him Sony is shooting themselves in the foot by asking for licensing fees, that they should let the format expand instead of trying to milk every manufacturer. Make their money on selling the movies, not the chips and drives.
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Sony Studios is doing that one step better. It decides to make movies in 3D and now wants the theaters to pay for the 3D glasses movie goers need to watch Sonys 3D movies. I would tell Sony to stick it.
 
I bought a 2011 Mini and solved this DVD "problem" by picking up a $20 external burner so its not a big deal. But what does bother me is the blind excuse making by the defenders who act as if physical media no longer exists. If Apple wants to rid their products of DVD drives then fine, but the subtraction of this feature didnt result in the addition of a new/better feature so in the end this made the 2011 Mini LESS versatile than the previous models and isnt something any consumer should be praising.
 
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darkgoob said:
When the original iMac removed the floppy drive, everyone panicked, but it still had a CD drive in it. At that point in time, few people ever used floppies anymore, anyway.
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I would strongly disagree with you in this one point. EVERYONE was using floppies at that point circa 1998 when Apple was eliminating floppy drives. It closely parallels the current situation where Apple is eliminating a device that it used to include for free in all devices, but it sees a way to get along without it. Just like in 1998, you can buy an external (DVD drive this time instead of floppy) if you find yourself needing one, but few people do or will for all the aforementioned reasons: online storage, extremely cheap HDDs, extremely cheap and large flash drives...etc.

I would imagine that one will be hard-pressed to find a DVD/BluRay burner included in standard PC systems in 5 years.
 
urkel said:
I bought a 2011 Mini and solved this DVD "problem" by picking up a $20 external burner so its not a big deal. But what does bother me is the blind excuse making by the defenders who act as if physical media no longer exists. If Apple wants to rid their products of DVD drives then fine, but the subtraction of this feature didnt result in the addition of a new/better feature so in the end this made the 2011 Mini LESS versatile than the previous models and isnt something any consumer should be praising.
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If you want or need this capability - then "yes" its Less functional. If you don't need it - its More functional. I can now have two internal hard drives in the mini - which opens up capabilities for RAID, an internal Time Machine drive or just additional storage. Apple makes an external DVD drive that works on any of their machines - so its not like they don't give you this option.

What bothers me is the blind excuse that we need DVD drives... still today - not acknowleding that there are now better ways of doing things.

The point is that most people probably use a DVD drive so little that its probably time for it to go away. Some people may use it all the time - but I would bet most hardly do. I bought the external Apple DVD drive when I purchased my mini - still haven't taken the drive out of the box.
 
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Ditching the optical drive allowed the Mac mini to finally get those dual-core i5/i7 and quad-core i7. There's even a dual-core i5 with a dedicated GPU with its own RAM.

You can't get a better CPU or GPU and connect it via USB. The Mac mini isn't a laptop. Get an external optical drive, put it next to the Mac mini. Problem solved.

For personal use I prefer to use USB flash drives anyway. They now have at least the same capacity as a DVD (8GB) and much higher capacities are already available (16GB usually isn't that much more expensive than 8GB anyway). Apart from giving away data to other people, why burn DVDs and make more plastic trash for the future? When I'm done with the files on my USB flash drive, I delete them. There's no trash produced by that.
 
VMWare Fusion (or Parallels) is a far better solution than bootcamp if you have to run windows.
 
darkgoob said:
We use Digital Performer in our band. It only runs on Mac. He wants to be able to mix down our sessions, I told him he'd have to get a Mac to do it. I explained that with Boot Camp, he could boot into Windows should he ever need to. He has a rather large collection of Windows software, mostly games. He also has a very large CD collection.

It really would have been simple if Apple supported installing Windows from an external DVD drive... yet another thing they can't be asked to do...

...then they make a buggy Boot Camp Assistant that reformats random external USB devices. Great.

Look, shoddy software always sucks, no matter who made it. Apple is perfectly capable of making crap, look at Lion. It's full of bugs, breaks many existing programs, has ridiculous default settings for scroll wheels... and they didn't care, they put it to market anyway. As long as they can force-feed their Kool-Aid to you then they're happy.

Just because they made a few visionary products does not mean that EVERY idea they have is visionary. There were some truly visionary ideas, but things like the lack of a DVD drive is not visionary, it's totalitarian. It's Apple trying to force their business model on us.
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Why would you be using a Mac Mini for this type of work? Wouldn't a Pro or iMac be worth doing this on? Or you could get a used MM. They haven't removed the drive from all the Mac's. You can still get them on the MBP, iMac and MP.
 
I like it without the drive, simple and it makes the mini more "portable" as its lighter. :D
 
darkgoob said:
How do you watch 3D movies? All mine are on Blu-Ray. Do you know of another way to get 3D movies?

Also I have to wonder, how do you watch 1080P movies? Or don't you?
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To watch a 3D movie I'll go to the the cinema, 3DTV doesn't fill your field of vision and for me that kills the effect.

I watch / rent movies @720p via an AppleTV2, looks just fine to me on a 52" LCD. I don't have any Mac hooked up directly to a TV but I often will AirPlay from one to the ATV2.

PS Apple doesn't have a Mac with Blu-Ray, I thought you were ranting about them dropping their DVD drive?

PPS It would seem a sub $100 Blu-Ray player would suffice for your dilema.
 
sapporobaby said:
You did. Thanks for the dictionary help and if I may return the favor. Try hitting a gym so that those uber-heavy optical drives are not such a chore to carry around.
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Oh you must be in a good mood today giving me such excellent tips. Whats ur recommendation for somebody being 6"5 and weighing 163 pounds?Can you give me some good ideas for a trainings plan :)

Back on Topic, I think the only reasons I use my disc drive for, is to install software and import music. However since I have ripped over all of my music to itunes now and most software can be installed over the web I personally don't see much use in them.
 
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