New
#11
So, all in all..the discussion has come to the conclusion that MAC does not use any special H/W. It is just a brand name that is selling and people are buying it.
In what way mac hardware differs from PC hardware?
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New #12
Correct.
To be fair, Apple takes the lead in innovating those standard parts:
- The Macbook Air was using SSD drives before any PC laptop manufacturers
- They eliminated the optical drive from their designs first.
- And as someone else has mentioned, they were early in the use of expanded-use touchpads.
They innovate design, not hardware.
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New #14
What apple does have, is a, (nasty), habit of non conformance to established standards - they take a standard item, change a minor aspect of the design and then register/patent the change. This means that they can licence the item to OEM manufacturers and thus gain their "pound of flesh" for sales.
One example is the humble wired headset - the industry standard 3.5 plug and socket used to connect to devices is different in apple devices from the accepted standard - the microphone and volume control connections are in slightly different places, meaning that although you can use items interchangeably for basic listening purposes, the Mic and remote control functions will not work. you have to buy the Apple version for your apple device and a regular version for all other devices - this raises prices and lowers choice for the consumer.
Apple are not the only OEM to use this "trick", Dell for a long time used a bespoke mounting system for the power supplies in it's desktop PCs - This caused serious issues for industry who found they could not locally sourced components in an emergency situation and was phased out
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New #15
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New #16
I agree with you!
It is the army of conformist hipsters that are shedding the optical drive for sleek, thin design. To match their pants I guess.
Mmmmm. Use a 75 cent DVD, or a $10 flash drive?
Why, the flash drive, of course!
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New #17
The vast majority of my optical drive use is for ripping content. Much of music is only available on CD. Same for my movies; many are available only on DVD. I also don't see the sense in buying music and movies I already have just to change media.
I occasionally will burn a photo CD to mail to someone who doesn't have the computer chops to download them from a sharing site. I also burn mp3 disks for the 6 CD changer in my "little" truck but that application will go away with my next truck.
For any other kind of temporary file storage or transfer, SD cards and thumb drives work quite well and can be reused indefinitely (usually).
Granted, shedding the optical drive permits a slimmer (and thus, lighter) computer. I suspect cutting costs is also a big factor.
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New #18
I've got one system left with a Burner - a Blu-Ray player / DVD writer, plus I have an external DVD burner which can be useful on site visits, but I must admit I will use a USB stick by choice these days.
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New #19
More like to fit in their pants. Afaik, optical drives were removed only from devices supposed to be very portable (and the cheapo ones), outside Apple stuff.To match their pants I guess.
Optical drives need around 1 to 1.5 amps to run while a thumbdrive usually doesn't go beyond 0.2 amps (at 5 volts of course). This is significant for devices with small batteries.
But yeah, if someone didn't dump a ridicolous amount of cash in developing BluRay and the next generation DVD tech, I suspect that switching to downloading and thumbdrives would really take over that segment too (movies and music).
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