Apple Killed The CD Today
It's rather interesting to me - thinking through the various forms of mediums that have been around, round and not round. I think of the vinyl that I listened to off my Dad's old stereo, and in the same stereo, we had an 8-track player, and then we skipped forward to cassette tapes, then laser disks, which were followed by compact disks, and now flash storage. So let's see, that's circle, rectangle, rectangle, circle, circle, rectangle.. ...which means that the next storage medium will also be rectangle - if the pattern holds any water.
When you get your MacBook Air and you open the box, you will find exactly zero optical discs inside. Normally, Apple includes at least one back-up DVD to reinstall OS X and other software if your computer fails. But now, that has been replaced with a super-slim USB stick. This stick, packed in with your manual, is all you need to reinstall your system now.
I'm not surprised too much about this, but I didn't think that it would come this soon. What I believe this means for other OEMs, is 'follow the leader'. It also points in a direction that indicates a greater reliance on cloud services.. storage. Network storage and the Air were one of the major reasons Apple came up with the Air - if you store all your 'stuff' on a network (or in your .Mac account), why would you need a old clunky storage device on your laptop. Insure a great internet connection and cloud storage and 'voila' the perfect laptop.
It'll be interesting to see how this goes - I don't think the new Air will outsell the iPad, but then again you can't really compare those
Apples to them
Apples, since they come in at completely different price-points. I did have a colleague ask if I thought the whole OS was on the USB stick or if it simply kicked off a restore partition somewhere else in the internal flash storage. I'm sure someone over at
Gizmodo or
CNet will have one of them torn apart within the week or
worse yet, and let us know how the new Air handles consumer pressure.
