Would You Ditch Your MacBook’s Optical Drive For A Speed+Battery Boost?

Giles Turnbull ()

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My esteemed colleague John Brownlee wrote earlier today about the excellent article at Ars Technica which explains in detail why the new 13” MacBook Pro doesn’t have a speedy i5 or i7 chip, while its bigger brothers and sisters do.

What interests me more, though, is the discussion that follows the Ars article.

Since the article makes plain that there simply isn’t space inside the 13” case to fit any additional graphics chips – not without reducing the size of the battery at any rate – the only feasible option was to stick with a Core 2 Duo chip, albeit one that’s slightly faster than its predecessors.

But in the comments, Gamblor says “why not get rid of the optical drive?”.

Hmm. Why not indeed? That frees up space for a dedicated graphics chip, and possibly for a larger battery too.

The Air has shown that not all notebooks need an optical drive, but has the time come to ditch them from non-Air machines too?

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I’m looking at my white MacBook and thinking: when did I last use the optical drive in this thing? The answer is, quite recently, when I installed Aperture. But that was its first use in months and months. Would I be happy to ditch it in favor of speed and battery life in a future machine? You bet I would.

How about you, though? Is an optical drive still an essential part of your computing, or could you live without it?

68 comments »

About the author

gilest

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He writes for the Press Association and The Morning News. He has a website you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

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Posted in Hardware, News, Opinions, Top stories |

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  • Charles

    I only use an optical drive on any of my computers (desktop or notebook) for two things: installing games that are too large to download, or watching DVDs.

    Even then it’s usually my desktop that I do both of those on, on account of the best graphics capability for gaming, and the bigger screen for movies. I never watch DVDs on my laptop, nor do I play very many games on it. Quite frankly, I could settle with abandoning discs altogether and taking the extra time to download applications/games off the net, and watching movies via Netflix.

    I recently considered getting a Thinkpad X301, which is touted as a MacBook Air killer since it also fits in a manila envelope but has the added bonus of a DVD drive. While customizing it on Lenovo’s website, I always opted out from the the DVD option and went with an extra 3-cell drive-bay battery instead. The extra bit of battery life is for more valuable to me, and most operating systems and applications that you purchase with it are already pre-installed.

    For the 13″ MacBook Pro, I couldn’t imagine a better upgrade than downgrading the drive to boost performance and battery life. I haven’t owned an Apple laptop before, though I would buy one in a heartbeat if that were the case.

  • Charles

    …I should add, as a check against my personal preference (no optical drive): a practical solution for Apple would be to offer it as another sub-model – a MacBook Pro 13″ to sit next to the other two in the store. Also, they could start offering their software on re-usable flash drives for a negligible premium. Speaking of which, I doubt optical drives will disappear from most configurations until solid-state memory becomes significantly less expensive.

  • http://blog.macalba.net/ macalba

    My current laptop is a MacBook Air – previously they’ve been MacBook Pro’s and PowerBooks. I absolutely prefer the slimmer Air and don’t have a problem using an external optical drive for those, now few, occasions that I need it.

    …, and, like others, the only component that’s ever failed on my laptops has been the optical drive. An internal optical drive is a liability.

  • Dustin

    I think an external optical drive option, for the rare times that I would use one, is the way to go, especially if it would allow better battery life and better performance in laptops.

  • Kylud

    I think the “pro” name would be lost if they took out the optical drive.
    Maybe they could have one without the optical drive but with better battery and performance, and another that includes the optical drive but not as good specs.

  • Nathan

    I think that if someone is looking to get an entry level MacBook and only looking for a 13″ screen – they probably don’t need that boost of power. While I will admit that I haven’t used the optical drive in even my iMac in quite a while, not having one would definitely make me not get one. I really don’t think I’d buy a computer – whether desktop or notebook, that did not have an optical drive.

  • weatherguy

    I actually need a DVD drive – I do plenty of DVD burning and reading. Still, I’ve got a DVD writer in a firewire case at the moment, which is perfectly usable. So, losing the internal for more battery and speed? Yah, I’d take that deal. I’d still probably need to pick up a bus powered USB drive, though, because I always seem to need DVDs on trips.

  • Matt

    I couldn’t live without an optical drive. I live in Aus and download caps still aren’t large enough for both games and software. However if Apple did this and made an external optical drive that was small, quiet and matched the laptop I would give it a try.

  • http://www.metis-acie.fr Josselin

    It’s time for the industry to move forward. I’ve been expecting a laptop without OD for a long time, the MBA isn’t powerful enough yet, but it’s definitely the path to future. Physical distribution of digital medias is on its way out, no doubt about it. I travel a lot, most of the time without being able to plug my MBP easily (rough countries, lost places…) and carried an extra battery for a long time. Economically the loss of OD in MacBooks wouldn’t be enough to fire up speed & battery, but I’d be ready to pay extra fees.
    Unfortunately it seems the consumers aren’t ready for such an evolution, even though they don’t use ODs that much, may they be on OS X or Windows.
    My dream MacBook Pro ? Core i7, 12 hours battery, no OD but 1 SSD + 1 classical HD (backup BootCamp & extra storage), real graphics, eSata ports, 13″ non-glossy-screen, 3G antenna, pico-projector…
    Yeah, I know… I’m dreaming !

  • Ameet

    i think the discussion is a bit of a fruitcake; of course you can live without it, but of course its nice once in a while!

    i think the bottom line is that the dvd drive is much too large for the capacity that it offers; the time is now ripe to either:

    a. start making the smaller dvd’s a standard, at least for os and software, in fact for blu-ray as well. use the extra density to reduce size of the media rather than increase capacity
    b. make other media more common, eg cheaper write only sd cards, etc.
    c. devise standards for wifi data centres at home that can hold legacy media, so that in the event that your lappy crashes, you can shove the osx disk into the star trek slot, and reinstall!

    ameet

  • Harry

    Apple consumers = sheep

  • Tee

    First reaction…NO!
    Quick second reaction — I hardly use it actually…except to import music into iTunes.

  • CJ

    I’ve had my MacBook for about 5 years now and when I first got it, the optical drive broke within the first couple months. I never bothered to get it fixed, so about 5 years later I’ve basically adapted to not using optical drives and I’ve been just fine. In fact in all this time I’ve never been in a situation where I even needed it, so it’s all worked out!

  • jos

    Get rid of the optical drive; increase battery size. I dream of this.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Owen-Denham/663785009 Owen Denham

    I can’t recall ever using it on a 2+ year old macbook. I put a CD in there the other day and it didn’t work. I was not bothered.

    Now considering taking it out and working a 3g module in there somehow. I’ll probably have space for another hard drive as well.

    It would be nice to have an option to put something else there anyway.Eespecially extra batteries.

  • Anonymous Coward

    You bet I would!  They could also throw in some more ports on the side in it’s space.  E-Sata & USB 3.0 would be nice.  A second display port (thunderbolt) would be even better!

  • david

    I use my 15″ pro on battery all the time and it would be nice to have double the battery or so but would i get rid of the optical drive, no. i use mine all the time for cds and dvds. if there was an extremely easy way to put a copyrighted dvd onto a flash drive or software cds onto a flash drive then i would get rid of it. also making bootable cds like linux cds, usb just makes it all more difficult so no i couldnt get rid of it without an easier way of flash drives

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=674730873 Jonathan Landa

    i barely ever used mine, so i switched to a macBook air

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