There’s something very ironic about an optical drive for the upcoming space-shaped [1] Mac Pro, like adding a fax machine to an iPhone. Better still is the fact that it’s not just any old optical drive, but a bag-of-hurt Blu-ray drive. And best of all is that this USB-connected optical drive is shaped to fit neatly underneath the Mac Pro as if it wasn’t there.
Apart from its colossal Death-Star-Like power, the big selling point of the trash-can Mac Pro is it’s expandability. You get a couple of zillion ports around back to hook up any and every peripheral and drive you might need. Of course, while we were all assuming that video folks would be stuffing these ports full of RAID-configured SSD drives for ultimate speed, the folks at NuMac took one look at this future-gazing Mac and thought it needed ~2006 technology.
The drive is at least made from aluminum, and can burn Blu-rays up to 6X, DVDs to 8X and CD-Rs (remember those?) up to 24X, letting you turn your multi-thousand-dollar purchase into the ultimate DVD player. Hell, why not by a stack of these things and turn the Mac Pro into a jukebox?
Price? $149. Ha. A-haha. Hahahahaha. Oh hoho hahaha.
Source: NuMac
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Space-shaped is the shape of the future. ↩
Charlie Sorrel writes reviews and how-tos. Follow Charlie on Twitter at @mistercharlie, and at micro.blog on @mistercharlie
12 responses to “External Optical Drive For New Trashcan Mac Pro [Retro]”
I ordered one of these on May 28th and still haven’t received it. If you need something in a timely fashion I would look elsewhere.
It cracks me up that this Mac “Pro” ended up being the flop while Blu-ray (and now 4K discs) are still going strong! Apple themselves even admitted this year that the Pro wasn’t really what pros were looking for and are going to come out with an entirely new design probably by next year.
As far as Blu-ray (which is quite a bit older tech by a factor of about 8 years) it is still doing great! It looks wonderful on my 5K iMac. That is a lot more then I can say for the faux “HD” that you buy in the iTunes store!