While Apple may have written off the CD and DVD as irrelevant, I still need to access older disc-based software on occasion, and the ancient, pre-Bluetooth and pre-USB stereo in my truck insists on CDs if I want to listen to music while I’m driving. Heck, one of the first posts I wrote for GeekDad (back in May 2007) was on the subject of a pooched optical drive in an older iMac–although that one was a casualty of kids, as opposed to a mechanical failure. I have three iMacs and a MacBook Pro kicking around that are all fully functional, except for dead optical drives. Anything recent from Apple has ditched the optical drive altogether and when Macs and MacBooks did still ship with the drives, that was always the first component to fail. I don’t know what it is about Macs and optical drives.
