Where’s the love?Īpple’s been phasing out optical drives in its Macs since it introduced the MacBook Air in 2008. However, even when purchasing a third-party DVD/CD drive system, you must beware because many such devices simply aren’t supported by macOS, though Macworld UK has a few suggestions here. To be fair, Apple’s isn’t the only external DVD burning/playing product you can get, and a glance at the 87 one-star reviews its accumulated at the Apple Store don’t exactly fill one with confidence. This lack of compatibility at the high end of the Apple-verse is surely a clear message that the future of the Apple accessory doesn’t look bright.

These days, the only way to get hold of a DVD reading/writing optical drive is to invest in a $79 Apple SuperDrive - and if you use a modern MacBook Pro equipped with Thunderbolt 3, then you need to get a USB-C to USB Adapter to connect the device to your Mac. How many enterprise execs still zip around with presentation slides on a DVD? How many movie editors like to burn early edits to DVD for feedback and sharing? There’s even a powerful case for using DVD as part of a Mac user’s backup strategy -but that’s going to be of little use if you can’t access content on those DVDs. Media consumers aren’t the only group of people that may need access to a DVD burner.

Mac users with extensive libraries of DVD classics and music loving Mac fans with huge collections of CDs, some of which aren’t available online, will likely disagree.ĭVD sales still reached over a billion dollars in 2016. Sure, that’s down 20 percent on their peak at 2015, but those numbers still suggest a lot of people still use physical media. I guess it’s easy to argue that with so much media content streamed or purchased online these days, there’s less need for an optical drive than there once was. A few years later, Apple introduced Apple TV, a “DVD player for the 21 stCentury,” as Apple’s Steve Jobs termed it. Not so long ago in 2001 Apple launched an iMac with the slogan “Rip, mix, burn.” Those systems had two big claims to fame: iTunes and a CD-RW drive, as well as Internet access built inside. And that’s bad news because it means an essential software component used by thousands of Mac users to watch video on their machines has no future. This modification failed to extend to 32-bit support.

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