Sony will stop production of optical drives early next year. Remember, these are the guys who invented it. Regardless, the end of an era worth noting.
I wasn’t surprised to read this article in Computerworld, discussing Sony’s shutting down of its optical drive (CD, DVD, and Blu-Ray) unit next year. Sony was one of the inventors of optical storage, and, having both studied and used these products throughout their history (the advent of the CD, especially for music consumed by other than purists who like the sound of scratchy phonograph records, was one of the watershed moments in the history of high fidelity audio, let alone its impact on data storage, especially in setting up the death of the once-great-itself floppy disk), I can tell you that there was at one point serious discussion of how optical would eventually replace magnetic storage.
And such seemed the path indeed for a while. CDs at roughly 700 MB, DVDs at 4.7 GB (single side, single layer), and Blu-Ray at 50 GB (single side, single layer) were all groundbreaking in their day and ahead, especially on a price/performance basis, of hard drives. Who would have thought, though, that a 2 TB 2.5-inch hard drive with a SATA 3 interface would be available today, at about $200 each, single quantity? Optical drives are slow, physically large (relatively speaking today), and no longer useful for, well, anything.
Media? Downloaded, although still a challenge over wide-area wireless. Local storage? Hard drives as noted above, although only rarely that large (today), and SSDs that continue to grow in both capacity and price/performance. We just don’t need optical storage anymore, which is why you don’t see it even in notebooks, I mean, um, er, ultrabooks, the notebooks that matter today. Optical, it goes without saying, just plain won’t fit in tablets, handsets, or – anywhere else. Even home Blu-Ray players are doomed, although you’ll see all optical formats supported in new products for some time just because of the installed base. But it won’t be long before I suck all of my CDs into iTunes, and that’s the end of that (I also still have a good number of the above-noted phonograph records and cassettes, but that’s another story…). Indeed, we simply have here another example of the march of technological progress, which is now practically a law of physics.
So, a toast to optical is in order. Thank you – thank you very much, in fact. And goodnight.
