I remember when Apple first announced that they would stop putting CD drives in their laptops. Back then I thought it was in idiotic thing to do – I was still a heavy disc user back then. Listening to music on CDs, watching movies on DVDs and burning files to CD-Rs. I was like, this was never going to fly, what are Apple thinking?
Fast forward to this morning, there was someone in my office asking around if anybody had a CD player – she wanted to test a disc she had. Unfortunately for her, nobody had a drive. I looked around the room at everyone’s laptop – not a disc drive in sight. I thought that was pretty insane that nobody had one available for her to use. Then I started thinking about my own media habits and realized that I haven’t used discs in a very long time.
At home, I have a PC with a disconnected drive. The drive is sitting there in my computer’s case, but it’s not plugged into the motherboard. Why? When I was building my PC many years ago, I made a conscious decision not to plug it in because I hadn’t used it in a long time.
The DVD player at home is still hooked up to the TV cos my mom knows how to use it to watch movies, but these days she’s getting her shows over Astro anyway.
I remember when I got my first DiscMan – I was so happy that I could finally listen to music without having to rewind cassettes. I could listen to songs on repeat conveniently (previously, I used to record blank tapes of my favorite song repeated so I didn’t have to rewind to binge on the same song). It was a game changer for me. Over the years I continually purchased CDs to expand my music collection. It was when MP3 players became affordable, it became a game changer.
Now, I don’t even touch the CDs I own. The stacks of burnt CDs with music that I have sitting in my car? Untouched for years. These days I stream music from my phone via Bluetooth or I listen to it off a USB stick that’s perpetually plugged into the player.
RIP optical discs. It was fun while it lasted.