Apple should ditch DVD drive in their notebooks

I wrote about my disappointment due to Apple’s removal of ExpressCard/34 slot in the last generation of its Macbooks. I can’t imagine this is due to cost issues — it’s probably the space constraint since they wanted to add SD card slot.

Here’s a proposal: remove the DVD drive entirely. I don’t know about you, but I have used that thing less than 10 times in last 2 years of owning Macbook Pro. It mostly collected dust and stopped working reliably rather quickly due to that same dust; last few times when I wanted to do anything with it, it spent ages trying to recognize the disk. Or even failed to read it — even Leopard original install disk, which is in pristine condition. Or last night, when it failed to write an empty DVD, which I then burned with no issues on my wife’s Sony VAIO drive.
It’s by far the worst part of the otherwise great notebook.

It’s useless outdated thing, ripe for replacement. It would free up huge space in the notebook for many, much more useful things like:

• integrated SIM card slot
• ExpressCard/34 or even /54 slot
• one or two eSATA connectors
• at least one more USB port

For anyone that needs the drive, they already sell external SuperDrive for Macbook Air and there’s plenty of 3^rd party external packages.

What’s not to like? Eh, Apple, how about that?