Apple should have discontinued the SuperDrive a long time ago
SuperDrive, Apple’s external optical media reader that lets you burn both CDs and DVDs, is sold out on the company’s online store in the United States and Canada.
The SuperDrive listing on the online Apple Store in the United States and Canada shows delivery information as “sold out.” However, Apple’s local online stores in the United Kingdom, Germany, China, Australia and other countries showed it as available to order at publication time.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the SuperDrive will be restocked or if get discontinued for good, in which case it’ll be selling while supplies last. If the drive won’t return, it should appear soon on Apple’s obsolete products list.
A short history of the Apple SuperDrive
The SuperDrive debuted alongside the original MacBook Air in 2008. Later rebranded “Apple USB SuperDrive,” the sleek $79 accessory owes its ultra-portability to its 5.47-inch (139mm) square appearance, and a thinness of just 0.67 inches, or 17mm. The SuperDrive was also pretty light for a device with lots of mechanical parts, weighing about 0.74 pounds, or 335 grams. In other words, the SuperDrive is only slightly bigger than a CD case.
“The Apple USB SuperDrive slips easily into your travel bag when you hit the road and takes up little space on your desk or tray table when you’re working,” reads Apple’s description. The SuperDrive was equipped with the last-century USB-A port, so modern Macs with USB-C ports required a USB-C to USB adapter to use the device. You could also use it on Windows with the latest Boot Camp drivers from Apple and, with a little trickery, on an iPhone or iPad, too.
The SuperDrove supported the CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, CD-R, DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R, DVD-RAM and DVD-RW standards, but couldn’t play Blu-ray discs. The product is almost certainly not returning because As of 2016, Apple no longer offers any Macs with an optical drive and the SuperDrive only supported Macs without a built-in optical drive. The discontinuation of the SuperDrive marks the end of an era as Apple no longer has any products capable of playing optical media.
I was your “Rip. Mix. Burn.” dude back in the day
I used to burn CDs and DVDs for everyone in the neighborhood back in the day. As fate would have it, I’ve been thinking hard recently about getting a SuperDrive.
Given the rising cost of streaming, it felt like the perfect time to dust off our physical media. My plan was to buy a SuperDrive so I could write tutorial to teach iDB readers how to archive their CD/DVD collections, burn new discs, create bootable CDs and DVDs to start up your Mac and the like So, now what?
Source link: https://www.idownloadblog.com/2024/08/06/apple-superdrive-discontionued/
Leave a Reply