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Apple has always been keen to ditch technology when it feels it has outlived its usefulness. The original iMac came without a floppy drive. The iPhone 7 came without a headphone jack. MacBooks and MacBook Pros in the mid-2000s came with USB-A ports. The original 2008 MacBook Air came without a built-in optical drive for CDs and DVDs. By the time the Macs came out in 2012 and 2013, products from the iMac to the MacBook Pro had followed suit.
These exceptions have often made Apple devices thinner, lighter, more elegant, or a combination of the three. But they also mean that people who still necessary These technologies also needed to deal with the bulky adapters, converters, or external accessories attached to their devices. For the MacBook Air and other modern Macs that needed to read or burn optical discs, that bulky accessory was Apple’s SuperDrive, an external DVD burner that connected via USB.
After 16 years of availability, it appears that the life of the SuperDrive may be coming to an end. As noted by Mac rumorsThe drive status has changed to “run outIn the Apple Store online, this is a label that looks more accurate and permanent than the “Currently Out of Stock” status assigned to some other out-of-stock products.
Even though it’s been more than a decade since Apple introduced a new Mac with a built-in optical drive, modern versions of macOS still have roughly the same level of support for CD and DVD drives that they did when optical drives were standard equipment. Connect an optical drive to a modern Mac—whether it’s a SuperDrive or a third-party model—and you’ll still be able to burn and rip audio CDs using the Music app, burn or rip CD and DVD image files using the Finder or Disk Utility, or burn files to a disc for archiving using the Finder. Even the old DVD player app is still built-in, though macOS mostly relies on third-party software to handle Blu-ray discs.
External DVD drives can be had from third-party vendors for under $20, and external Blu-ray drives start at around $50, making the $79 DVD-only SuperDrive a questionable financial proposition. It’s also never been updated with a USB-C connector, so connecting it to any modern MacBook requires another dongle. But Apple’s drive was unique, in that it was a slot-loading, metal optical drive from a major manufacturer; copies of the SuperDrive sell on Amazon for $30 or $40, but they come from nameless companies and have mixed reviews from customers. For now, if news of its potential demise has you wanting to buy it suddenly, the original SuperDrive is still in stock at Amazon And Best buyamong a few other retailers.
We’ve reached out to Apple to check on the status of the SuperDrive and will update this article if we receive a definitive response.
