Last night, right around this time, my colleague MG Siegler argued that Apple basically killed off the CD with yesterday’s launch of another optical drive-less Mac Book Air and the introduction of a Mac App Store to follow the original App Store and the iTunes Store in the simplifying and/or dumbing down of the computing experience for a generation of users.
Fine.
There’s a pretty solid counter-argument for the fact there will always be a demand for CDs and optical drives in the PC world, despite the maximum capacity for a flash drive being currently 256 GB versus the cap of about 17.08 GB on a DVD-R. Optical disks also make more economic sense at the moment, as consumer pricing for a more reasonable 8 GB flash drive is around $18 versus about 60 cents for the same size double layer DVD-R.
And some of you have brought up the pretty valid point that, if anything, Apple dealt a heavy blow to the optical disk when it launched the iPod in 2001 and then for all intents and purposes finished off the CD once and for all when it opened the iTunes Music store in 2003.
But, because I’m wacky, I’m just going to go ahead and say that if there was any definitive tipping point into this new post-CD era it was when Apple symbolically erased the CD off the iTunes 10 logo last month, transforming it into the less dated but much blander icon above.
And while the new iTunes logo was pretty much panned all around, put yourself in Steve Jobs’ shoes for a moment — It’s pretty damn hard to make a flash drive look sexy, even if it is the future.