Ten years ago, Apple released the iMAC without the floppy drive. It was controversial but now there is not a new computer that actually comes with a built in floppy.
Apple has just driven the envelope forward by leaving the Optical drive out of the package for the Apple Macbook Air. When will standard laptops from Apple leave out the optical drive entirely?
Physical media is so 2000, and I believe that optical drives will not be included in mainstream computers by 2010 based on this lead by Apple and the PC followers that will appear over the coming six months. The future for getting large amounts of digital data onto a computer is a fully connected networked world. So much for the war between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
At last, the motto of Sun from the 90′s IS coming true… the network is the computer.
