Phil Schiller Explains Why Apple Opposes Moving Optical Drives

Every road leads to Rome, they say. In terms of Apple’s products, every road leads to iTunes and the recently introduced products just emphasize Apple’s effort to guide their customers towards their online stores: they removed DVD burners from portable computers years ago, and now removed optical drives from the new iMac as well.

The official reason as cited by Phil Schiller himself: power and space efficiency.

“It actually comes from similar thinking as with the portables,” Schiller said. “In general, it’s a good idea to remove these rotating medias from our computers and other devices. They have inherent issues — they’re mechanical and sometimes break, they use power and are large. We can create products that are smaller, lighter and consume less power.”

From Apple’s point of view Blue-ray also packs issues, and the company is ready to fend its customer base from that. How? It’s simple:

“Blu-ray has come with issues unrelated to the actual quality of the movie that make [it] a complex and not-great technology…So for a whole plethora of reasons, it makes a lot of sense to get rid of optical discs in desktops and notebooks.”

His preferred Blu-ray alternative? iTunes, of course, which lets you buy a movie and then watch it on all your Apple devices, the Time article notes.

In other words: it’s time to place your CDs and DVDs in a box, because now everything is available in the Mac App Store or iTunes Store. You can forget about lending your favorite  DVD or music disk to your friends.

And they may be right — this is a way to fight piracy. What do you think?