My friend is a system integrator at a large IT solutions provider and deals with demanding clients on a daily basis, catering to their every whim. I could sense a nervous tone in his voice. “What’s up with this new iMac dropping the optical drive?”, a friend of mine asked me nervously the other day. The question is, will other makers follow suit and remove rotating medias from their products? More importantly, what exactly does the new iMac tell us about a Tim Cook Apple? Then again, every Apple customer has always been an early adopter in every sense of the word. With the revamped all-in-one desktop, club Cupertino risks alienating the old-fashioned types by inconveniencing their daily computing, at least until the rest of the industry catches up.

The new iMac without a built-in optical drive is the perfect epitome of such forward-thinking that, however, isn’t without its pitfalls. I guess you could say the company invented it.

Apple is no stranger to abandoning features it thinks are heading for the graveyard of technology.

Apple mac dvd drive