Some of the initial notebooks with those drives were not only big but also required high-end hardware that ballooned costs. Also, the battle between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray - which were two warring hi-def disc formats - didn't end until a month after the Air's 2008 debut. For Apple, which was making an increasingly large amount of money selling movies and TV shows through iTunes, this never made much sense. Even Netflix's streaming service - now usedby more than 40 million subscribers worldwide - was still in its infancy.Īpple wasn't the first company to exclude a disc drive from its machines, though Apple's move came at a time when many PC competitors were aiming to upgrade the disc drives on notebooks from DVD readers to drives that could read high-definition discs. It was also years before some major third-party companies, namely Adobe and Microsoft, were pushing their biggest products as cloud subscriptions. It was a whole three years before the company would introduce its Mac App Store for distributing software - both its own, and apps made by other companies. But as time went by, slimmer, cheaper, and more powerful models came out, and it eventually replaced Apple's plastic MacBooksas the entry level notebook.īut rewind back to 2008, and Apple was making a gamble. The specialty computer trimmed the MacBook Pro's inch-thick size by getting rid of the disc drive and many of the ports.Ī high price tag kept most people from snapping up an Air over one of Apple's less expensive notebooks. Mac Pro available in December, starts at $2,999Īll this started with the arrival of the MacBook Air in 2008.Red Mac Pro to be auctioned off by Bono's charity.

Best optical drive for macbook air