HUZZAH! The Combo Drive is Finally DEAD!
Ding Dong, the witch is dead! It may have happened 2 years later than it should have, but Apple has finally given up its bizarre hold on the combo drive in the MacBooks.
Today’s announcement of new MacBooks and MacBook Pros also came with the news that Apple will continue to sell the older “white plastic” model MacBook at a discounted price alongside the shinier, faster models. 
While at first it appeared all that changed on the previous model was a $100 price drop, the big news to come out of the announcement is that there is no longer an option for a combo drive-only MacBook model!
I have long lamented about Apple’s clinging to the combo drive in order to justify its 3-tiered “good, better, best” pricing model, and have been lambasted by the most faithful of Mac followers who were somehow able to justify in their minds that Apple should be allowed to charge $200 more for a laptop with a $25 SuperDrive instead of the $15 combo drive, but I am happy to say that today marks the day when both I and the uber fanboys can lay to rest our differences, and agree that everyone of my readers should send me $10 so I can buy a MacBook Pro. Thank you all.
Well… the Mac mini still has one…
Good luck on your donation fund. As for the combo drive, i too am glad that it has died. I thought of your honourable self when i first saw them and there disappearing act. Was going to try and find out about the old model, but the store went down.
And about time I say.
A friend of mine always argued that Apple had probably bought an UNLIMITED amount of Combo-Drives once and stored them inside of one biiiiiiiiiig mountain and that they would now have to use those until the mountain was empty!
I like my combo drive, thank you very much!
Well, actually, I’m indifferent.
I don’t remember ever needing to burn a DVD.
Yeah, very nice new Macbook! The design is beautiful and damn I love the battery indicator on the left side!!!
But…
why does the cheaper version has a CPU that is slower than my one year old?
And more importantly, where has Firewire on the Macbooks (not the pros) gone?
Sorry, but what’s the difference between those two?
No Bluray means the superdrive is now the new combo drive…
agree with Christian: i’m sure there’s a pretty “strange” reason for the longevity of the “combo” drive. 😉
as for the rest of the macbook: great casing and specs, but why the black bevel and keys?? they’re like adornments.
also, the lack of mate screens will screw up all those outsiders that “actually” will need to work on the macbook’s.
no Blu-ray DVD RW, no 17″ HD display and no dual SLI graphics. Apple’s implementation on using both a 9400 and 9600 GPU in the same system is idiotic. Offering a dual graphics system with the same GPU would benigit both artists and gamers. Not waisting my money on this MBP.
Too bad, maybe they’d be closer to a true sub-1k notebook if they had kept it. That’s really the only reason Apple is keeping it around.
Macenstein…. Let me know where I should drop the $10…