The end of media and why broadband is a green technology

Submitted by acohill on Wed, 10/24/2012 - 08:27

Apple introduced the new iPad mini yesterday, which is an incredible piece of engineering, but to me, the more interesting story is the release of the new iMacs, which seem impossibly thin, largely because Apple has eliminated the DVD drive. Apple has always led on storage media, and the company has a long history of pushing the entire industry in a new direction, including 3.5" floppy drives, CD-ROM drives as standard, DVD drives as standard, solid state drives as standard, and now, elimination of removable media entirely.

The story behind the story is broadband. Only widespread availability of broadband has made it possible to eliminate removable storage from our computers. Apple's Mac App store and the Web have made it possible to buy any software you need directly from the 'net, so who needs a DVD drive? The interesting side effect is that broadband is green....really green. Eliminating hundreds of millions of DVDs also eliminates the cost and energy of manufacturing, storing, and shipping those DVDs. While it is true that data centers storing our content in the cloud use energy, at the same time, broadband and the cloud are eliminating lots of other energy uses.