The “Post-Disc” Era

June 7th, 2011

A bit buried among other recent Apple announcements was the distribution of Lion as an App Store download as opposed to residing on a traditional DVD.

In an earlier post, I pondered going all of 2011 without purchasing any software in disc form, but thought Lion would be the one bunch-o-bits to put a wrench in things. Well, that’s no longer going to be an issue. And so this shall be a software-discless 2011.

But 2011 will also see the eschewing another disc — the movie DVD. Over the past year my Netflix Instant Queue has gotten longer and longer, in parallel with the DVD queue  growing shorter — until yesterday — when the DVD queue went completely empty. So I cancelled our Netflix DVD plan, opting for streaming only.

The television DVD player is going away, I’m sitting out Blu-Ray, and our various DVDs are going into storage along with all the CDs that were mothballed years ago. And I look forward to the end of the ritual red-envelope-opening and mailing. Yes, I am lazy enough that that seemed a chore, but how can you not when the other option is never leaving the couch and tapping a button on the remote or the iPad?

So it looks like 2011 will be the year of no discs of all sorts. And that “no optical disc” argument against the MacBook Air seems sillier and sillier as time goes on.