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The same goes with the new Mac Pro, which Apple says is one eighth the volume of the previous generation. Its sides were tapered down into a 5mm edge, which is close to the thinnest part of the newest MacBook Air. By removing the drive and using new manufacturing technology, the once boxy machine was cut down by 40 percent. Last year's iMac redesign was one of the most dramatic. Since the Air, ditching optical drives has led to slimmer and svelter devices all around. 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.
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Those USB dongles were later replaced by a recovery tool that could download a fresh copy of the OS over a broadband connection.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. Apple also sold a standalone external disc drive for $79, as well as offering its OS recovery tools on USB sticks. One was a new feature built into OS X, Apple's desktop operating system, as well as a utility for PCs that let Air users tap a working disc drive from another computer using Wi-Fi. Even Netflix's streaming service - now usedby more than 40 million subscribers worldwide - was still in its infancy. 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.
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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.
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