How Long Until DVD Ceases Production?

Well for blu rays and dvds I'm pleased folks are dumping them, makes picking them up for a good price ideal. I can't see them dissapearing not for at least another 10 years,

 

Laptops, yes. But every desktop I see for sale has an optical drive.

 

Mac desktops seldom (never?) come with optical drives. When I bought my Lenovo desktop in 2014, I had to specifically ask for an optical drive to be included. The default was to not include one.

I work in a college where over the summer thousands of Dell desktops with i7 processors were purchased. None of them have optical drives.

I'm perplexed by your experience -- mine is totally different. It seems clear to me that optical drives are already dying out in home computers. And remember, desktop computers themselves are disappearing from the market.

 

Colleges usually have dummy terminals, you have to log into a Novell or Citrix network and like a terminal server and your environment is on a server somewhere else. All Walmart or major Fortune 500 company employee and manager computers and not real computers anymore. Many of these computers are as small as a cell phone or Roku device where you just plug in a monitor and USB keyboard/mouse and all set.

 

I'm actually not sure. I bought a new PC a couple of years ago with a DVD-RW drive. Of course, it was pre-loaded with Windows 7 with a Windows 8 upgrade disk.

Also, I still use a desktop. I have never owned a laptop. So, I might not be the best judge.

 

Lenovo sells primarily to businesses, and as Zoso pointed out, colleges are centrally administered. I was shopping for a new desktop at Microcenter a few months back, and can assure you that CD/DVD drives are still very much standard equipment for Windows desktops.

For the life of me, I can't understand why people are so fired up on laptops, especially people who never actually take them anywhere. I have a laptop that I use constantly, but nothing will ever replace a desktop with dual monitors and a great keyboard for getting work done.

 

Apple always gets rid of peripherals first. You have to look at PCs sold at Wal-Mart and Costco before you can really judge if a peripheral is being phased out.

 

I hope they continue to make physical media because:

A) would be disgraceful having to be online to see an episode of "The X files" or whatever (also, what I watch on TV is strictly my own business, too much data collecting sucks)
B) if the connection doesn't work all the time, what do you do? wait some hours for it to come back?
C) a computer on is fine for web surfing, gaming, working...don't want to depend on it to watch movies and TV shows.
D) how many hard drives am I supposed to buy over the years? We all know there are basically two kind of HDDs; those who failed and those that are going to fail. My older DVDs are 17 y.o. and all in perfect working conditions. Same for my DVD-Rs and DVD-RWs. I don't know how many hard drives can last that long; and let's not forget that we often have to back up our data...too time consuming. Also, if/when a hard drive fails, you're likely to lose not just one movie, but and incredible amount of data.
Do I want to watch a movie? I just put the disc inside the player and press play. Simple & easy. And away from the www.

By the way, judging from the link posted by Deuce66, the end is not round the corner; even a major bomb such as "Gods of Egypt" had a DVD version that could gross $6.3M, so there's still a market..

 

This does not describe my college at all. The computers are Dell all-in-ones (i.e., iMac types). They have a space in the case for an optical drive but no actual drive. You do have to log in via Novell, but they are not served environments. The terminals have 500 gb hard disks and every new log in gets a profile on the PC with its own static desktop and files on disk, etc. At least for the faculty computers. You have to manually access the network if you wish to get at shared disks, printers, and the like.

In any event, I'm astonished that I'm getting pushback on my assertion that DVD drives are dying out in home computers. All kinds of exceptions and qualifications are being offered, but I don't see how anyone can doubt the truth of these statements:

1> Desktop/all-in-one sales have plummeted -- they are a specialty item mostly favored by older users, gamers, and modders -- so most home computing happens on laptops and, increasingly, tablets and phones.
2> Laptops (and, obviously, tablets and phones) mostly lack optical drives.
3> Ergo, even if desktops still mostly have optical drives (the truth of this proposition is far from obvious to me, but let's accept it for now), most home computers don't.

@Chris DeVoe , the reason Lenovo "sells primarily to businesses" (a debatable proposition in itself) is that-- except for the old, gamers, and modders -- home users are no longer buying desktop computers. Their consumer-oriented laptops all lack optical drives.

 

I could see a college deliberately omitting the optical drive from their desktops as a cost saving measure - $19 per unit adds up when you're buying hundreds of desktops. And I know people think they want laptops, which lack optical drives primarily to make them thinner.

I do support work, both Windows and Mac, and often start with a client wanting a laptop and eventually converting them to a desktop. You can get a Mac Mini, two screens, a full size keyboard and great speakers for a fraction of the cost of a MacBook Pro.

People should really look at how they're going to use a computer, rather than just seeing what's popular. For many, the laptop is like an SUV; maybe they'll go off-road, but 99.99% of the time, they're driving on the highway, wasting fuel when a sedan would serve their needs better.

 

Oh, I agree with you, Chris. But it doesn't change the way the market is going.

 

An Apple MacBook Pro (really a consumer grade laptop) is hardly a SUV in laptop terms. Think more like a Toyota Corolla. One of my two laptops is much closer to a real, uncompromised, off road SUV is, this machine of which I speak is a Panasonic ToughBook CF 30 Mk II. Not a fair comparison. There is consumer grade, business rugged (and yes, Panasonic also makes that variety of machine) and there is from there Semi Rugged and then Full Rugged. My CF 30 is the latter. The Laptop equivalent of a Hummer H1, and yes, sometimes I need this grade of build, as spastic me needs reliable and portable on the road. Or I get to repair machines or replace them much more often.

 

Like it or not, the ultimate goal of all the media conglomerates is to make you pay every time you watch or listen to a recording (or read a book or news story), and to make it as difficult as possible to make a permanent copy of it.

LOL! yea, just like the "old days"...

 

With UHD discs coming out soon, I can see DVDs starting to disappear.... Just like the VHS did.

 

I think UHD will affect BD more than DVD. Most people interested in superior quality moved from DVD to BD years ago, and I don't think UHD will prompt the DVD-onlys to change.

BD is a niche, and UHD is a niche of a niche. It might dent BD but not DVD, IMO...

 

[QUOTE="Oatsdad, post: 15107748, member: 633”] BD is a niche, and UHD is a niche of a niche. It might dent BD but not DVD, IMO...[/QUOTE]

I agree they are both niches, but it will force DVD out, as Blu ray players are now cheap, and so are Blu rays discs. The will soon stop making DVD players.

 

Could be, but looking at that sales link provided earlier, DVD's still holding its own compared to BD. Leave off the "Force Awakens" outlier and sales looked fairly comparable - plus sales of BD/DVD combos count as BDs, so I suspect those cut into sales that'd go DVD if the combos didn't exist...

 

Don't Blu-ray players also play DVDs?

 

Yes, they do - and AFAIK, UHF players play BDs and DVDs...

 

No, I don't think this will be the case. DVDs will soldier on as they have done in the BD era. It's a lot cheaper to release a DVD than a BD (still, due to licensing, etc), let alone UHD BD (which will likely be the last physical disc format).

 

I think DVDs will be around a lot longer than people might expect them to be because they offer a good price point, but also something you can actually own. Long live physical media!

 

What about going to Oz?

 

I don't believe physical media will ever die. The newspapers and magazine layoffs you mentioned were a result of trying to monetize free media on the web through advertising. That wasn't the cash cow many people thought it would be, so now we see more and more firewalls going up. But that industry blinked and is now the Diet Coke of news and information; they won't get back up to number one ever again.

Bookstores and merchandisers are closing or shrinking their inventory because of Amazon. Meanwhile, the number of blu-ray titles are increasing every year. Optical discs are inexpensive to produce, that's why the industry jumped on them to replace the more expensive cassettes. In other words, CDs, Blu-Rays, and DVDs are profitable, that's why they're still around. This is something many people don't get. They're not loss leaders, and anyone phasing them out would have some explaining to do in the boardroom. Pinging the customer every time a kid watches a Disney movie sounds like the motherlode, but that doesn't make optical discs suddenly unprofitable.

 

Tornados are too unpredictable.

 

I think it's more true to say that what many people don't get is just how much the market for entertainment media consumption has changed and how fast it will continue to change going forward, as millennials continue to age and their successors enter the market.

These people don't care for physical inconvenience (especially when you have to jump through hoops when playing a disc with unskippable content, warnings, previews, etc, etc). They crave convenience over anything else. The physical format doesn't have to completely disappear to become archaic and sparsely supported.