This coincided with the phasing out of optical/hard disk drives not only for laptops but even some PCs now (opens in new tab).
Corny PSAs like “Don’t Copy That Floppy” and such tried to scare kids into not copying or sharing such media, which had absolutely no effect.īut look at what happened once digital media became the norm: the tech industry quickly pounced and replaced actual physical programs that you could own, copy, and pass on with subscriptions that remove ownership from the user and forces us to constantly pay companies the right to rent programs like Microsoft Office and Adobe suite. However, the biggest reason why companies jumped at the chance to remove optical and hard disk drives from laptops is simple: it allows for more control.īack when computer programs and media were exclusively on physical media, once you made that purchase, you had complete control over how you used it.
(Image credit: Shutterstock / NicoElNino) The real reasons why internal disk drives were phased out There is some truth to the cheaper aspect, as a lawsuit settlement back in 2017 (opens in new tab) accused optical drive manufacturers of “colluding to inflate the prices of optical drives sold to big computer companies and retailers.” And over time laptops have gotten generally thinner and lighter too. There’s also a commonly spewed fact that not including hard disk drives has made the best laptops and the best gaming laptops cheaper to make and purchase, allowed for circuit boards in laptops to be larger and less dense, required fewer layers, and reduced weight and thickness. On paper that makes sense, since DVDs and CDs weren’t the most reliable of hard media and could easily scratch which affected playback. The biggest one is the advent of cheap, reliable, fast, and high-capacity USB drives, cloud storage, and video streaming options that took over for hard drives. Hard drives generally saw a decline starting around 2009 after major manufacturer Fujitsu exited the market, and in 2011 when a series of floods in Thailand (opens in new tab) impacted many hard drive factories, with predictions of a shortage causing prices to double. There are plenty of reasons that we could come up with as to why laptops with internal disk drives went from standard feature to rare unicorn. (Image credit: pixnio) Why laptop manufacturers stopped including disk drives
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