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When you’re awestruck by the MacBook Air’s strikingly thin design - you start to forget about its drawbacks. Obviously, the major drawback is its optical drive - it doesn’t have one. This means you’ll either have to lug around an external drive (which costs an extra $99) or you’ll need to “borrow” another computer’s drive via WiFi. When you think about how the Remote Disc feature works, you start to think about its limitations. Because it’s transferring data from one computer to another through a wireless connection, the rate is much slower and will vary all the time. It won’t write discs, which is acceptable considering how it works. But you may not have known that it doesn’t play DVDs either (or rip them for that matter). So if you’re planning to watch movies on your MacBook Air, you’ll have to rip them on another computer and transfer them to it.

For a computer that costs almost as much as a MacBook Pro - the MacBook Air seems extremely expensive for only having the advantage of being thin and light. It’s still the same size as a MacBook, 13 inches. Maybe Apple’s decision to remove the optical drive was deliberate - so that more people would buy or rent movies from iTunes.

Via [MacUser]