What do dinosaurs, the Dodo bird, championship-level basketball in New York, The Wiz stores, VHS tapes, and DVDs all have in common?
Apple was able to slim down the laptop, which will start at $2,200 for a model with a 15.4-inch screen, by eliminating its DVD drive…Apple’s move to drop the DVD drive echoes past moves by the company to drop technologies in its machines, like floppy-disk drives, that it viewed as outmoded, even though some consumers initially grumbled about the changes. — The New York Times (June 11, 2012)
Apple’s direction seems like a decent gauge of where technology is heading.
The majority of your favorite independent skate videos are likely edited on MacBooks. Now that Apple is scrapping the DVD drive, hard-copy loyalists (the same sort of people content with spending $1K+ a year on VX1000 repairs…or only listening to music on vinyl) will need to suffer the inconveniences of older technologies to keep the format they grew up with alive. HD did not kill off Mini DV the day it came out, and iTunes skate video downloads did not immediately end DVD production, but this seems pretty close to the end for any future additions to your DVD shelf. Skate videos will get to a point where only legitimate, money-making companies shell out resources on discs to keep the older crowd happy; it is just hard to imagine a shop/independent video going through the hassle of producing something that so few people buy anyway. (Especially if most laptops won’t have a place to insert the disc three years from now.)
Yeah Right! comes to mind as the last major skate video to be released on VHS. It would make sense if the Chocolate video is the last one to come out on a disc. R.I.P. DVDs, you had a good ten-year run. You’ll be missed.
“I organize my past based on skate videos, based on the emotions I got from them, the ideas they gave me. I don’t know what’s going to happen now that videos are online, and there’s so much to choose from. I hope there’s a resurgence of hard, physical, collectable videos.” — Jake Johnson, 2011
That would be great, but it doesn’t look like it is going to happen.