Buried in the iPad Mini story last night was the revelation that new Macs would no longer have a DVD drive. Apple were (eventually) right about the Floppy, but have they missed the point with the DVD?

I'm now blessed with a reasonably quick broadband line, but not so long ago I struggled with 1Mbps. Not everyone lives in a city with 200Mbps lines. Many don't even have cell coverage - let alone 3G. 4G will be a long way off and prohibitively expensive for long downloads.

Personally I buy most of my music or media on CD/DVD and rip it myself. That way I own the material and have a very hard backup in case things go very wrong. I can dispose off, or pass on, my copies of the material as I see fit. Can't do that with downloads. Copy controlled media also can be a pain when it comes to re-formatting from an HD TV to a 7" tablet, which you may want to do.

I think we'll see plenty of Mac owners spoiling the lines of their new all in ones with a rack of cables leading to USB driven external drives.