Gadgetory

a mere ten years ago CD and DVD drives were a staple and present in virtually all pcs nowadays you could be forgiven for forgetting about your old loyal friend entirely since most laptop designs omit them in favor of slimmer form factors many custom builders leave them out to save a buck and Apple no longer sells a single Mac with an optical disk drive but how did such a popular format go from near universal adoption to being suitable for nothing but protecting tabletops history lesson time in the 1980s the most popular existing format for music was the cassette tape an analog technology that you couldn't copy without losing quality managed only mediocre sound fidelity required manual fast-forwarding and rewinding and always seemed to get tangled up in your player at the worst possible time CDs changed all this by allowing music studios to use digital recording for much better sound quality and easier reproduction and thanks to their low production cost and greater data capacity CDs also made a huge splash in the PC world with most software moving from multiple floppy discs to a single CD in the box then when CD burners or writers became available they were the bee's knees for data backups since they held nearly 500 times as much data as a standard high-density floppy disk and only about an order of magnitude less than hard drives at the time and it didn't stop there by switching from infrared to lasers that use shorter wavelengths of red light on DVDs and then devising methods to cover the entire surface of a disc with data then have another layer under it for double the capacity and then finally by switching to the blue light used on blu-ray discs optical made it possible to jan up to 100 gigabytes of high-quality movies with surround sound onto a disc the same size as an original CD not to mention that they're so cheap to produce that even Moore's law hasn't been able to make USB drives or SD cards competitive so we're all the way into this video we still have an answer then why did such a versatile medium lose so much ground to things like online streaming services are we really just too lazy to take our discs with us and stick them into a player well maybe but that actually isn't the whole story first of all optical discs while definitely better than tapes do deteriorate moisture from the air can get into the metal layer that contains the data and cause a reaction that damages the disk not to mention that user-created discs are written using dyes that break down over time unless you're shelling out for archival grade media and the discs aside the drives they go in are fragile too like mechanical hard drives an optical disc has a lot of moving parts but unlike a hard drive which sits in a sealed box inside your computer optical drives have to constantly open and close making them susceptible to user error and wear and tear especially compared to solid state drives or SSDs with no moving parts at all but even if all your precious equipment stayed intact nearly all other modern data storage mediums are faster than optical disks anyway with even high-speed internet catching up and surpassing them thanks to services like Google Fiber ok Linus I get it they suck so then why do I still see these things all over the place well optical discs haven't gone away completely despite these drawbacks because content distributors still like optical discs thanks to physical media being easier to lock down with DRM which you can learn more about here CDs and DVDs are still much cheaper than putting things on SD cards or flash drives like I mentioned before gamers can sell optical disc copies of games between each other much more easily than ones they downloaded making it preferable especially for console gamers and audio files can enjoy lossless movie audio on blu-ray for example something that even if streaming services did offer would be way more than the average u.s. internet connection could handle anyway so while comparisons to other modern technology might make it look like shiny discs are dead it may actually be a while yet before we're all making disco balls out of our old CDs but if you were going to make disco balls out of CDs maybe you'd want to make a website about doing that with beautiful pictures and so you want to use Squarespace they offer simple powerful beautiful templates they've got 24/7 support via live chat and email it costs only eight dollars a month for a basic plan and you get a free domain if you by Squarespace for a year the sites look great whether you're looking at them on you know a computer or on a smartphone that's there's another reason that optical drives have kind of we've had to find alternatives for them you certainly can't put a disc in those and unloved all the Sony PSP I guess tried to do small discs anyway the point is that you can start a trial with no credit card required and start building your awesome website today whether it's for a blog or a store or like Luke's mom she's got a store on there actually he's raising the roof off camera right now and when you do decide to sign up for Squarespace make sure you use offer code Lynas to get 10% off your first purchase so thanks to Squarespace for supporting tech quickie and to you guys for watching I guess that's pretty much it like the video if you liked it dislike it if you thought it sucked leave a comment if you have suggestions for future fast as possible and don't forget to check out some of the great videos that we've got on our other channels Luke for example just finally did a review of the r9 390x why did it take so long well maybe it has to do with our excitement level I guess you'll find out check out that video now