Most modern laptops lack an optical drive, yet CDs and DVDs are still used in many households, whether for playing old movies, installing older software, or even for making physical backups. An ...

Optical drives are still practical for many users, whether to play old CDs and DVDs, install software, or create backups—especially with modern laptops, which are usually supplied without a drive.

Apple was one of the first manufacturers to exclude DVD players from its laptops, and the same quickly became true for iMacs as well. This meant that if you wanted to rip CDs for your iTunes library, ...

Music, movies, and books have gone from physical objects to digital files over the past 10 years, and computer designs have changed with the times. A lot of computers — laptops, all-in-ones, and ...

Apple has always been eager to dump technologies when the company feels they have outlived their usefulness. The original iMac came without a floppy drive. The iPhone 7 came without a headphone jack.

For a long time, Microsoft didn’t sell Windows install media in the form of bootable USB flash drives. Instead, it prefered to stick to old-school DVD media, despite the fact that many notebooks today ...