Louwrentius

I'm a strong advocate of killing the optical drive. As of 2011, there is no need for it anymore. Laptops could get lighter, smaller or have more room for additional battery capacity if the optical drive would no longer be present.

In my life, I never see people use the optical drive. And why would you use them any more? Isn't it so that if you are still using CDs or DVDs with your computer, that you do it out of (a bad) habit? And if you really can't part with your CDs or DVDs, would an external USB optical drive be a usable solution?

I think that we are at a point where most people don't even know that their computer has an optical drive.

With the release of the new 2011 Mac Mini, Apple dropped the optical drive yet again. They first dropped it from the MacBook Air and now the Mini.

What is next? Well that is clear. New Macs will be able to boot over the Internet from Apple's servers. Again, no need for an optical drive, even for reinstalling your computer. I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation of MacBook Pro laptops would not contain an optical drive. Maybe some people aren't ready for it but people should rejoice since it would make MacBooks thinner and lighter.

As apple killed the floppy drive, it is now killing the optical drive.

If you want to order a new iMac with an SSD there are two problems:

1. An SSD of 256 gigabytes will cost you a lot: 600 euros.
2. The SSD is of medium quality, and does not justify the cost of 600 euros.

Here you can find information about the Toshiba SSD that Apple provides.

You can consider buying an SSD for half the price and put it inside your new iMac yourself afterwards. However, this is a hassle and you will probably void your waranty.

The solution is to buy an SSD yourself and put it in an external Firewire 800 casing. Firewire 800 provides you with about 70 megabytes per second of troughput, which is enough for most applications. It is about three times faster than USB and the latency of Firewire is lower than that of USB, thus improving responsiveness.

Thunderbolt would provide the best solution, but as of July 2011, there are no Thunderbolt products on the market.

The product I use is an external 2,5 inch Firewire 800 casing of OWC: the Mercury Elite-AL Pro mini. This casing cost me about 60 euros or 80 dollars including shipping costs. I admit that this solution is not cheap, but it does work. And you won't void your warranty and it is way cheaper than the Apple SSD.

I've put my Intel SSD inside this casing and my mac boots in about 15 seconds. After entering username and password, login is almost instantaneously.

Caveat

I encountered one problem with the OWC casing. I encountered random system freezes, related to the external OWC housing. Using the internal 1 TB hard drive, I had no problems. The cause of this issue is probably related to power not being provided to the OCW casing after the systems returns from sleep.

I resolved this issue by connecting a special USB cable to the iMac and connecting the other end to the 5V DC Power Input on the OWC casing. After that, the daily random system freezes vanished. These cables can be obtained almost everywhere.

Over the last couple of years, Debian Linux has released new stable versions about every two years. This pace is great for progress, but there is a serious problem. This problem is related to their support for older Debian stable versions.

If you read the quote below from the Debian Security FAQ it will dawn upon you:

    Q:  How long will security updates be provided?
    A:  The security team tries to support a stable distribution 
        for about one year after the next stable distribution has 
        been released, except when another stable distribution is 
        released within this year. It is not possible to support 
        three distributions; supporting two simultaneously is 
        already difficult enough.

Translation: after 3 years, you must apt-get dist-upgrade or be screwed, you will no longer receive security updates!.

Apt-get dist-upgrade or die, so to speak.

The problem is that the whole apt-get dist-upgrade thing is cool and all, but in my experience, it doesn't work. Even a simple web server gets screwed up badly. You need to diff all config files and spend quite some time reviewing all changes and fixing the broken stuff.

I'd rather spend the time creating a new fresh Debian installation based on the new stable release than on tinkering with the aftermath of an apt-get dist-upgrade. But that also takes a lot of effort.

I want an operating system that will be supported for the next five years so I don't have to spend time on this upgrade process every 3 years for a system that is otherwise fully functional and rock solid.

To tease you a little bit: Microsoft Windows operating systems are supported for ages. But that's not an option for me, I stick with Linux, but Debian does not provide this kind of extended support.

But Ubuntu does.

Ubuntu releases LTS versions: Long Term Support versions that will receive security updates for at least 5 years.

All the goodness of Debian but with longer support. That is the reason my shop will switch to Ubuntu Server LTS.