Environmental DVD Wrecks Apple Drives

FST777 writes "The British Mail on Sunday published its latest DVD giveaway on the EcoDisc, a thin and bendable DVD format that is supposed to be more environmentally-friendly than regular DVDs. Despite the clear warning against using them in Apple slot drives, some Mac users decided to give it a go. The result? A brisk trade for repair shops in the UK. 'The EcoDisc's manufacturer, ODS, insists the disc won't break drives. "We've produced over ten million of these discs — we've had less than a dozen phone calls," says managing director, Ray Wheeler. "There are ways to get the discs out." Wheeler says the problem stems from Apple's slot-loading drives. "It uses an ejection system that doesn't get approval from the DVD Forum." He claims the EcoDisc should work in other types of slot-loading drive, although admits that it hasn't been tested in the PlayStation 3.'"

Never trusted slot loading

[PingPongBoy]

Slot loaders look voracious, and what keeps them from scratching the disk when it slides in and out? If the ejector fails perhaps on a bad disk, it's surgery time for the entire drive. Ask for trouble, and ye shall find it.

Re:Nelson points and says "Haha!"

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, not all Apple interfaces are rubbish. I was very impressed by Xcode when I made another abortive attempt at using it the other day.

I particularly love the way that you can add files to projects by drag-and-drop! Oh, wait, no you can't, you have to add them with an "Add file" dialog.

But at least you can add a whole bunch at once! Oh, wait, no you can't, you can only add one at a time.

But at least the dialog box remembers where the files were so you don't have to navigate your directory structure again and again for every single file! Oh, wait, no it doesn't, it always goes right back to the project directory.

And that's before we get onto the really fun details, like the only way to change the build settings for your project is to right-click on the build target name and select the intuitively named "Get Info" option.

Apple, king of user interface design? Don't make me laugh. OS 9 was very good, but it's been downhill all the way since they abandoned usability in favour of useless eye candy.

Optical drives in laptops

[Jim Hall]

That being said, you could always get a MacBook Air. Nothing says "high technology" like a complete lack of an optical drive. ;-)

Offtopic, but I know a lot of people like to beat up on Apple for the "no internal optical drive on the MacBook Air" thing. I have a Dell D420, which doesn't have a built-in optical drive (it's in the dock) and I can't say I ever use the optical drive until I need to upgrade my Linux distro. All my backups are done over my home network, or to USB storage. When's the last time you used your DVD/CDRW drive? And not having an internal optical drive saves a lot of weight and bulk in the laptop.

I'm not a Mac weenie by any stretch, but I think Apple made a good call on that for an ultralight laptop.

Re:environmental friendliness

[thomas.galvin]

Because the Internet doesn't use any electrical power?

I agree that it's probably more efficient to download data instead of burning it on DVD and distributing it that way, but by how much?

I can download a lot of data on one charge from my battery. I can't burn even one DVD. I don't know how it compares to stamped disks, but I'd say the efficiency gain from downloading is significant.

Re:Nelson points and says "Haha!"

[MacColossus]

My memory is fine. less than a minute to upload a 1 MB file. Floppy drives took the same amount of time to save. I used Netscape. Never a fan of Claris Emailer, but I digress. I worked in service for a Apple Authorized Service Center in 98. I am aware of internet reports of a "click of death" I saw very little of this. The reason it had a short span was due to the quick decrease in price of burners and media. Not to mention every computer had a CD reading device. I do remember the external drives hanging off Macs. But was that due to necessity for a floppy replacement, graphic artists use large files and Macs (remember Syquest drives before floppies were removed from Macs and Zips were introduced), or struggle of end users to accept a new paradigm?