ashes to ashes, disc to disc —
Other DVD drives are cheap and plentiful, but Apple's slot-loader was unique.
Enlarge / Apple's external DVD-burning SuperDrive may be fading away.
Apple
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. Mid-2010s MacBooks and MacBook Pros came with USB-A ports. And the original 2008 MacBook Air came without a built-in optical drive for CDs and DVDs. By the time 2012 and 2013 Macs rolled around, products from the iMac to the MacBook Pro followed suit.
These exclusions have often made Apple's devices thinner, lighter, sleeker, or some combination of all three. But they've also meant that people who still needed those technologies also needed to deal with dongles, adapters, or clunky external accessories hanging off their devices. For the MacBook Air and other modern Macs that needed to read or burn optical discs, that clunky accessory was Apple's SuperDrive, an external DVD burner that connected via USB.
After 16 years of availability, it looks like the SuperDrive's run could be coming to an end. As noticed by MacRumors, the drive's status has shifted to "sold out" in Apple's online store, a more definitive and permanent-sounding label than the "currently unavailable" status assigned to some other out-of-stock products.
Though it's been more than a decade since Apple introduced a new Mac with an optical drive built in, modern versions of macOS still have roughly the same level of support for CD and DVD drives that they did back when optical drives were standard-issue equipment. Plug an optical drive into a modern Mac—whether it's a SuperDrive or a third-party model—and you'll still be able to burn and rip audio CDs with the Music app, rip or burn CD and DVD image files with Finder or Disk Utility, or burn files to a disc for archiving with the Finder. Even the venerable DVD Player app is still included, though macOS relies mostly on third-party software to handle Blu-ray discs.
Third-party external DVD drives can be had for as little as $20, and external Blu-ray drives start around $50, making the $79 DVD-only SuperDrive an iffy financial proposition. It was also never updated with a USB-C connector, so connecting it to any modern MacBook requires yet another dongle. But Apple's drive was unique, as it was a metal, slot-loading optical drive from a major manufacturer; SuperDrive clones on Amazon go for $30 or $40 but come from no-name companies and have mixed customer reviews. For now, if the news of its potential demise suddenly makes you want one, the genuine SuperDrive is still in stock at Amazon and Best Buy, among a few other third-party retailers.
We've contacted Apple to check on the status of the SuperDrive and will update this article if we receive a definitive response.