Jim Dalrymple Talks to Apple Executives About Lion and Today’s New Mac Hardware

Jim Dalrymple:

With the release of the new MacBook Air came the demise of the white MacBook. Apple said it made sense after seeing the trends of its customers.

“One of the things we saw is that the MacBook Air was simply more popular than the MacBook,” said Moody. “It does more in half the weight and in half the volume.”

The one advantage the white MacBooks had over the Airs is that hard drives store more data than flash drives. That’s it. Hard drives are going the way of the dodo, though.

A new Mac mini was also released with faster processors, and surprisingly to some people, no optical drive. Apple said the popularity of the Mac App Store helped with that decision.

“We found that the majority of customers don’t use the optical drive on a regular basis,” said Moody. “Things are changing. The primary use for the optical drive was to install software, but the Mac App Store provides a more efficient method for doing that.”

Optical drives are the new floppy drives.

★ Wednesday, 20 July 2011