On 22/02/18 07:38 AM, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
The largest manufacturer of CD-Rs and DVDs and also the inventor of CD-R media, Taiyo Yuden, stopped making them. Same for TDK.
Other manufacturers are following suit. These companies wouldn't stop making media if people were still buying them.
I sometimes wonder why people don't have a better understanding of economics. There are always (at least) two possible economic reasons for things like this. An alternative that occurs to me is this. I was around when optical media began and everyone, including my then employer who was looking for something of this order, was sceptical, and the manufacturers were few and the product was taken up by music industry and there was little production left over for the computer world. Now we're at the tail end; the technology to produce writeable optical media is easy, commonplace and there are all to many manufacturers of 2nd and 3rd grade product. The street price of clone DVDs is around $5/1000. Yes they have a failure rate between 1% and 5%, but so what? Some of that the software can route around, some it just 'try the next one'. Heck, notebooks at the dollar stores cost more, per page, than that. You can expect the retail stores to have a 100% price mark-up. The whole supply chain probably has a 500% mark-up. Competing with those prices who wants to be in the business?
Also, more and more computers you buy these days don't even ship with an optical drive anymore.
Again, look to economics. When it comes to laptops, they are being made thinner and lighter -- that's the way the market goes -- and hence batteries are thinner and lighter but the operating lifetime must be sustained or increased. My Older HP/Compac x6000 (that now sits under my desk and run MySQL to support web services) had what, 4 USB ports, HDVI, audio, a cluster of card slots, AND a CD/DVD drive. It also had a hunking thick battery, two fans but still ran hot and the whole thing was heavy. It was everything that today's market isn't. Yes, today's machines are just as expensive, and in many ways you're getting less for you money; just a faster cpu, a better screen to display the more eye-candy of the more space and cpu-power consuming software. No wonder some of the old-timers on the openSUSE lists are turning away from Gnome and KDE and all their hungry eye-candy to the simpler, cleaner XFCE. As for PCs, well it's the same economic argument as the airlines. They sell 'stripped' models and charge extra for the 'add-ons'. Not enough disk, not enough RAM, not enough video; but just enough to run ... And the airlines charge extra for luggage, for meals, for headphones. They are now taking away the seat-back screens an making it a BYOD, but you can bet they are going to charge for power hookups and the movies will will become pay-for. Like the man said, "it's the economy". Or rather profit margin. I don't think that looking to economic explanations rather than technological ones to explain market shifts makes me an old fart or anti-technologist. -- "The greatest of all faults is to be conscious of none. Recognizing our limitations & imperfections is the first requisite of progress. Those who believe they have "arrived" believe they have nowhere to go. Some not only have closed their minds to new truth, but they sit on the lid." -- Dale Turner. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org