"Mark Lloyd" wrote

| Newer computers usually don't come with DVD drives, but you can add one.

The first all-in-one I found had one. I certainly
wouldn't buy a machine without one. But I also
wouldn't buy an all-in-one.

| If no other way, there's DVD drives that connect with USB.
|

Sounds like the fiasco when Lord Jobs announced
that Mac users had no further use for floppies and
removed the drives from Macs. Many Mac users, as
usual, stridently supported his decision. Lord Jobs
knows best. Then they went to Microcenter and
bought a USB version for $100.

If you have to buy an external DVD drive that would
be part of the cost of the computer. Not an economical
solution.

At the time Jobs nixed floppies, a magazine article
noted that it would have cost only $7.50 more per
$2,000-ish Mac to include a floppy drive. But Jobs
wanted slick.
Windows computers tended to have floppy IDE plugs
in the motherboards for many years after that, even
when they stopped shipping with floppy drives. I
put old drives into a number of computers.

A good DVD drive these days doesn't cost much more
that floppy drives did then. I think I paid about $20 for
a Samsung when I built my last computer, two years
ago. Recently I was fixing a Win8 laptop for someone.
It needed a new hard disk. I downloaded a Win8 ISO
from MS and put it onto a DVD. About 30 cents cost.
To do that with a USB stick would have cost maybe
$7-$10 and a trip to the store (so that I could give the
stick to the owner) and I don't even know for certain
that I could have booted to the USB stick.

All of which is to say that it seems very premature to
me to start leaving out DVD drives, or to buy computers
without them.