New Airport Express

If you cant afford to buy a few cds a week then you cant afford to buy apple products anyway

It's the other way round actually 

In all seriousness though, you'd surely have to be buying very large numbers of CDs to be needing to rip new ones more than once a week wouldn't you?

Not so surprising when you see the cost differential between disc and USB sticks

Exactly.

And, obv', a tidy few designers still work from hi-res scans supplied on CD/DVD - it's not always possible to access sufficiently swift broadband. 

Meanwhile, what does Apple expect me to do with c. 1200 audio CDs, which I rip/delete/re-rip in ALAC to my MBP to load/delete/reload onto an iPod 120GB? And 99% of my new music is still bought on CD because 16/44 downloads are rare, or more pricey than CDs.

And before anyone suggests iTunes Match - 256 AACs instead of ALACs is not an option.

Yup, I too will be taking extra care of my old-school CD/DVD-drive MBP.

Ahh, that makes more sense now - so you're constantly having to re-rip CDs because of lack of space available on the Macbook, is that right? In which case, I can see why having the drive would be important.

Just a thought though, have you considered getting a large external drive (I'd think 1 TB would be enough for 1,200 albums) and keeping all CD rips on this (in a separate iTunes library maybe to keep it separate)? This woud make the process a lot easier than having to keep re-ripping CDs as you want them, just by dragging and dropping the files between the disks.

Ta for the thought

Assuming I did upgrade to the sans CD/DVD-drive MBP Retina - how would I rip new CDs to an external HDD?

Or is one of these the only solution - Apple USB SuperDrive?

Love the product blurb's "let them eat cake"-style assertion that the SuperDrive "fits easily into a travel bag", erm, it would be much easier if it was built into a MBP.

one of many. look for an external usb DVD/CD rewriter.

If you have access to another laptop or desktop with a CD/DVD drive, there's one more option:

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5287?viewlocale=en_US

(As long as it's not an Audio CD or DVD movie) 

Indeed - I use one I bought a while back. Here's a few on Amazon.

I brought one of those Samsung DVD Writers from Amazon to go with my Mac mini and my wife has used it a few times with her Mac Air. I know when i first purchased the DVD drive it was used alot for a week or two and now i'm lucky if i use it once a month, and that mainly to burn a playlist to CD for the car.

But if you haven't noticed its pretty easy to get you'r hands on a Apple Superdrive, you can get them from Curry's and Tesco's and lots of other places now. So its an issue that Apple are fully aware of.

But even Pc laptops are heading more this way now, it seems like old tech is going to be left to us to decide if we need it or not.

It looks like for us with very old PCs that you have to have Windows 7 on the computer in order to run the AE Utility!?!?!?!

I know there is an app for it on the App Store, but would you be able to use just that to set it up with your own network????

Thinking I may have to 'upgrade' to this new one to sort out my issues with my old 'g' AE...

Physical media will never truly fade because it's not possible to hand someone something non-physical.

Like someone said, usb thumb drives aren't exactly suited for that. They are not storage media, but storage devices. That will always make them more expensive and quite a waste of resources if you're going to be flooding people with them. Also a usb stick does not identify the contents unless you have it company branded.

Imagine wanting to give someone a bouquet of flowers, and you have to say "can you get your tablet out, I need to transfer this virtual bouquet to your device." That's basically the situation if you want to gift someone music in a world without CDs. Already the situation is that I cannot give a CD as a present to any of my friends, because I don't know whether they will even appreciate it. I know two of my friends have sold all of their CDs and "gone digital" (as if CDs aren't digital ).

I can imagine a situation coming up where I'll say, happy birthday, I wanted to give you a CD, but I know you wouldn't appreciate it, so I didn't get you anything.

It's funny that people treat compact discs as 'non-digital'. The only difference between CDs and 'the digital world' is that in that digital world digital data is stored on devices instead of discrete media. It's the same digital information. It's just no longer something you can touch, hold or cherish.

Blizzard is still supplying World of Warcraft on DVD.... because if they didn't, what would they be selling if they sold a physical package? But a lot of people like having a physical product packaging on their shelves. Of course, no one actually installs the DVD because it will already be outdated and you need to download a huge patch anyway.

How are you going to gift someone a movie? Or a computer game? Life becomes pretty barren when there are no more physical media to put stuff on.