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Author Topic: 2001 macs 500mhz+ began shipping with "burner" optical CD-RW drives by default  (Read 2142 times)

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Offline chrisNova777

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observation:
in 2001, all macs/imacs with 500Mhz or more began shipping by default with CD-RW "burner" drives, before that, all macs from the previous years had only ROM optical drives, capable of reading but not writing to CD optical media.

this began the trend of being able to burn CD's from any internal mac CD drive.

in 1999, the "DV" series imacs were titled as such because they had DVD-ROM drives, capable of reading DVDs but not writing to them. the G3 desktops also only came with CD-ROM drives, and the G4 desktops came with DVD-ROM drives, all of them incapable of writing to optical media, only reading from. but the higher-end G4's could be bought with 5x DVD-RAM drives,  (which was a big deal at the time, as with these drives you could burn to DVD-RAM consumer DVD-R was not really a thing yet) the 450 had the option, DVD-RAM was standard on the 500mhz G4 AGP Sawtooth. these dvd-ram drives could read from any available optical media at the time, but can only write to DVD-RAM discs. thus the name "combo" and then "multi" (drives) created first by manufacturers such as Hitachi/LG electronics would later stem from the ability to burn to more than one optical format.

compare:
year 1999: https://everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-1999.html
year 2000: https://everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-2000.html
year 2001: https://everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-2001.html

year 1998: https://everymac.com/systems/by_year/macs-released-in-1998.html

in 1998, only one machine came with a DVD-ROM drive, and that was the
PowerBook G3 300 (PDQ - Late 1998) 300 MHz PowerPC 750 (G3)
making it the first apple mac being capable of reading DVDs but not writing to them of course.