One of the things that dates an older PowerBook is the lack of a disc-burning optical drive. For example, my two my PowerBook Pismos, manufactured in January and October, 2000, came with non-burner DVD=ROM drives.

How things have changed! While some have suggested that the optical drive-less MacBook Air (an external dual-layer USB 2 SuperDrive is a "99 option) my be the thin edge of the wedge, so to speak of an optical drive-less future, as the floppyless iMac proved to be in that context back in 1999, I'm doubtful that's the case. The only potentially adequate substitute for a recordable media drive for serious computing would be USB flash drives, and they may prevail in the long run, but the CD and DVD aren't going to go the way of the floppy anytime soon, although I personally prefer an external hard drive for data backups, and 700 MB burnable CDs are now at the low end of the recordable media scale. For burnable media data backup, you need a "SuperDrive" DVD-burning drive that will allow you to store 4.7 gigabytes of your stuff on one, single-layer disk, or twice that much on dual-layer disks.

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