Against our will, or mine at least, Apple has woven a master-plan in how the company presents its products to customers but more than anything in getting its machines more tightly connected to its various digital storefronts.

Apple released yesterday the much anticipated OS X Lion. At the same time they killed the white MacBook (that had an optical drive) and removed from the refreshed Mac mini, its optical drive.

As you know the new OS X Lion is only available as a digital download from the App Store to existing Mac OS users, short of having them buy a new Mac.
That’s a stark contrast to years past, where users would have to turn to a retailer to get a DVD.

Do you see what’s happening? If you have a PC and you want to have Lion on it, you’ll have to either buy a Mac or wait until August when the Cupertino company will be offering the new OS on a USB stick.

The other move taken by Apple to bound you to their store, is the gradual elimination from the company’s retail stores of boxed software. Slowly everything will happen only via the Mac App Store. Apple will know exactly what’s on your machine!

After shelving the white MacBook and modifying the Mac mini, only three machines are left with an optical drive, at least for now: the MacBook Pro, iMac and Mac Pro.While it might take an entire overhaul of those three machines to do away with the disc drives, Apple has made it very clear the feature is on its way out, just like what it did with floppy-disk drives in the 1990s.

So why are they eliminating the disk drive? Because the optical drive will still give you freedom to easily install another OS on your machine, to get movies, music and software from somewhere other than Apple’s.
Apple can offer you all that from iTunes and the Mac App Store.