There’s a rumour floating around on the internet that the next generation MacBook Pro--which is supposedly dropping in April--will not only feature Intel’s much-ballyhooed Light Peak interconnect technology, but will also see Apple’s portable workhorse follow in the footsteps of svelte Air-branded sibling by ditching its optical drive. As a result, many pundits and geek oracles have been asking the questioning whether or not this move by Apple heralds the death of the optical drive. My opinion? Absolutely not.

Technology doesn’t persist or cease to be simply because a single corporation or individual deems it thus. It rotates in and out of its lifecycle due to innovation and popular opinion. Take the floppy disk, for example.

Back in the day, floppy disks were a mainstay of every computer user’s experience. Despite the technology’s vulnerability to temperature, dust, moisture and bad language, industry and consumers alike continued to rely upon 3.5-inch floppies for years after other, more reliable portable storage mediums such as USB flash drives and optical disks became available and financially feasible. Even now, over a decade after Apple and the majority of the world’s PC manufacturers opted to forego the inclusion of floppy drives in their desktop and portable offerings, Sony is still cranking out floppy disks, with no plans to cease production until next year. Why? It’s simple. Up until now, enough people have kept buying them to make it worth their while.

While a company may drive innovation through the inclusion or exclusion of a technology in their products, whether or not the innovation takes hold is the domain of the consumer. In the past year, even Apple--a company not known for their flexibility--has bowed under the weight of consumer opinion. Remember the third generation iPod Shuffle? Sure you do: it had no physical buttons other than on its inline headphones and functioned almost entirely via VoiceOver. Consumer backlash over the design decision to do away with a physical user interface was such that the company looked back to the simplicity of design found in the second-generation iteration of the audio player when cranking out the fourth generation of the device.

Still not convinced? You needn’t look any further than last summer’s Antennagate debacle. In the face of astoundingly bad press and growing public disdain for the iPhone 4 and its radio reception woes, Apple brought the world together for a bit of a jaw-wag, announcing that in the face of the smartphone’s increasingly well-known design flaw, they would be offering up free bumper cases to anyone that picked up one of the handsets.

The fortunes of Apple, or any other hardware manufacturer for that matter, rise and fall based upon our acceptance and purchase of their products. With that in mind, let the pundits squawk and babble on about what’s hardware will rise or fall in the days to come, and rest well knowing that the real power to decide what stays or goes is in our hands.

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