You'd think so, Sechs. People buy SATA hard drives after all, and they cost more. So what's holding the manufacturers up?
OK, the way I see it, there is no particular point in SATA for opticals, and I don't think more than ... oh ... about 5% of customers, maybe 10% would be willing to pay the $extra. Let's say it's 5%. What's the overall world market share in optical drives of an average middle-sized manufacturer? Five percent sound reasonable for an LG or a BTC or a Sony or a Pioneer? If those two figures are correct (the 5% and the 5%) then, while the situation lasts, a medium-sized optical drive manufacturer could double its market share! That's a huge incentive.
So why hasn't anyone done it? Seems weird. I can't imagine that it's a technical issue. After all, if you can make a SATA hard drive, how hard can it be to make a DVD?
Nope: I think the answer must be OEM sales - or, mopre to the point, lack of OEM sales. The component manufacturers, generally speaking, are very, very slow to listen to their retail end-user customers. They probably do do their market research, but do this by talking to their 20 largest customers - who, of course, are all OEMs. They wind up with a very slanted view of the market as a whole, because those 20 customers might represent more than half of their market, but are highly unrepresentative of a nevertheless significant minority sector.
The more I think about it, the more sense this makes to me. RAM manufacturers made the same mistake, remember, back when they chopped off production of SDRAM while it was still selling like crazy on the upgrade aftermarket.
Sometimes I wonder about this industry. So many players are so incredibly clever - they have to be in order to survive and malke the products they do - and yet at the same time they often ain't too bright.
