Apple used a Superdrive model of only 9.5mm thickness, instead of the standard 12.5mm, making the MB Pro 15" so thin. This ultra slim optical drive is only available from Panasonic. But, they decided to go even further by releasing a notebook-dedicated DVD burner featuring only 7mm thickness.
Despite its diet program, it can burn DVD at 8x and CD at 16x. The use of such mobile is currently not beneficial in notebook, as 2.5"HD are 9.5mm thick at the most. One can of course have thinner HD with 1.8" models, but then performances are strongly reduced. The only way to be able to maintain performance while having thin storage unit is by adopting SSD (capacity being directly linked to chips density for a define volume). So Panasonic might simply have released the first DVD burner for the SSD-based notebook era.
