They say you can’t have your cake and eat it too, and if you want an ultra-thin lightweight laptop, you have to say goodbye to a built-in optical drive. It’s a minor sacrifice made even easier to tolerate now that Pioneer is introducing an external Blu-ray/DVD/CD burner that connects to your Mac or Windows computers over Wi-Fi.
To clarify, the optical drive itself isn’t wireless, but it includes and connects to a base station dock that’s 802.11a/b/g/n compatible. So not only can you use it to read and write media from an optical disc, you can also swap in hard drives, magically granting them wireless capabilities too. Available near the end of the month for about $250, the drive and dock combo even boasts custom firmware to help quiet its operating noise, since most of us haven’t had to endure the whir of an optical drive for some time now. [Pioneer via AV Watch]