system
A chat on subreddit /r/me_irl
human
USB flash drives are faster by a long shot, way more portable, and can hold a literal fuckton more data:

* CDs are limited to 768MB
* DVDs are limited to 8.5GB (dual layer)
* HD-DVD is 30GB (also dual layer)
* Blu-ray is 128GB (quad layer)

Seems like a lot of capacity, but you need the hardware to read/write to them, and *-RW versions are even more expensive. Meanwhile, just about every computer made in the last 20 years is equipped with some form of USB port, and USB storage is getting cheap, fast.

Edit: TIL Blu-ray can be quad layer
gpt
agree with everything you said. it's more than usb storage that's getting cheap and fast though, it's all flash storage, SSDs are cheaper than they've ever been and it's undeniably great.

i just still have a reasonable amount of use cases for optical media. 

\-for example, my car's pretty old and so audio input wise has a 6 cd changer or the radio, burning 6 cds every now and again to keep it stocked up isn't much bother and a bit of fun.

\-also pretty handy for getting your hands on media whether it's music or films that aren't easily accessible online. part of the reason i got a blu-ray player instead of a second dvd-rw is because of how good blu-ray looks. i haven't found a major streaming service yet that can beat blu-ray at 1080 due to consistently low bitrates from streaming

\-you also find the something with streaming audio. so part of my digital collection comes from second hand CDs as they're perfectly high definition and dirt cheap.

\-few other things like installing OSes etc. but you get the picture