When I bought new laptops last summer I made sure I got ones with optical drives.
For two reasons:
I have a lot of legacy programs that install from DVDs or CDs.
Downloading software with file sizes of 2 GB or more is a problem if you don't have a fast Internet connection. I don't. Even 100 or 200 MB takes quite a while. Also it uses a lot of data bytes.
I have a Verizon 3G aircard and it took 6 hours or so download Office 2013 Home and Student. I didn't realize when I bought it that what I assumed was a DVD was actually a scrape off card with a key number. The program had to be downloaded from a Microsoft web site.
