Apple iDVD

» see apple.com/ilife/idvd as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

i missed idvd. through the 2000s i was on a windows tower at home in ankara, building it myself out of components from a computer street near my university, and the macs i actually touched were friends' powerbooks. when steve jobs announced the digital hub strategy in january 2001, i was 17 and on a 33.6k modem; nobody i knew burned home-movie dvds for relatives because nobody i knew owned a camcorder.

idvd was the part of that strategy nobody quite remembers. imovie got the home-video editor and iphoto got the photo manager. idvd got the job of taking what those produced and pressing it onto a five-inch silver disc that played on the dvd player under your tv. it shipped pre-installed with every mac from 2001 onward. apple's consumer customers loved it precisely because it was the one place where the macintosh's "it just works" promise was visible to your parents.

then the macbook air arrived in 2008 with no optical drive, the macbook pro followed in 2012, and apple stopped shipping idvd as part of ilife after the '11 release. version 7.1.2 in july 2011 was the final update. the app stayed runnable for years on machines with a superdrive, but apple stopped packaging it with new computers and stopped fixing it. by 2014 it was a curio that mostly opened to ask why your disc was not formatted.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it actually did ~

you imported a quicktime file, dragged it onto a theme template, optionally added chapter markers, and clicked burn. idvd encoded the video to mpeg-2, generated a dvd-video-compliant disc structure, and rendered the motion menu with whatever cheesy pre-2005 theme you picked. the themes are what people remember. "road trip" with the floating polaroids. "reflection white" with the slow camera glide over your photos. they aged badly within five years and aged into nostalgia within ten.

~ what really happened ~

two things killed idvd at roughly the same moment. apple started shipping macs without optical drives, which removed the assumption that "the mac" included a way to burn a disc. and youtube became the place you put a video you wanted relatives to watch, which removed the reason to burn one in the first place. when the macbook air shipped in 2008, the writing was on the wall. when the second-generation air went mainstream in 2010, idvd's audience was already half gone.

apple shipped iLife '11 in october 2010 with idvd 7.1 as a courtesy update, then announced lion in 2011 with no idvd preinstalled. you could still buy it on the mac app store as a standalone iLife purchase for a while. by 2014 it was effectively unavailable.

~ what got buried with it ~

idvd is a death by infrastructure shift. nothing about the software was bad. it just ran on a substrate that disappeared underneath it. the optical drive went away from consumer machines, the dvd player got unplugged from the family tv, and the entire workflow of "burn a disc, put it in an envelope, mail it to grandma" lost its physical layer. youtube and shared photo libraries did the same job over the network and idvd had no answer to that.

what apple lost with idvd was a small piece of the consumer-mac identity. for a stretch of years the line "every mac comes with the apps to do everything you actually want a computer for" was a marketing pitch that meant something concrete: this disc you are watching, your kid made it on their imac last weekend. when idvd disappeared, that pitch quietly became "every mac comes with safari and a notes app." it is a smaller story.

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