Today Apple announced the new iLife ’11, new features in the next OSX revision called Lion and new Mac Book Air’s. Like the original Air the new ones don’t come with any built in optical drive but relegate that duty to an external unit. They kind of had to since that would be the only way to reinstall the OS.

Well with the latest version Apple includes a slick little USB flash drive to reinstall the OS. Finally! Now there really is no need for optical media or drives for the majority of computing needs. For me this officially spells out the end of optical media for good. Very nice.