You had a new Mac Pro desktop for three days? Interesting since it doesn’t ship til December.
Anyway, it sounds like you had some settings issues with a laptop, and the fact that cd/DVDs aren’t supported. Given that flash drives have far more capacity than the old cd/DVD formats; what difference does it make? Optical drive are going to go away and for good reason: limited capacity, they take up a large amount of physical space in whatever form factor they reside, and they suck power.
As for the manuals for your new camera, most everyone these days have PDF versions of manuals on their websites. I know Canon does, because I downloaded them onto my iPad and they reside in my iBooks app along with all sorts of manuals for appliances and whatnot.
The MBP Apple was selling a month ago, almost identical to the new,new,NEW MBP.
As far as manuals, etc. Some of my programs I wanted to load are on DVD.
And if you use the laptop for business or just carry it around it would be nice to be able to load a CD or DVD w/o the extra load of an external drive.
What about sharing your photos w/ relatives? Commonly done w/ DVDs? You can't make a DVD. Yes, there are workarounds but what happened to Apple's simplicity of use?
Do they make a thumb drive and/or SDcard labelmaker? I've not seen one..g..couldn't read it if they did.
I had my eye on the least expensive 15" MBP, hi-res, DVD drive . Don't see it in this year's lineup. They do sell it in 13".
The frustrating thing is I've come to really like Macs far better than the PC's I used to have.
The iMac desktops don't have the DVD drive either. Look beautiful. Not much thicker than a pane of glass, side view. 'Where's the DVD slot'. "Oh, you have to buy this external drive and make room for it on your desk"
In my opinion a mistake.
Esthetics over function.
It'll be a cold day in he!! when I load my photos, files, etc. onto a remote sever, aka 'The Cloud'.