Many remember the distinct, whirring hum of a disc spinning up inside an old plastic MacBook. It was a comforting, mechanical sound, the usual preamble to a weekend movie night or a massive new software install. But tech marches relentlessly forward, and Apple has never been a company to cling sentimentally to the past. Now, nearly two decades after they first started phasing out optical drives from their hardware lineup, Apple is preparing to sever its last software ties to the format.

With the recent beta 2 release of macOS 27—affectionately dubbed Golden Gate—Apple has quietly signaled the end of an era. The company is officially pulling the plug on its built-in DVD support.

According to a recent breakdown by Macworld‘s Roman Loyola, the developer release notes for the new operating system reveal that the DVDPlayback framework has been entirely removed from the macOS 27 SDK. In plain English, this means developers can no longer build or update apps that rely on Apple’s native DVD playback tools. Furthermore, Apple noted that in a future macOS release, the framework will be ripped out of the operating system completely.

This leaves the door open just a crack for the built-in DVD Player app to make one final, potentially broken appearance when Golden Gate officially launches this fall. But make no mistake: this is the software’s death knell. Golden Gate will likely be the very last version of macOS to ship with any native DVD application.

Honestly, you might be surprised to learn that your Mac still even had a DVD Player app.

Apple’s war on physical media is long and well-documented. They famously killed the floppy disk with the colorful original iMac in 1998. Ten years later, Steve Jobs pulled the original MacBook Air out of a manila envelope, proudly showing off a ridiculously thin machine entirely devoid of a CD/DVD drive. By 2012, the optical drive was aggressively stripped from the flagship iMac lineup. We’ve been living in a streaming, cloud-based, flash-storage world for a long time now.

Apple practically buried the DVD app years ago. Back in 2018 with macOS Mojave, they quietly moved it out of the main Applications folder and banished it to an obscure, hidden system directory. For the last several years, the app only ever saw the light of day if you happened to plug in a dusty external SuperDrive and physically slid a disc into the slot to trigger an auto-launch.

And if you’ve actually tried to use the native player recently, you already know it’s a bit of a mess. The framework hasn’t seen a meaningful update in years. It produces playback that is noticeably jerky, pixelated, and entirely out of place on a gorgeous modern Mac display. Apple’s neglect here wasn’t a secret; it was a strategy to push users toward digital alternatives.

So, what does this mean for the physical media holdouts who still love their Criterion Collection DVDs, or those of us who have archives of old family home movies we occasionally like to revisit?

You don’t have to throw your discs or your external drives away, but you will need to rely on the open-source community to keep them spinning. Third-party media players like VLC have been the go-to for power users for a decade anyway. They offer vastly superior playback quality, modern interface features, and robust codec support that puts Apple’s abandoned built-in player to shame.

It’s hard to genuinely mourn the loss of a piece of software that most of us forgot existed. Still, there’s a tiny, undeniable pang of nostalgia watching the final curtain fall on DVD support in macOS. Golden Gate is looking strictly to the future, and as with all things Apple, there’s simply no room left in the overhead bin for our old baggage.