When’s the last time you saw a laptop with a spinning disc drive on a store shelf? Outside of a pawn shop, I don’t think I’ve seen one in almost 10 years. But Japanese manufacturer Fujitsu just announced brand-new models, complete with fairly recent Intel and AMD processors, that come with Blu-ray or DVD disc drives.
These 16-inch FMV Note A designs (spotted by VideoCardz and Fudzilla) aren’t exactly “ultraportable,” with a chassis design that looks dated even though it’s rocking USB-C ports. But on the left is a familiar old friend: a pop-out Blu-ray or DVD drive that’s compatible with full-sized optical discs. A beefier body allows these laptops to be equipped with a full-sized Ethernet port (without the little fold-out port for thinner designs) and an SD card slot. According to machine translation of the Fujitsu site, some models also come with a separate media remote, complete with a touchpad and a dedicated YouTube button.
These designs aren’t fully top-of-the-line, featuring Intel 13th-gen and AMD Ryzen 7000 processors, and mostly coming with just 16GB of RAM and as little as 256GB of SSD storage, though upgrades to 64GB and 2TB are available. (Strangely, they come with Copilot buttons on the keyboard despite not qualifying as Copilot+ laptops by Microsoft’s definition. I’m guessing it’s a re-used bin part.) They’re also on the hefty side as you might expect, weighing in at 1.9 kilograms (4.2 pounds) and 26.8mm thick (just over an inch). Prices range from 124,800 yen (~$820 USD) for the base DVD model to 214,280 yen (~$1,410 USD) for the top design with all the trimmings and Blu-ray.
The Japanese market is an interesting one in many ways, with a lot of love for hardware that’s hard to find elsewhere. Old-fashioned disc drives are still in high demand there, and stores are selling out of desktop drives as Windows 10 support ends. Japanese buyers appear to have a healthy appetite for Blu-ray and DVD movies as streaming becomes the norm elsewhere… and seeing how that’s going for those of us trying to save a little money, I wonder if they might be onto something.
Fujitsu, Toshiba, and a few others are still selling PCs in Japan with disc drives, though more typical models are available as well. Good luck finding one elsewhere, though. I suggest making friends with an importer, or adding a plane ticket to the sticker price if you want one of these machines for yourself.
