Apple announcement triggered some weird flashbacks...

[A Black Falcon]

Apple's next challenge will presumably to get rid of the lightning port (and replace it with only capacitive support or something?), so their phones will have no ugly holes in them at all...

... Yes, I know that would break innumerable things, but so did this. Form always matters more than function after all!

Your points about the drawbacks of CDs are all true, and noted, but nothing negates the singular capacity advantage that CDs had over floppy disks. The choice basically comes down to "will this file actually fit on this disk?". Yes, backup programs let you spread an archive across multiple floppies, but now you've just replaced my choice between one CD and 30 or so floppy disks. All in all though, both decay too fast. Bit rot is pretty bad in both formats, neither one ever even being meant to use for archiving for as long as people have. I mean, there are very expensive "archival" writable optical discs, but there's that "very expensive" part. Frankly, for archival purposes, Flash wins once again. Eventually, flash can be written to enough for it to die, but if you just use it for storage after writing to it once, it'll last longer than I will.

As bad as CD-Rs or CD-RWs are for moving files from one computer to another or short-term storage, for longer term storage, they will surely last longer than floppies! Floppies are terrible and fail all the time. CD-Rs do fail, often, but I don't think discs are quite as unreliable as magnetic media is. You're right though, both are terrible for longer-term archival purposes, use something better for that.