I question some of the figures in this article. It’s hard to believe 1994 is “peak CD”. I’d have expected that to be 1998-9. The PS1 didn’t come out until 1995 and must have represented a huge boost to both CDs and drives sold.
The internet wasn’t a great CD replacement for most people until well after the DVD had already supplanted it.
It's not explicitly stated, but in this article "CD-ROM" means, "Multimedia CD-ROM" that you'd buy for the sake of the multimedia content on it.
For applications and games, CD-ROMs would dominate the whole decade (and well into the mid 2000s really). But this kind of multimedia CD-ROM, which had content for the sake of content, definitely peaked earlier.
Peak of hype/excitement - many things have their technical peak (most units sold/most units in the field) after the real "popularity peak".
CD-ROM drives first started not being put in Mac laptops in 2008, so the peak "units sold" would have been somewhere in the early 2000s. But by then Internet speeds were fast enough and other methods existed, so they were waning in popularity/excitement.
I remember upgrading from a 4x to 24x, and being excited for the much faster data transfer rate. What I didn't anticipate was the fact that it sounded like a jet taking off when it spun that fast! I figured out how to ratchet it down to 4x and kept it there unless I knew I'd need a fast sustained rate for something like copying hundreds of megs. It wasn't worth the noise for smaller transfers.
I have to agree. My family didn't get its first CD player until 1996, and that was because it happened to come attached to a new Packard Bell computer with a Pentium 100.
Edit: I also remember that this computer came with a FMV game on CD. The gameplay and story were absolutely terrible, but the FMV sequences themselves were quite well done.
I think the USB "jump drive" was a stop gap between CD and internet. There were many times where we would download once, copy to jump drive, then walk it around as if it were a CD as the download was still really slow to do it on each machine
In 1994, home computers were getting more much popular, thanks in large part to the Eternal September having already begun and the proliferation of other national dialup services. People were finding interesting things with these new-to-them (expensive!) computers offline because even though dial-up was a prime reason they bought a computer to begin with, it very slow and was often still metered.
And by 1994, approximately every new big-box desktop computer came equipped with a CD-ROM drive. IDE CD-ROMs became well-entrenched around that time (which reduced costs by eliminating competing proprietary buses), and CD-ROMs held what was still a seemingly monumental amount of data. So they often used CD-ROMs to do much of their offline stuff.
Things like the Saturn, Dreamcast, PSX, and CD-i certainly helped move a non-trivial share of CD-ROM media, but the total number of these (pricey!) games sold is probably dwarfed by the ridiculous number of cheap shovelware PC releases. (And most people weren't reading like PSX discs in a PC -- piracy was a thing, but it required hardware hacking to work smoothly and successfully burning game discs was sometimes problematic enough that my friends considered it a black art.)
By 1996, things were changing in the PC space. Unlimited dialup was becoming common. Even AOL went from metered to flat-rate all you-can-eat in that year, and downloading larger things became a lot less of an ordeal.
The internet wasn’t a great CD replacement for most people until well after the DVD had already supplanted it.