4 ms·
Is it a fair comparison? I don’t know, you tell me, on the basis of the actual facts. When the iMac was released without a floppy drive in 1998, it was launched
by qubex 7y ago
Is it a fair comparison? I don’t know, you tell me, on the basis of the actual facts. When the iMac was released without a floppy drive in 1998, it was launched with a CD-ROM (and, only in the DV models, with a DVD-ROM) drive, which meant it was not able to write to CDs or DVDs.
Flash drives were first released in 2000.
So... were “better alternatives” available? Yes. Were they incorporated onto the machine? No.
The idea was that almost all output would occur through the network, and that was a fairly prescient idea. If you wanted writable media, you had to add it externally — via a USB 1.1 connection, if memory serves (though maybe the machine also had a FireWire port, I can’t quite remember).
The point was that the floppy drive wasn’t removed because they replaced it with “better alternatives” on the machine, the point was that they thought that obsolete media had no place on modern almost-turn-of-the-millennium platforms.
I’d argue that there’s a pretty good parallel here.
- bscphil 7y agoIronically, if you're right about the order of events, I agree with you about the parallel being pretty good, but disagree with you about the implications of the argument. They should have waited until it was possible to include some form of writable media support on the iMac to remove the floppy drive. (This wouldn't have taken very long, however, unlike the headphone jack, which is likely to remain the superior audio connector for consumers longer than the iPhone remains a product.)
- jmiserez 7y agoThe original iMac 233MHz did not have Firewire, only the later "DV" (digital video) models did. But it had USB (instead of ADB), and the Iomega Zip 100MB drives were a popular alternative to floppy disks for personal use. New Mac-compatible software was already available on CDs, so the lack of a CD burner or floppy drive was not actually that much of an issue in practice.