USB 1.1 was already more than good enough for flash drives, since flash drives competed with floppy disks (way slower and poor capacity and reliability), Zip dr

USB 1.1 was already more than good enough for flash drives, since flash drives competed with floppy disks (way slower and poor capacity and reliability), Zip drives (not much faster even in the ideal case, and slower if they were parallel port), CD-Rs (need burning software so not available on public/school/office computers, slow workflow, slow burning, expensive single-use discs). Although I think the most-sold device in those days of USB were external USB floppy drives for all the iMac users who needed to read floppies. I think perhaps the iMac gave USB the customer base (of people who had no other option) to get the prices of chipsets and devices down to the point where it could also be accepted by the PC market.