Ah, the classic iMac-inspired debate: to floppy, or not to floppy? When Apple announced a new consumer Mac that would ship without a standard floppy drive, by some reactions out there you'd think they announced that the iMac would also ship with a required human treadmill for power and the Amazing Zero-Button Mouse™. The arguments "for" are compelling: 3.5" floppy drives are in just about every personal computer in use today, and omitting them in the iMac was sure to introduce compatibility problems in several environments; how would kids bring work home from school, for instance? And yet, the arguments "against" were pretty darn good, too: floppies are slow, unreliable, and ridiculously low-capacity for many uses in today's world. The question of which side is right will likely never be answered-- toss it in the "boxers or briefs?" file.

Luckily, just as with your choice of underwear style, you can also choose whether or not you want or need a floppy drive for your iMac. Several vendors are working on drives that you can hook up to your little blue buddy, whether it's by the plug-and-play glory of USB, or some much less friendly hack such as soldering a standard floppy connector to your iMac's motherboard. And while you'll have to shell out something like $100 for the joy of using all those AOL diskettes you found in your MacWarehouse shipments and the bottoms of cereal boxes, it's an option nonetheless. This is not news. What is news, after a fashion, is that if you're really enamored of the whole floppy scene, you can actually have two floppy drives hooked up to your iMac simultaneously. Really. MacCPU did it, for instance.

While we question the necessity of having one floppy drive for your iMac, we admit, there's something incredibly cool about having two of them. Actually, we suspect that you might be able to add as many USB floppy drives to your iMac as you want, though we're not at all sure of that fact. (MacCPU added a USB drive and also a standard drive soldered to the motherboard.) Imagine if it's true-- if you were rich and absurd, you could stun the the world with your 127-floppy drive iMac. We see a huge rack of USB floppy drives, and an iMac desktop filled with "Install AOL" floppy icons as far as the eye can see. What a beautiful dream...