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Flip-Floppying Around (5/7/98)
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Okay, yes, as of right now, the iMac has no floppy drive. The debate over this issue is pretty fierce. We've heard from viewers who say that the lack of a floppy drive could be a serious roadblock on the path into consumer's homes, because the kids won't be able to transfer their files between school and home, and the parents won't be able to bring home that proposal they were working on to finish up at night. On the other hand, we've also heard from plenty of viewers who say that getting rid of the floppy drive was the best design move Apple's made in a while; after all, if you only need to transfer 1.4 MB of data, why not just email it? (That argument may hold pretty well for the parents transferring files to and from work, but for the kids in grade school it may not be a viable option.)
We can certainly see both sides of the argument, which is why we continue to hope that Apple will accommodate both viewpoints by selling an external USB floppy drive to households who want one. We were happy to see on Mac OS Rumors today that Apple's hardware developers are "playing with" a USB floppy drive, but then we saw Apple's official statement on MacCentral that plainly states, "Apple will not be offering a floppy disk drive configuration or external floppy disk drive for iMac." That would seem to be the final answer, but there have been enough times when Mac OS Rumors was right, and the official Apple spokespeople were wrong, to give us pause.
Actually, there's another peripheral missing on the iMac that's almost as important as the floppy drive-- the Zip. Without a SCSI port, there's no way to connect a Zip drive to the iMac. That could be a real problem; why have a kick-ass multimedia system that's just begging to be used to create nifty graphics and sound, if the only way you can get your work off of it is to email it via a 33.6 modem? (Yes, we know about the ethernet connection, but most households that would buy an iMac wouldn't have another machine to connect it to.) Here's hoping Iomega comes up with a USB Zip drive, complete with Mac drivers, sometime soon.
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And Now For A Word From Our Sponsors |
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 5/7/98 episode: May 7, 1998: For a computer that's still 90 days away, the iMac is taking the world by storm. Meanwhile, debate over the usefulness of the floppy drive (as well as confusion over whether or not one will be made available for the iMac) rages on, while a sharp-eyed faithful viewer spots something fishy in a CompUSA store-within-a-store PR photo; is there no end to the frightening conspiracy it reveals?...
Other scenes from that episode: 682: iKnow That iWant One (5/7/98) As we're sure you've noticed, everybody on the planet is writing about the iMac, Apple's newly-unveiled consumer-level Mac due for arrival within the next 90 days. And the good news is, just about all of the mainstream press has been positive... 684: The Conspiracy Continues (5/7/98) AtAT's viewers continue to amaze us with their sharp eyes and commendably overdeveloped senses of paranoia. This time it's faithful viewer "Edward Pollard," who risked life and limb to alert us to a continuing conspiracy that has surfaced on AtAT several times in the past...
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