You know, the only thing kicking up more debate than the iMac's lack of a floppy drive is its inclusion of a 33.6 Kbps modem. Since the "i" in iMac reportedly stands for "Internet" and Apple is strongly targeting the cute blue lump at computerless homes who want Internet access, why stack the deck against themselves by including only a 33.6 modem when the rest of the world is going 56K? (Never mind the fact that a huge number of people can't achieve 56K connections over their phone lines anyway-- it's the marketing we're talking about, here.)

Well, Reality has some interesting light to shed on the subject. According to them, Apple actually plans to ship the iMac with a software-based modem, like the Geoports that shipped with many of the PowerPC Performas. This would help keep costs down, and more importantly, allows Apple to upgrade all iMac modems simply by releasing a software upgrade. Apple's Telecom software currently maxes out at 33.6, which probably explains the listing of a 33.6 modem in the iMac's specs, but they can certainly rev the software if they need to. In fact, it seems entirely likely that Apple is quietly planning to do just that (though probably not for the Geoports). We think we read somewhere that buried deep within the pre-release developer version of Mac OS 8.5 is the string "iMac 56K internal modem," but we might have been hallucinating.

All we can say is, we hope Apple's right about this whole software modem thing. We at AtAT used a Geoport software-based modem for well over a year on our PowerTower Pro. We frequently got connection speeds of 31.2 (and occasionally achieved 33.6 connections) when dialing in to our ISP; everything seemed great. But then we recently switched to a hardware-based Global Village K56Flex modem, and even though we can never connect at anything better than 28.8 for some reason, the actual throughput performance is easily 50-100% better than we had with the Geoport. Even on our respectably-speedy 200 MHz 604e, the Geoport software just couldn't compete with a hardware chipset. It'll be interesting to see if Apple manages to achieve decent throughput in the iMac's software modem; otherwise people who use the system are just going to think Macs are slow at Internet access. (Reality claims that the iMac software modem should only chew up 3-4% of the CPU time when in use; we'll see.)