For crying out Pete's sake, we continue to be stunned and amazed by the death grip that most people seem to have on their floppy disks. Based purely on the reactions we've witnessed from potential buyers getting iMac demos in the stores, we'd have to guess that if Apple had included a floppy drive in the system and kept the price at the $1299 mark, all of the additional sales would have made back the extra expense. The lack of a floppy drive seems to be the number one deterrent causing interested parties to decide against getting an iMac.

Yes, we fully understand that some people really do need floppy drives. Students, for example, might not have school net access to email their projects to their iMacs at home and back again (and do you really want to have to rely on your ISP when you're under deadline?). Limitations like that are why even ingenious solutions like the upcoming www.iMacFloppy.com, a cool free "virtual floppy" that grants 4MB of storage space on a secure internet server, aren't going to fill the need for everyone. But if we had to hazard a guess (and faithful viewers are well aware that we aren't averse to such things), we'd have to say that a good solid two-thirds of the people complaining that the iMac has no floppy drive don't really need one in the first place, but haven't really considered that the Internet is a suitable substitute in many (though not all) scenarios. Besides, $90 USB floppy drives will be shipping any day, now, for that segment of the population who really needs them.

And of course there are also the true psychotics out there who not only discovered that the iMac's motherboard has the circuitry necessary to support a standard Apple SuperDrive floppy, but actually grabbed a soldering iron, voided the hell out of their warranties by affixing the necessary socket, and now have a functioning floppy drive sitting ugly and bare-ass naked on the desk next to their gleaming iMacs, connected by an umbilical length of ribbon cable. Yes, we're suitably impressed at the technical prowess and the sheer guts involved to do such a thing, but does anyone really need a floppy drive that badly? Don't get us wrong-- it's unquestionably a neat hack, and we can understand the "we did it because we could" mentality, but if anyone out there is seriously performing this iMac surgery because they absolutely positively could not wait another second to add a floppy drive to their systems, we'd like to remind them that there's a big, bright world out there (so we're told) to enjoy until Imation and Newer Technology ship their USB floppies. Breathe deeply; it won't be long now.