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Home
Origins
of the Floppy Drive
Woz's
Floppy Drive Miracle
Lisa,
the Apple III, and the Twiggy Fiasco
Mass
storage and the Macintosh Project
A
Floppy for Macintosh
Manual
vs. Auto Eject: The Great Floppy Debate
iMac
and the End of an Era
Sources
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iMac and the End
of an Era
On May 6, 1998, Apple made two product announcements that spelled
the beginning of the end for the floppy drive in Macintosh computers.
The iMac
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The
first was the iMac, a powerful G3 Mac in an approachable blue case.
The machine instantly took the national spotlight as the cool technology
du jour, but Apple immediately drew flak for excluding features traditionally
found on Macs such as serial ports, a SCSI port, an ADB port, and
a floppy drive. The lack of a floppy drive spurred a plenitude of
media and public criticism of Apple's apparent foolishness. Members
of the Mac media (including myself)
struck back with articles demonstrating the increasing irrelevance
of a 1.4 MB floppy in a world of 100 MB Zip disks, 600 MB CD-ROMs,
and 4 GB hard drives. |
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The
other announcement of the day was of the PowerBook G3 Series. The
notebook's large screen, sleek styling, and speedy performance garnered
most of the attention, but few took interest in the fact that the
PowerBook G3 Series was Apple's first full-size notebook computer
sold without a floppy drive. As Henry Bortman wrote in Macworld's
June 1998 issue, "Curiously, a floppy-disk drive is optional,
but you'd be ill-advised to leave it out." The exclusion of
the floppy drive on the PowerBook was not merely a "curious"
decision, but an intentional move by Apple to phase out the use
of floppies in Macintosh computers.
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PowerBook
G3 Series
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Imation
External USB SuperDisk Drive
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Today, floppy drives are still available for the Mac, primarily in
the form of third-party external USB devices. The floppy also lives
on in the form of the 3M SuperDisk drive, which is compatible with
high-density floppies as well as with 120 MB SuperDisks. However,
Apple has made it clear that it no longer considers floppies a necessary
component of a Macintosh. With the announcement of the Blue and White
G3 systems on January 5, 1999, Apple eliminated the floppy from its
mainstream line of desktop computers. Apple is not producing an expansion
bay floppy drive as an option for the latest update to the PowerBook
G3 Series. An the company's eagerly anticipated consumer portable,
due this summer, will almost certainly not have a floppy drive.
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The ostensible arrogance of Apple's decision may be explained through its
popular "Think
Different" television ad:
"About
the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things.
They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy
ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think
they can change the world are the ones that do. "
Apple clearly sees itself as much more than just a computer company. By
dumping technologies that it perceives as obsolete (like the floppy drive)
in favor of the latest innovations, the company attempts to assert itself
as an agent of technological progress.
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