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That's funny ! The iMac was ahead of it's time and that guy was behind the times....and he honestly thinks he was the target "potential" customer. That's even funnier. The iMac was targeted at non-Apple users to make the switch. It was the first home use PC Apple ever made that was competitive.

Many of the industry analysts at the time were saying Apple would be out of business within a year or two also. Where are they now ? Unemployed I hope !

Here it is almost 10 years later and where's the Floppy drive ?
Where's the SCSI drives and SCSI port ?

And it's connectivity to a NEWTON ? Yea, right !

It's a good thing that guy is not in charge of R&D at Apple or we would all be buying $100 adapters to attach that old 5.25" diskette drives to the new Mac or trying to emulate System 7.


This is my favorite quote: "and using non-standard connectors to
connect to such things as printers and Newtons" Apple rarely used "standard" connectors until the iMac. Ok, the power cords were "standard" but that was about it. The industry standard printer connection was Parallel or USB already and SCSI wasn't standard on any home PC except a Mac.

I wonder if he's still using the 7500 or whatever "do-all Mac" he had at the time ?

I was working at CompUSA the summer and fall the iMac was introduced. I was the one and only full time "Mac Guy" in the store which meant I dealt with most of the people who bought Macs.
By far and I mean really far, the most common accessory I sold with a new iMac was an external floppy drive.
Many I sold post iMac purchase because the buyer hadn't noticed that there was no floppy, had a "WTF??" moment when they got home and came back for a solution. We had a harder time keeping the usb floppy drives in stock than we did the iMacs themselves as they had been a real slow moving product previously.
The lack of a floppy didn't kill the iMac of course but anyone who thinks that was a positive attribute people were seeking is nuts.
The real selling point of the iMac was how affordible it was at introduction. In 1998 the $1000 barrier had yet to be broken at retail so the $1299 price tag on the iMac was one of the very cheapest complete systems we had in the store. The iMac was fully $1000 cheaper than the lowest price G3 tower. If the same relative pricing were on the iMac today it would have the iMac going for around $500.
The most "revolutionary" aspect of the original iMac was the price, not the form factor.

Last edited by Pariah (2007-09-04 6:18 am)

thelegendofjohn wrote:

At the same time though, somebody had to do away with the floppy, or we'd still be using them today.  I'm glad Apple took the leap.

Nah, the floppy was going to die a natural death anyways. People give Apple way too much credit for driving tech.
I have a different view on the situation because I was a front line Mac service person who had to spand alot of time handholding people thru the difficult process of transferring files from their old Mac to their new iMac. Keep in mind that iMacs had not one single  port or media type in common with most older Macs they were replacing. Very, very few "consumer" Macs had ethernet.
Riddle me this: How does one transfer files between a Mac and an iMac when one has only serial ports and scsi, while the other only has USB1?  Bear in mind that at the time 56k modems were only just hitting the market and most email services had a limit of one or 2 meg of storage.
It was a big cluster smurf.

Pariah wrote:

thelegendofjohn wrote:

At the same time though, somebody had to do away with the floppy, or we'd still be using them today.  I'm glad Apple took the leap.

Nah, the floppy was going to die a natural death anyways. People give Apple way too much credit for driving tech.
I have a different view on the situation because I was a front line Mac service person who had to spand alot of time handholding people thru the difficult process of transferring files from their old Mac to their new iMac. Keep in mind that iMacs had not one single  port or media type in common with most older Macs they were replacing. Very, very few "consumer" Macs had ethernet.
Riddle me this: How does one transfer files between a Mac and an iMac when one has only serial ports and scsi, while the other only has USB1?  Bear in mind that at the time 56k modems were only just hitting the market and most email services had a limit of one or 2 meg of storage.
It was a big cluster smurf.

I agree it is difficult, and am currently dealing with this same issue while trying to get some old pictures of some of my old Mac's.  But my point is that at some point this difficult transition period had to happen, somebody had to stop including floppy drives.  It seems smart of Apple to me to have done it with the iMac.  They were aiming to make a big splash with it, bright colors and all, leaving out the floppy made it cause an even bigger splash.  Some people liked it, some obviously didn't, but I feel like it had to happen, and in the process gave the iMac more attention.  Seems like it worked out...

Pariah wrote:

Riddle me this: How does one transfer files between a Mac and an iMac when one has only serial ports and scsi, while the other only has USB1?

With a CD-burner in the PPC. Or any number of different adapters that showed up after the iMac was released.

Besides......

iMacs were not intended for Mac owners anyway. They were intended to get non-Apple users to switch and the price was part of the temptation. And since cost was a major part of the iMac's design parameters anything they could save money on by excluding was a plus. The floppy drive costs money and Apple wisely decided to axe it long before anyone in the home PC market was doing it. Apple doesn't drive tech, they just have more balls. Sometimes it works out for Apple, sometimes it doesn't.

And Macs have always cost more and Mac users know that and bought them anyway. The cost of a Mac was not a deal breaker for Mac owners. They still bought Macs when there were much cheaper machines running Windoze available.

Not to mention floppy disks sucked ! And failed a lot. I lost many files to floppies dying long before they should have. It got to the point I would copy everything to a second floppy just in case the first one died.

floppies were useful back in the day, but the writing was on the wall when games starting coming on 25 separate floppies

KrowMagnum wrote:

thelegendofjohn wrote:

KrowMagnum wrote:

...or trying to emulate System 7.

I am emulating system 7 right now!  Purely for nostalgic reasons, but still...

Are you doing your post running System 7 ?

Believe it or not, there are still some hardcore Mac users who surf the net with System 6 and 7 on old Macs. They mostly do it as a challenge but it can be done.

System 7 is much more fun on a old Mac. I had a few old dogs that ran System 6 and 7 and it was fun to play around with them because I started with Mac OS 8 and the older Systems were amusing to me. There are lots of old 68k Macs around cheap or free if you really want to play with System 7.

No, my post was from OS X.  7 is being run under SheepShaver just for kicks and to play some old LucasArts games, but I do have an old Performa that's up and running with system 7, and an SE running system 6.  They are fun for sure.

KrowMagnum wrote:

Pariah wrote:

Riddle me this: How does one transfer files between a Mac and an iMac when one has only serial ports and scsi, while the other only has USB1?

With a CD-burner in the PPC. Or any number of different adapters that showed up after the iMac was released.

Besides......

iMacs were not intended for Mac owners anyway. They were intended to get non-Apple users to switch and the price was part of the temptation. And since cost was a major part of the iMac's design parameters anything they could save money on by excluding was a plus. The floppy drive costs money and Apple wisely decided to axe it long before anyone in the home PC market was doing it. Apple doesn't drive tech, they just have more balls. Sometimes it works out for Apple, sometimes it doesn't.

And Macs have always cost more and Mac users know that and bought them anyway. The cost of a Mac was not a deal breaker for Mac owners. They still bought Macs when there were much cheaper machines running Windoze available.

Not to mention floppy disks sucked ! And failed a lot. I lost many files to floppies dying long before they should have. It got to the point I would copy everything to a second floppy just in case the first one died.

First off, if you think burned CDs are more reliable than floppies you are in for a rude awakening. Pressed CDs have a relatively long life but burned ones seem to begin loosing data after 2 or 3 years.
As for using a CD burner on the older Mac?? Um...in 1998 burners were brand new on the market and were extremely expensive, $500 to $700. Practically no one owned one yet, that came several years latter.
I dunno...I just can't be convinced that simply dropping a capability while not replacing it with anything represents "innovation".

benightedbastard wrote:

Surely you would have seen a lot of people come in and ask where the hard drive was?

Not too long ago, my brother asked where the computer was on the post G4 iMacs.

Pariah wrote:

First off, if you think burned CDs are more reliable than floppies you are in for a rude awakening. Pressed CDs have a relatively long life but burned ones seem to begin loosing data after 2 or 3 years.
As for using a CD burner on the older Mac?? Um...in 1998 burners were brand new on the market and were extremely expensive, $500 to $700. Practically no one owned one yet, that came several years latter.
I dunno...I just can't be convinced that simply dropping a capability while not replacing it with anything represents "innovation".

First off CD blanks are more reliable than a floppy disk. Not permanent but more reliable nonetheless. If only because there are no moving parts in a CD. The question was not about long term reliability, it was about transferring files.......

And as I'm looking through my 1997 Macworld ads I see Lacie was selling a CD-RW for $399, not $500-700.00 and that was 1997. The prices in 1998 were less than that.
Sure there were some $700 burners but there were also $300 burners and that wasn't that much for fairly new technology considering a 15 inch Apple monitor was $400.00 too.

"Innovation" does not have to be a improvement of something old. If innovation was tied only to what was existing there would never have been an Apple computer in the first place.

There would be no true innovation, only upgrades and reworked tired old BS. (ie: Microsoft Windows)Technology can only go so far in one direction. Sometimes you have to start over from scratch in a new direction. That's true innovation.

OS X Is innovation, OS 9 wasn't.

dvpierce wrote:

True. The 233-333 iMacs should have had SCSI.

True, but they would have cost more and keeping the cost down was crucial to the design of the iMac. Something had to be sacrificed,  I'm just glad there was a CD-ROM in the iMac and they could still sell it for less than $1,000.00.

I never would have bought an iMac but it had nothing to do with the lack of a floppy drive. It just wasn't useful for me because it was a throw-away computer with virtually no upgrade path available. Ram in an iMac at the time was maxed at 128MB and that wasn't enough for me. Even with a floppy drive and a SCSI port the iMac would not have been something I would buy.

I did convince a couple of friends to buy an iMac when they were released,  but the iMac suited to their needs for an easy computer to use for email or whatever. Neither of the new iMac owners ever owned a computer before,  didn't know what a floppy was, and SCSI was a someone who needed a bath. One still uses his iMac to this day.

I think it was very insightful that Apple saw SCSI and floppy drives were on a dead end path in the home PC business. Just as it was insightful to include a hard drive in the SE FDHD when everyone said we will never need hard disk storage on Mac. If Apple had always listened to "everybody" they would not be here today.

Think Different...........

thelegendofjohn wrote:

Did the first iMac have a CD burner?  I can't remember.

I know my beige G3 didn't, but that was slightly older.

CD burners didn't show up until 2001 in the Special 500MHz iMacs like the Flower Power and Dalmatian. The DVD-ROM was in the 400MHz iMac first. After the 500MHz iMacs I think it was an option for either drive.