Was Apple Innovator of Abolishing Floppy Drives?

Apple is known to be an innovator in the tech industry but was it Apple that came out the the first desktop/laptop to have no floppy disk drive advocating their uselessness against USB drives?

Was Apple the first? Not sure, but Floppy drives weren't replaced by USB drives, they were replaced by CD-ROM drives and then CD R/W drives and then USB drives become prolific and have taken over.

Apple was, however, the first company to ship a laptop and an all-in-one without a built-in CD-ROM/DVD drive..

Apple is quick to adopt new technologies and forgo "industry standards" to push the envelope. Just as quickly as they adopted FireWire, they left it for the next thing.

Now they are leaving other connectors behind with USB Type-C..

Raz0rEdge said:

Apple is quick to adopt new technologies and forgo "industry standards" to push the envelope. Just as quickly as they adopted FireWire, they left it for the next thing.

Now they are leaving other connectors behind with USB Type-C..

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My curiosity of this topic actually stemmed from the USB-C and the current criticism behind it. From it's universality and fast transfers, it is understandable it will leave current technologies obsolete. However, the major complaint is because it simply has only ONE port. Perhaps in the next Macbook Pro, it will have more than one USB-C port.

The Macbook Pro is supposed to be bigger than the Macbook or Macbook Air and thus might sport multiple ports. However, on the current Macbook you can grab the USB-C to Multiport adapter to get a charging port, HDMI and USB port.

With any transition, there'll be people who will praise, people who complain and people who just deal with it..

Raz0rEdge said:

With any transition, there'll be people who will praise, people who complain and people who just deal with it..

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Well said!

- Nick

All of the USB stick drives that I see are USB 2 or perhaps 3. When you want to use a standard USB stick on the new Macbook you would have to use a converter. Is this correct?

If that is the case, will manufacturers of USB sticks will start producing USB-C sticks? I am not sure if they have in fact started yet...

By the way, the Macbook Air has a screen of 13 inch while the new Macbook Air has a 12 screen inch. Why the downsize?

simonvee said:

All of the USB stick drives that I see are USB 2 or perhaps 3. When you want to use a standard USB stick on the new Macbook you would have to use a converter. Is this correct?

If that is the case, will manufacturers of USB sticks will start producing USB-C sticks? I am not sure if they have in fact started yet...

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USB 3, 2 and 1.1 are backward compatible with the USB Type-B connector. The new Macbook uses a the USB 3.1 spec which is backward compatible with all the previous versions once you get the Type-C to Type-B adapter.

It won't be long before vendors of USB devices start using the Type-C connector and the USB 3.1 spec to take advantage of the 5 Gbps speeds.

simonvee said:

By the way, the Macbook Air has a screen of 13 inch while the new Macbook Air has a 12 screen inch. Why the downsize?

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The display size of the new MacBook Air was not downsized. The resurrected new MacBook has a 12" display.

- Nick

Okay, if you want to get technical.

Why not 13 inches? Why 12?

simonvee said:

Okay, if you want to get technical.

Why not 13 inches? Why 12?

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Only Apple can answer that. There is now a Macbook Air 11", 13", Macbook 12", Macbook Pro 13", 15".

Choose the size and the power you want based on your use case..

Rumor has it however, that Apple will cease the MB Air (11,13) production. Thus, only 12 remains

simonvee said:

Okay, if you want to get technical.

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Not getting technical…just being factual. At this time there is no 12" MacBook Air!

So your statement above is wrong! The display size of the 13" MacBook Air was not downsized to 12"!

- Nick

Abolish and innovate are contradictory terms.

An innovator would not abolish anything.

An innovator introduces / provides new ideas, methods, or products.

A new method / product could make a previous method / product obsolete, but that would still not abolish the former method / product.

A manufacturer making the decision to stop including something on their product that they deem to be obsolete would not be considered an innovation.

The first Apple model with no floppy was the 1998 Bondi Blue iMac 233MHz model. Was it the first? Do a Google and see if anyone was earlier. Then in 1999 with the G4 desktop Zip drives made an appearance. What limited floppies was the 1.44MB capacity.

Very early low cost models ran two floppies and no hard drive!

This topic reminds me of why I do not miss floppies. Back in the "old" days when I was teaching computer science, our method of saving data was well...first on cassette tapes and then floppies.

We had floppies for our 5-1/4" IBM computers and for our Apple 2's. Difference was the Apple 2's would read and write one one side and you could turn them over and use the other side as well. Apple floppies had a cut out area on both sides for the reader/writer. You had to turn the floppy over to use the other side. At no time did I let the students take a floppy out of the lab. Their reliability was low anyway and they could not handle the mutilation the kids could dish out.

When we moved on to 3-1/2" floppies the reliability increases but the student amusement factor did to. They loved to flip the slide back and forth until the spring died or the metal piece fell off. Actually, most of the time they were still readable.

I actually had to dig out my portable floppy reader this past week as the secretary had a disk of old documents that need transferred to the storage server - just in case someone woke up and needed one of them. That is when I remembered just how unreliable they can become over time.

All that to say -- every time some new portable way of moving data comes out some adopted it and some don't. Some times the new technology goes by so fast we don't even remember what it was. I am just thrilled that each change has provided a more stable reliable storage medium that is faster.

Time will tell if the new USB-C will be here to stay or gone tomorrow.

Lisa

Thanks for the memories Lisa, and just to add another old technology, we had to fire up my old G3 DT PPC Mac yesterday and connect a SCSI Jaz drive I just happened to have, in order to reclaim some DOS data stuff for a client of my Apple Tech son who's visiting from the Yukon.

Believe it or not, all files are saved to USB flash drive and can be opened and read, even on my OS X 10.9.5 iMac. Thank gosh they were the compatible 1GB Jaz cartridges that the data had to be rescued from.