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Happy Endings Todd Stauffer
(tstauffer@webintosh.com)
iMac: Connect Different
It's interesting to think that 3.5" diskettes may soon look like 5.25" diskettes -- that is, they'll look like they're from another time. I'm not sure if the iMac will change our perceptions completely on its own, but the curvy little box may be the forerunner. The Internet, it seems, has taken over.
I'm looking down at my PowerCenter Pro right now. There are five floppies on the floor. One says "Geoworks Clipart" -- which I highly doubt. Another is the Kensington Mouseworks software, a pretty important installation for my Turbo Mouse, but one I've since upgraded from the Web site. Another floppy is the modem drivers for my PowerBook 540c -- I'm not even sure why it's over here.
Yes, I need to clean the floor of my office. But that's not the whole point.
Change is Good
Is it time to move on from the 3.5" floppy diskette? Maybe. Remember 5.25" floppies? Remember when they stopped putting them in PCs? It was a change, maybe somewhat radical, and people had to do some adjusting. But eventually things worked out.
It's certainly true that Apple, with the introduction of the floppy-diskless iMac, is setting a standard -- or trying to kill one. And it'll be interesting to see if they're ahead of the game or if it's about time. It's certainly true that I'm much more likely to e-mail a file than I am to try to distribute it on a diskette -- even my publishers agree with that one these days. (When I started writing books four years ago, diskettes were the only way they'd accept manuscripts.)
If you asked me right now to find you a blank floppy, it'd be a study in hilarity. Yes -- I need to clean my office. (Haven't we been through this?) But the fact is, just a few years back I would have had a fresh box of floppies at my fingertips. These days...not so much.
So, maybe we can live without floppies. We may have to think a couple of things through -- like dusting off some of the old diskettes and getting them burned onto CD-R or put on Zip disks or something -- but we'll survive. Kinko's will probably keep Macs around that feature a floppy drive for emergencies, at least for the near future.
Portly Persuasion
Which brings us to the other scary change in the iMac -- Universal Serial Bus (USB) connectors in place of, well, everything else. Two USB ports, daisy-chainable to allow you to print, hook up a scanner, plug in a digital camera add external storage and, yes, maybe even a floppy drive. In exchange there's no SCSI (pretty much the first Mac without it in fifteen years), no serial ports and no ADB. Yikes.
I think it's brilliant. The more I mull it over, the more I can already feel myself falling into the rhythm of it. Sure, it's going to take a while for all those USB peripherals to ramp up. But what's funny about the whole situation is the fact that USB makes SCSI look complicated. (Maybe it's funnier if, like me, you have the benefit of having spent the last four months writing an 800-page book about upgrading Macs.) No one knows if there are horrors lurking on the other side of USB, but I doubt it. It's certainly likely that there will be nothing called "USB Voodoo" that gets in the way of utterly simple and foolproof plug-and-play.
That's progress. That's a change for the better. Consider, if you will -- what do you tell your PC friends is laughable on their Wintel systems and simply works on a Mac? Plug-and-play. Now, with just one port, one type of cabling to buy and one way to connection tons of different peripherals, USB just made Mac plug-and-play that much easier.
And USB should be completely cross-platform, allowing us to potentially use PC peripherals, in all their abundance, with nary a concern for compatibility -- we'll just download the Mac drivers from the manufacturer's Web site (since it won't come on floppies) and we're done.
Still concerned
In spite of the Macs I'm used to, I definitely want an iMac. It might not be the right decision for me (my next machine will more likely be one of the WallStreet PowerBooks), but I'd love to have that little guy sitting at home on an apartment-wide network somehow -- maybe as my "living room" machine for doing Quicken during X-Files. Somehow I'll get one of these guys.
But more important might be integrating the design specs and forward thinking into bigger versions of the iMac -- one that can accept a 3Dfx card, video in and a cable tuner. In fact, I'm concerned that this first iMac might be better off with just one slot -- a TV tuner/video in slot that makes this the ideal system for a dorm room, even for a broadcast or film major.
Yeah, I know they called it MacTV. But I don't think it was a half bad idea. And if Apple puts out a second iMac with video-in and a cable tuner for, say, $300 more, it might really move.
Other than that, though, I've got fewer and fewer complaints every day. The iMac is exciting, not just because a lot of people might buy one, but because it does move us forward in that way that Apple has been known to do, sporadically, over the past 20 years. Remember when Byte Magazine said, in effect, to see the future of the PC, look at the Mac?
The future, it seems, is a slightly translucent shade of green.
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