I remember everyone thought it was crazy for the iMac to not have a floppy drive. But also that there were a lot of Bondi blue USB floppy drives around for the next few years.
People talk about how the iMac drove the USB market, which it did (how many PCs were seen with "iMac looking" USB devices for a decade afterwards), but the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport.
Many iMac users started to transfer files via email and other tools; before that things like FTP were really in the weeds.
Now most people needing to transfer a file to another computer in their house will upload it to some server thousands of miles away as it's "easiest".
> the real thing I feel it drove was using the Internet as a main file transport.
I don't remember it that way. Remember, the iMac came out in 1998. It shipped with a 56k modem (which was still new at the time!), and most users would use that to connect to the Internet -- higher-speed connections were essentially nonexistent at the time. While attaching files to email messages was technically possible, the combination of slow Internet connections and small mailbox size limits (often as small as a few megabytes) made this impractical for most users.
No -- what the removal of the floppy disk drive from the iMac primarily drove was the use of other removable storage, like Zip media and USB flash drives. It wouldn't be until considerably later that casually transferring files over the Internet would become feasible.
I remember, in 1999, my friends using a website called imacfloppy.com to transfer files to themselves via the internet. I suppose it was the dropbox of the day.
You're probably thinking of home use (where, if you're buying a Mac, you're probably also thinking ahead and investing into something to move its files around); or maybe university lab use.
I bet the GP, meanwhile, is thinking about (pre-university) educational use-cases. Public-school computer labs were a big part of Apple's market share from the late '80s until the early '00s.
When I was small (late '80s), we had a single Apple II per classroom. Those machines has no networking or storage, other than the 5.25" drive. Usually we weren't saving anything, just using stateless educational software/games; but every once in a while, we'd all be run through some program, which would save our work to a single shared classroom "state" floppy.
Later, we had computer labs full of Macs (Color Classic IIs, if I recall), but still no computer network — nor assigned seating in the lab — so saving data on the lab computers themselves was pointless/untenable. Instead, we were expected to bring a 3.5" floppy disk to school with us to save our work on. It was a school supply!
And that's basically how computing in schools continued to work, riiiiight up until the iMac era. Which is both when there began to be no economical data storage medium you could expect every five-year-old's parents to easily purchase as a school supply (flash drives were "pay a premium for portability" products in 1998, not the commodities they are now); and also when computer local-networking stacks began to really be standardized (no more AppleTalk, only Ethernet), lowering the barriers to schools building IT competence, and so enabling even elementary schools to start setting up computer networks, with user directories, roaming user accounts, and central file storage.
But despite now having a place to save things at school that didn't require any disks, you were suddenly put in a tough spot if you wanted to bring work home with you. If you weren't one of the rich kids with a USB stick, then email was pretty much the only solution! (Not necessarily actually sending email; I recall people opening webmail, attaching documents, and then saving the message as a Draft.)
Yeah, the disposable nature of floppies was key; sure they were small, but if you lost one you didn't cry all night (unless it had your only copy of your thesis on it).
That wasn't really solved until the era of the "affordable" CD burner, so there was a moderately painful 1998-2001 or so era where you had to do some tricks often or trust someone with a relatively expensive piece of equipment.
Even in 2000 a burner was around $250 or more, but spending $15 or whatever on a ZIP disk was painful even then, if you weren't sure you'd get it back.
LaTeX and git work really well and you can push to somewhere remote as a backup (and will usually retain the ability to pick through the ref-logs if something goes wrong). LaTeX is super super popular in the academic world and it wouldn't be surprising for a thesis to be required to be submitted in LaTeX anyway.
Github has a word-by-word visual diff thing that would be really nice since usually you don't want to consider whitespace to be semantically significant in the context of a diff, eg word wrapping.
The business world likes to fret over every detail and I get it but a lot of powerpoint presentations/etc could really be done pretty simply with a latex template, and git checkin/merging/etc is sooo nice. Let alone chapter material or stuff that needs equations/figures, a bibliography manager, table of contents, etc. Super super nice for cross referencing, kind of like a generalized form of javadocs, and it does layout pretty well with some help, and it doesn't randomly spazz out and break borders etc.
Etckeeper is really nice for change tracking for your /etc folder too... love being able to look back and see if there's been any changes that might have broken stuff, get a log of package updates etc.
That's my recollection as well. I was in college around that time and my primary way of saving data to move between computers was a Zip drive disk (since all the computers in the labs had one), then a USB flash drive with maybe 32MB of space (worked fine when moving files between Macs - I don't think the PCs had USB ports at the time).
"Cloud storage" was definitely not a common thing at the time.
The PC I purchased in late 1996 had USB 1.0 ports. USB 1.1 came out in 1998 around the same time as the iMac. The new PC I bought in fall 1998 had USB 1.1 ports. Most new PCs at that time were coming with USB ports. Maybe your school just had older PCs.
Schools have never been known for keeping up with the latest in computing hardware. The 90s were no exception.
Besides -- early on, a lot of PC makers put USB ports on the back of the computer, since that's where all the other ports were. It took some time for PC makers to realize that USB ports weren't just for permanently installed equipment like printers or modems, and to start redesigning cases or using drive bay breakouts to make the ports more accessible.
The 90s was a really weird time. One school that was ”richer” would have bought early Macs and still be using them, whereas a poorer school wouldn’t have been able to buy until the time of the iMac and handily defeat the older machines.
I remember when my school had its first full sized 'Computer Lab'. As a fifth grade, our class was given a scavenger hunt.. One of the questions was. What is the presidents dog name? As a power user I typed in whitehouse dot com.. This resulted in me showing all the people around me the landing page for well a pornish site, and then questioning the teacher about it when they finally came by.
From my group I was one of two people who had a Zip drive (the other guy had a Jazz™ drive too) and we usually dragged the parallel port drive along with the discs.
But that was just when things like IRC fileservs and Napster (1999) started to take off which was the main medium of "file sharing" at that point (for local transfers networking gear had dropped significantly, the iMac had ethernet built in, everyone had some sort of yumcha network setup - often sharing that 56k connection. 56kbps is 18 gigabytes a month, and the proliferation of "unlimited" internet was right around that time.
The final nail in the coffin was affordable CD-Rs. Once those started to proliferate (rip mix burn) you finally had disposable removable storage you could give people. Floppies were that, but zip and USB were not.
They weren't the first with gigabit Ethernet in a laptop as I recall, but they were fairly early, and that made a huge difference.
Having a decent router available also helped. I'm still pretty miffed at whoever axed the Airport group. I kept expecting it to come back. Or for the apple TV to sprout router functionality. Something.
The worst thing about it is that I now have to carry 3 pairs of shitty Bluetooth headphones instead of one good pair because switching connected devices is such a pain that this is literally much easier to live with. I hate it. Bring the headphone jack back.
AirPods solved this for me. I'm not sure exactly what apple did that is different from the regular bluetooth audio spec, but the seemless integration and transition between devices is fantastic
Do note that using the microphone will degrade the playback and recording quality to rotary-phone-levels. For the sake of everyone in your Zoom call: please buy a $50 wired microphone if you're going to spend $150 on Airpods.
I did not know that, I'll have to check next time it comes up. To be clear, I use them as a backup, like when I'm traveling and didn't bring my normal headset.
It's specifically only an issue when your Airpods are being used for playback and recording. If you're simply listening to the meeting on your Airpods and using your Macbook microphone, you probably won't notice. Most people don't seem to set that up though, which leads to the cellphone-quality audio that people associate with wireless earbuds.
It's not an Apple issue. Works perfectly when you use a Mac + AirPods. The issue is when you try to use Windows. All bluetooth headphones I've tried (with microphones) sound horrible with Windows, if they work at all.
Airpods do not have better duplex audio on MacOS. The problem is that AAC cannot support high-quality recording and playback at 330kbps, so it has to degrade the quality of the recording stream to fit within the Bluetooth bandwidth. MacOS might default to using your laptop's microphone, but that's something you can also set up on Windows. Hell, it should be the default on Windows as long as you have AAC support installed - there's no reason a headset should be using SBC over Bluetooth unless the last version of Windows you used was XP.
I actually normally use my headphones through my phone, but I doubt ios is doing anything differently compared to macos.
The point isn't that there's only so much bandwidth for mic + headphones, the point is that the bluetooth stack on Windows just doesn't work. I tried connecting multiple bluetooth headphones (Airpods, Beats, Sony) to a new Windows 11 computer (Microsoft Surface). I only got one set paired and it defaulted to the headset profile immediately. It was horrible. The others never connected or the connection was unreliable.
The process was so bad, my son recently bought a set of wired headphones just to avoid the entire issue.
If you've never been in the Apple garden and used headphones + device, it's a night and day difference in experience.
I haven't used Windows in years, it's a pretty bad point-of-reference for me. However, I can say pretty confidently that iOS, Android and Linux all have more reliable Bluetooth stacks than MacOS. In fact, the stack on Linux is so good that I don't lust for Airpods at all. I just turn on my Sony XM4s and it automatically connects to all my devices. No muss, no fuss.
Oh, and neither MacOS or iOS support high-bitrate audio playback. They're not even on the same eschelon as Android or Linux, which support codecs like LDAC and APTx, with 3x the bandwidth of Apple's 330kbps AAC stream. Come to think of it, if Apple switched to APTx for their newer Airpods, they would have no problem recording and playing audio back at the same time.
All bluetooth devices do this on all platforms when you use both sound + microphone. It has to split the available bandwidth between the two.
My Sony headphones will go into "headset mode" on Windows and Mac and sounds horrible in both, just have to make sure no programs are trying to use the headphones' microphone and then you get full bandwidth for audio.
>That’s not a problem with AirPods. You pair them with one device and they are automatically paired with all of your devices and auto switch
And how do AirPods know whether I want to use them to take a conference call on my work laptop, listen to a YouTube video on the personal laptop, or watch a quick video my friend sent me on WhatsApp on my phone?
Do they have telepathic powers that I don't know of?
Oh, and will they prioritize the work phone call over an incoming call on my personal phone too, unless it's something really important?
Simple, if I am listening to a podcast and then I take a conference call on my computer, they automatically switch. If I am watching something on my iPad, and I answer a call on my iPhone, they automatically switch.
If I’m actively playing a video or listening to audio on my Mac, my iPhone, or my iPad and I put my AirPods in my ear, sound is automatically rerouted to my AirPods from the device.
If I’m watching a video on my iPad and then I click on a video on my iPhone, they switch.
My AppleTVs don’t automatically switch. An AppleTV is a shared experience most of the time.
But even if you turn automatic switching off, I still don’t have to pair my AirPods with my iPhone, iPad, Watch, two AppleTVs and my Mac individually. I can just click a drop down and they automatically show up on each device or any new device I use with my AppleID.
In all the pairs I own it's some arcane combination to enter pairing mode, and then have you tried adding BT headphones to windows when the same ones were paired in the past? You have to remove them first then go back into pairing mode again. It's more bullshit than I'm willing to deal with. With a jack you plug them in and they work.
If they are(or were) connected to my laptop and phone and both devices are nearby, then they will default to my phone. There is nothing I can do on my laptop to force them to connect there instead(and believe me I tried). I have to either remove them on my phone(pain) or enter pairing mode and re-pair them with the laptop(even greater pain).
Work phone, personal phone, work laptop, personal laptop, tablet, desktop.
Good luck pressing that button five dozen times to take the call on your work phone after using them with your desktop, only to find out that your glorious BT device only has 4 memory slots like a videogame from 1991, and unlinked your work phone when you used them with your tablet.
My Samsung Galaxy A22 has headphone jack (which gets used all the time), dual SIM, dedicated SD card slot, NFC, all day battery, and 5G support.
It came out this year — there are plenty of sane manufacturers releasing phones with features that people want out there.
Use cases for 3.5mm jack that Bluetooth can't handle:
* Never having to worry about headphones running out of charge
* Zero added latency - critical for music making apps (somewhat remediated with latest BT versions, but good luck finding latency specs on the box)
* Switching between devices instantly (work/personal laptop and phone) - especially not fun if you use more than 2 of them
The last issue is especially annoying. It's 2022, I should be able to pair my headphones instantly by tapping them to the device I want to pair them to, without screens and buttons. Accelerometers exist. Proximity sensors exist.
But noooo, apparently, UX is not a consideration in the design of this godforesaken protocol.
agreed. until bluetooth earphone batteries can go for a few days between recharging, and can quick charge in, say, 15 min or so, I'll keep my wired. I also have AirPod Pros, but I keep my Bose qc20 around and still find myself using them multiple times per month when the APP go low (never get more than around 3 hrs from them).
I only recently discovered why bluetooth isn't a particularly good option. I'd paired my good headphones with my phone, but all of a sudden wanted headphones for other devices, and having one set of earphones paired with multiple devices is a deeply flawed experience. First, you can only connect to one or two, second, mine kept telling me it was disconnecting and reconnecting to the other device while I was walking around listening to audio. That is extremely distracting.
I have my AirPods and my Beats Flex (better for traveling, if they fall out, they just end up around my neck) “paired” to six devices. If the auto switching is a problem, you can disable it and still have your AirPods paired to multiple devices
Unfortunately I have not jumped on the airPod bandwagon. I got into the Shure ecosystem and their solution doesn’t have many controls.
At some point overpriced audio equipment became a way to bribe myself to do adulting for things I really didn’t want to do, so while for most people the moral might be to stay in the Apple ecosystem, that advice isn’t great for me.
However at this point I’m one gen behind on their receivers so maybe those issues have already been fixed.
