[rednukleus]

> When Apple dropped the floppy drive they were not trying to screw over consumers, they were looking forward and realizing that documents would not fit on a 1.4mb storage medium for much longer and they were right.

No, they dropped the floppy disk for aesthetic reasons. Steve was adamant about there being only a trayless CD drive, and USB. The original iMac had a CD tray, but it was switched to trayless in the first revision.

This came back to haunt them, as early CD burners only came with a tray, but aesthetics trumped utility.

[smallsharptools]

Actually when Apple dropped the 1.4mb floppy the Zip Drive was becoming popular which was before the USB thumb drive was popular. And now people rarely use thumb drives and instead use Dropbox, Box.net, Skydrive or Google Drive. Maybe it was partly due to aesthetics, but it was also looking at how the average file for many documents (photos, videos, etc) are generally bigger than 1.4mb. It was a good choice. I use to own the early iMacs. I worked on them quite a bit actually. They were great.