The Intel iMacs Won’t Have A Disk Drive
The year is 1998 and Apple is in trouble. Steve Jobs has come back and started to work his magic but never the less pundits are loudly proclaiming that soon Apple would exit the business all together. But wait, suddenly the iMac comes out and everything changes. Sales go up, profits increase, and as the ref gets to the count of 9 Apple gets up off the mat and sucks in a breath of air and just like that they are back in the fight.
And yet, the critics were not silent. It has no floppy drive, they howled! How could anyone be so stupid as to forget something like that? How will people move their files? What will they do? How will we ever live without that drive? THE WORLD WILL END!
As it turned out it wasn’t that bad, Apple was just ahead of the curve. Maybe a little too ahead but not by much. Jobs realized that floppy drives were an old technology that would soon become obsolete. Between accessing data via a network or with a USB device, the need for a floppy disk was fading. Of course, that didn’t stop Dell and the rest from including them in their systems for several more years, however it did signal the end of an era. A very popular type of removable media had just gotten the axe; this left many wondering what was next?
Fast forward to 2001 when Apple releases the iPod. It is a stylish, portable hard drive that plays music. With amazing ease you can connect it to your computer and transfer files to it. Why is this important you ask? Because suddenly lots of people who would normally have no idea what an external hard drive is are carrying around portable data storage devices.
Suddenly it is June 2005 and the tech world is shocked when Jobs announces that Apple will soon switch all of its computers over to Intel chips. He shoots, he scores, the crowd goes wild. But wait, there is more.
But what does this all mean? Well, here is a clue. Jobs has said several times that there won’t be a big change and that the transition will be very painless. You won’t even notice that we have changed processors, he claims. Things will just be faster and that is all.
Mr. Jobs isn’t telling you the whole truth.
And do you know what else, Apple doesn’t really care whether HD or Blu-Ray wins out in the end. Why? Because it won’t matter. By the time both technologies are perfected, compared, used and a clear standard is established the industry will have moved on. And guess who will be leading the way? That’s right, Apple.
When Apple finally releases the new, Intel iMac it won’t have a disk drive in it. No CD drive, no DVD drive and no HD/Blu-Ray drive. Those technologies will be obsolete. What it will have is the next generation of Bluetooth and wireless technology. It will have plenty of ports to dock an iPod, flash drive or other portable media drive. And it, along with the rest of Apple’s lineup, will get a redesign.
Yes, I think that once the switch is made Apple will roll out its new computers and they will all be redesigned without any type of disk drive. They will be sleeker, thinner, wireless network ready, and of course, more powerful. In short, you will notice when Apple makes the switch.
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Comments
Are you serious? please… That is the most retarded thing I’ve ever heard! CDs and DVDs are still necessary. I have my entire movie collection (200+) on DVD, what the hell am I supposed to do then? If Apple did this, it would make me switch to something else.
No, no, no, no, and no.
Floppies went away because they held very little in the way of storage. Even when software shipped on floppies, it often took many of them for a single install (even the smallest utilities often shipped on 2 or more floppies).
Comparing the floppy situation to CDs/DVDs is very different as several posters have pointed out because of current media distribution methods.
Apple would be cutting its own throat to not include a DVD drive of some sort. DVDs are superceding CDs as a software distribution media like CDs superceded floppies… but, as yet, we have no newer viable technology to replace DVDs (other than newer DVDs that hold more data).
Also, it has been said before and will be said again - current flash memory technology is not a good replacement for disks, due to write limits and the way data needs to be block-written. (I don’t explain it very well… go look it up on Wikipedia),
You’re full of shit dude…no matter what you say, not everybody in the known universe uses wireless and non removable media. Apple would be cutting its own throat to remove a dvd/cd player from it’s format, and honestly I think Apple would have been better to develop a new chip with AMD versus Intel.
There are a multitude of reasons why Apple signed with
Intel instead of AMD - reasons which shall be revealed
as new cutting edge technologies are introduced;
including 20 mile WiFi, virtualization, much lower
energy consumption, et.al. Perhaps the most important
factor being that Intel is far more capable of keeping up
with high volume production than AMD is at this time,
and for a much better price.
With inPhase’s development of Holographic Storage
far ahead of schedule, we will be seeing 300G -> Terabyte
of storage on a single disk by mid 2006 - Far exceeding
what Blu Ray will be capable of handling. Good times
are ahead indeed!!
This article has taken on such an interesting view. So I thought I’d take a look at how the argument on the importance of a disk drive is coming along. However, this is more a documentation of how people will react at first. I see it when my 80 + year old friends cuss me out when talking about no photo albums and no cassette players when I tell them my photos and music is all computerized.
Anger is displayed over the thought of no DVDs, CD in this forum. You people must be so young as to have forgotten the record, cassette player and the forever honored 8 track player.
I remember in the 60s when there was talk of putting music on something other then a record or reel to reel tape. That’s when Cassettes and 8 track players came out. Tons of people invested a lot of money in record collections and lots of people invested in tons of storable sounds on reel to reel tapes just to see that go by the way side with 8 track and cassette decks.
Probably b/c you couldn’t play a record or a reel to reel conviently in a car or truck. And certainly b/c astronauts couldn’t play records in zero gravity. The thing is, people couldn’t see the end of records and reel to reel recorders, much less the end of cassettes. There are many people that still have tons of sounds recorded onto those mini reel to reel devices.
No one blinked an eye b/c we had a lot invested in records, 8 track players or cassette decks. Progress continued to progress whether people wanted progress or not. Thus, the CD player and DVD burners became important. Not only could you put photos, music, movies and games on these devices, the amount of information you could put on a CD or DVD was far more than a cassette or record.
Now we have Blue Tooth or satellite technology to push CDs and DVDs out of the picture. Some of you are angry about having to use telephone wires instead of cable wires for your communication that you don’t realize both of these systems are replacable and are being as we write.
We not only do not need CDs or DVDs, we do not need wires. It’s just a matter of time and Blue Tooth will be the standard as people sell their DVDs and CDs in garage sales across the universe just as people buy the 8 track players today. B/c once you get the idea of talking about tetras instead of giga, you’ll understand.
Progress doesn’t stop for anyone or anything. It’s a continuum.
I don’t really care what storage it offers as long as it runs Windows XP. I can boot it from a PXE boot image on my Windows Server 2003 terminal server and have a nice little $2,000 thin client.
WINDOWS? omg, this person has really flipped out! I think we’re writing about progress instead of digression.
The powers that be in progress don’t consider a particular brand, unless of course, it’s their’s they are trying to sell. Then it’s not progress, but rather a marketing ploy.
Damn!! And here I thought someone plucked my forward-thinking comment out of the past, but it was just 2 spam entries. :-(
Although I had the size totally wrong, my comment on page 1 did sound an awful lot like what became the iPhone.
And Apple may yet make something between an iPhone and a MacBook Air that’s closer to what I projected in 2005.
I’m so brilliant. Thank you. Thank you. LOL.
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