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Comment by thelittleone | Hacker News Reader

Is this a fair comparison? A floppy disk stored 1.44MB. The first imac was released without a floppy drive was 1998. There was other superior alternatives. Floppy’s where quite easily corrupted by magnetically or through other means. Sandisk Flash drives and other alternatives where much faster offered much higher capacity and improved reliability / integrity.

How is there a parallel to the headphone jack?

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Is it a fair comparison? I don’t know, you tell me, on the basis of the actual facts. When the iMac was released without a floppy drive in 1998, it was launched with a CD-ROM (and, only in the DV models, with a DVD-ROM) drive, which meant it was not able to write to CDs or DVDs.

Flash drives were first released in 2000.

So... were “better alternatives” available? Yes. Were they incorporated onto the machine? No.

The idea was that almost all output would occur through the network, and that was a fairly prescient idea. If you wanted writable media, you had to add it externally — via a USB 1.1 connection, if memory serves (though maybe the machine also had a FireWire port, I can’t quite remember).

The point was that the floppy drive wasn’t removed because they replaced it with “better alternatives” on the machine, the point was that they thought that obsolete media had no place on modern almost-turn-of-the-millennium platforms.

I’d argue that there’s a pretty good parallel here.

Ironically, if you're right about the order of events, I agree with you about the parallel being pretty good, but disagree with you about the implications of the argument. They should have waited until it was possible to include some form of writable media support on the iMac to remove the floppy drive.

(This wouldn't have taken very long, however, unlike the headphone jack, which is likely to remain the superior audio connector for consumers longer than the iPhone remains a product.)

The original iMac 233MHz did not have Firewire, only the later "DV" (digital video) models did. But it had USB (instead of ADB), and the Iomega Zip 100MB drives were a popular alternative to floppy disks for personal use. New Mac-compatible software was already available on CDs, so the lack of a CD burner or floppy drive was not actually that much of an issue in practice.

I can pair my bluetooth headphones to different devices with the click of a button (eg. when leaving the desk etc). I can be connected to my phone and the Laptop at the same time. It's very convenient when making phone calls on the go or listening to navigation on the bike without messing with cables. I am not an Audiophile but have two decent pairs of Bluetooth headphones with subjectively great audio quality. For me personally, it is a huge step up in convenience, i would never go back to have another wire on the desk or under my clothes.

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