Whereas with USB sticks all one needed was a USB port. I immediately wanted a stick.
But only a few years later, as you say, USB thumb drives were making Zip drives irrelevant.
I think the network effect was more a question of who had tons of data: for example, all of the graphic design shops had Zip or Jazz drives because they needed to schlep client deliverables around so you could just assume they had the hardware. Most people weren’t generating that much data before digital cameras became common.
What I recall being sold for Mac were FireWire peripherals back in the late 90s and most of the 2000s. By 2000, USB 2.0 was too good to ignore and addressed all the pain points manufacturers had with USB 1.1 being too slow. That's when I remember USB drives finally being practical and mainstream.
Apple's decision to leave out all the other ports meant that a bunch of folks were forced to buy new USB peripherals (and/or adapters), and gave peripheral manufacturers a dedicated market for USB
It seems that even Apple quickly caved in and put FireWire on the G3 iMac when they updated the design to a slot loader in 1999.
I don't have anything against Apple, but USB before the 2000s was pretty bad. It seems weird that people are now thinking otherwise.
Indeed. So bad that no one apart from Apple would have tried to go all-in on it. I doubt things like USB mice and keyboards would ever have happened if Apple didn't give it a kick in the behind
Firewire was indeed a nice addition when that came along, but it always remained the domain of pricey high-bandwidth devices.
This happened 4 months before the release date of the first iMac.
When Firewire was introduced, it wasn't ever popular enough to get the self-sustaining popularity loop of "all the machines have it" <-> "all the peripheral makers support it".
Apple made that happen for USB. Not because USB was amazing in 1997, but because it was the only thing on what was then the cheapest new Mac.
Yup I do think that's true for Mac users, and questioning Apple fans' just-so stories are usually worthwhile to anyone curious. They sure do keep history alive and well. I mean, hey, The Beatles made an entire career out of doing that with their fans!
I just realized this month was Apple's 50th anniversary, so that's likely part of why this is making the rounds. I guess I have my answer.
Probably also worth noting the list of founding members of the USB-IF did not include Apple (not surprising). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Implementers_Forum
The motivations behind the "legacy-free PC" has its own Wikipedia page too which is pretty neat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legacy-free_PC
Hockey Puck mouse.
By the time the iPod came around, Apple had adopted FireWire to handle devices that USB's then-limited bandwidth couldn't really support. USB peripherals like mouse/keyboards were already pretty widespread by then.
The magazines may have been wrong and their claims turned into an urban legend in the meantime, but it's part of the general sense of what I recall from, ugh, nearly 30 years back now.