“It seemed like a radically dumb idea at the time, but Apple — as was its wont — struck out on its own by eliminating floppy drives from its products altogether in 1998. That marked the beginning of the end for the storage format. Although the technology stuck around far longer than it deserved, by the turn of the millennium, floppies had largely gone extinct,” Brian Fung writes The Atlantic.
“Fast forward a decade, and it’s clear Apple’s retained a fancy for killing off outgoing technologies that the rest of us think still have some life in them,” Fung writes. “In the latest update to the company’s notebook line, Apple does away with physical DVD drives and spinning hard disks, the latter being replaced by small, ultra low-power solid-state drives with no moving parts.”
Fung writes, “Apple’s mild paternalism might be defended as a good thing. By getting us to abandon technologies before we’re emotionally ready to pull the plug, Apple has effectively accelerated the rate at which we adopt new ways of doing things. It moves the ball forward, ending demand for technology that will be dead in a few years anyway, while getting Apple’s competitors to start thinking ahead, too.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Without Apple, and, more specifically, Steve Jobs, we’d all still be staring at 12-inch green phosphor CRT monitors, typing arcane DOS commands on mechanical keyboards, thinking “640K ought to be enough for anybody,” and reading magazines constructed of glossy paper in which sci-fi authors predict a worldwide computer network that will deliver the “accumulated knowledge of the world to your fingertips” within the next 50 years which, like ubiquitous flying cars, never seems to arrive.
Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.Thanks again, Mr. Jobs!