Dell Drops the Floppy

Nice. Apple gets one mention in the 26th graph.

How typical. It's almost always the second person to restate something that gets described as being the visionary.

I TOTALLY hear you...

...like the time that Apple stole the GUI from Xerox.

;o)

i'm glad we're moving away from the floppy but one reason so many pc people like it is because in case of any problems you can boot from a floppy. i'd like to know if there is a way to boot from a usb drive...

From a 'power user' perspective this is a bad thing. Anyone who has tried to rebuild a hard drive that refuses to boot will be groaning, and rightfully so. Sure bootable CDs work great in theory - but I've had more than one jam I've been in only get resolved when I pulled out the good old backup floppy kit.

From an end-user perspective? If a hard drive dies, they take it to a shop, who will be able to temporarily install a floppy if absolutely necessary. Kill 'em. No one needs them anymore.

Michael Dell is arguably the most visionary individual when it comes to the manufacturing process.
I dont think he boasts being a visionary when deciding what components to put in whatever box his company is building at the time. For all I’m concerned he could be building bicycles and still be truly revolutionary.

To be honest, Nathan, Apple legally and ehtically bought (to simplify it) the GUI and networking concepts from Xerox.

Apple is right, everyone else is wrong. :-)

personally, this just makes me glad that i build my own computers, rather than buying premade dells, or what have you.

i've always thought floppys, though obviously outdated by the cdrw's and new dvd-rw's out there, are outdated, are also very conveniant. if all i need to do is transport a paper or something to another computer putting it on a floppy has always been a very reliable (and easy) method.

owell.. i suppose i'll do without one soon, albeit kicking and screaming. =)

Also, it should be noted that power users will still be able to use a floppy drive if they wish to. Dell is saying they won't be putting actual drives into the machines, that doesn't mean the motherboards won't have floppy cable connectivity.

A floppy drive costs 15 bucks, sometimes more like 5... if you needed one after getting a new Dell, you could just buy one and put it in yourself (or better yet, take the one from the computer you're replacing). This is an option the iMac didn't have (or really need, for that matter).

I think it's more of a stretch to take the Floppy out of PCs than it was out of Apples. I own a P4 PC and a G3 iBook. In the past few months, I've used the floppy drive on my PC at least 3 times for recovery purposes but I've never even thought about the idea of my 'Book having a floppy. I guess in the Apple world it just feels more natural to be Floppy free.

Windows makes you work a little harder to get to that point.

C'mon you guys, get off the knee-jerk Mac bandwagon. Sure the floppy has been obsolete for ages (though 2 years ago i had to help a panic-stricken iMac user who had no way of using his printer because of the lack of a floppy drive, and i had to get the make and model from him, download the drivers from the net and burn a CD for him ... back when CD burners were not exactly ubiquitous.)

But there's give and take on both sides. Like, having my first Mac now after being a PC user for 14 years, I was blown away that OSX was tooting a horn about having true multitasking. Wowee, you can actually do something in another program while your files are downloading fom the internet. Gimme a break, I've been doing that on the PC for years.

Not to mention WindowsXPs ClearType which predated OSX's Quartz subpixel rendering of type.

Don't get me started on the number of ways that my gorgeous G4 is inferior to my homely PC.

Geessshhh ... Mac users are the most self-centered group of people I have ever seen. By the way, I breathe air because Mac users do.

Geez, Todd. Yes, Apple preceded Dell in removing the floppy. However, that 'advance' is mitigated somewhat by the overwhelming number of external drives sold with the early iMacs and later machines. I recall an awful lot of upset people wondering what they'd be able to do without a floppy drive...

Also -- as cfont and others have mentioned -- the floppy drive has long been a very effective tool in getting absolute control over a PC when you need it (not to mention its sneakernet utility).

Really, I don't find the elimination of this device by either Apple or Dell terribly mold-breaking or exciting in the least. It's simple refinement, and it should be expected. Who cares if one platform got there before another?

The point is that Apple took A LOT of flack for ditching the floppy drive. Review after review after review said the iMac was a nice piece of work except for the lack of floppy drive. So this really isn't news.

There's a long history of innovation on the part of Apple that is largely ignored by the industry, which is why the faithful are quick to jump on this stuff.

Oh, and ClearType was really created by Woz back in 76. But who's keeping track...

Oh, someone is

I agree about Apples innovation..gawd..using that word makes them sound so much like microsoft.

But I dont think there is any need to beat on pans about this. Zealotry is not really an attractive attribute.

Gosh, Apple is SO progressive! As soon as I get a pay raise and the rest of the business world stops using PCs, I'll rush out and get one so I can be cool, too.

For Apple taking away the floppy wasn't the biggest deal in the world. Sure you have to transfer files by e-mail or ethernet. MOst installers were on CDs anyway. How often did you really use your floppy on a Mac? I never booted off one on a modern Mac with a CDrom drive. If you had a harddrive problem you could boot off a System CD or Disk Warrior CD and fix your problem.

For the PC side, booting off floppies has always been more of a commonly used practice when problems arise. Sheesh, with Windows 98, it was essential to have a floppy with your CD-rom driver on it and FORMAT.COM on it. Newer PCs seem to be friendlier with the idea of booting off CDs. I think now that all new PCs ship with some flavour of Windows XP having a floppy for it makes as much sense as having one a Mac.

My point in all this is that Michael Dell has a long, long, history of trashing Apple and Jobs in the Wintel-bankrolled technology presses (remember his suggestion to "liquidate the company and return the money to the stockholders" crack when asked what he'd do if he ran Apple?), while simultaneously borrowing design ideas (as does Microsoft) from the company and acting like they were the first ones to think of such a thing. Want more? Go to As the Apple Turns and enter "Dell" in the search field. He's closely followed the Jobs / Dell relationship over the past few years.

Dave S. wrote:
"From a ‘power user’ perspective this is a bad thing."

Seems to me 'power user' and 'floppy' shouldn't be used in the same sentence.

The thing is, the boxes themselves have been able to boot from a cdrom for over six years. it was the os and users who wanted a floppy. Intel caught a lot of flak for merely suggesting a pure, legacy free pc, even though it would probably make motherboards way cheaper. Most good motherboards let you boot from the lan, usb, or scsi devices too. And this isn't any precedent, anyways, as you can buy a $200 pc at walmart.com without any floppy for the last two years, and with linux no less! talk about a disaster waiting to happen for those users.
as per the pc vs. mac debate... what's with all these dual g4 boxes being louder than a 747?

How appropriate that the title of your next post is "Prebuttle". Michael Dell must have privately disclosed to you that he's going to call himself visionary for dropping the floppy. Mac users seem to have cookie-cutter responses to any news that the Wintel side announces...typically negative.

The decision to drop the floppy is simiply the death of old technology. There's no vision or innovation behind it.

I love the concept of Mac Zealotry, something the PC users of the world seem to wallow in to justify their own zealotry. This thread, like many, many, many others, exemplifies that perfectly. "Mac users are all self-centered zealots, we all breathe the same air. J00all sux0rs dudes! PC's r0x!" Grand.

Regardless, Intel has been trying to get rid of legacy components for a while now, they just can't get the manufactureres to let go of their iron grip on antiquated technology. Is there some reason brand new Dells continue to ship with PS/2 connections and serial ports? It's really stagnating the industry.

Regardless, it's not the first time the PC industry has followed the iMac's lead.

With a little more name calling, we might just have a Mac-PC flame war going. w00t. "Intel or AMD - who cares?! Nvidia or ATI - who cares?! Windows or Linux - who cares?! It's about the experience. The technology. It's the journey, not the destination. There is no end point. No perfect buy. No perfect company. No perfect chip. Stop looking for your identity in a piece of hardware!" -Omid Rahmat

I think it's high time that people stopped complaining about Apple getting snubbed. The fact of the matter is that the company has been playing second fiddle for years, and that probably won't be changing any time soon.

The PC crowd dominates the market, so changes like this tend to affect a much larger user base. Honestly, just think of scale. This move by Dell will inevitably sweep the consumer market, as Gateway and kin decide to jump onto the 'hip' bandwagon. The fact that Apple decided to drop the floppy first is arguably less important than Dell ushering in a floppy-less age for consumers. That's the key, though. For your average end-user, Windows is "the computer" and vice-versa. Anything that affects the Windows world affects the greatest number of users. Consequently, Windows stories are more "news-worthy" than Apple stories.

I'm not saying that this is proper, only that it's the way things work right now. If I ruled the world, credit would be given where due and I'd be happily typing this message on a PowerBook... sigh..

I'm installing GNU/Linux on a brand spanking new Dell box tomorrow. We'll be downloading the OS from a university server instead of from a CD.

We can't do that without a floppy drive to provide the necessary network drivers and ftp connectivity.

I think Dell is probably gonna keep the floppy drive on servers, because like mentioned before, it's a useful tool for power users, even though it's old technology.

There's nothing visionary about removing the floppy drive. It is, however, a double sided issue, hence the attention.

http://www.robgalbraith.com/diginews/2003-01/2003_01_07_macpc.html

Thanks vineire for demonstrating that some people still consider hardware just another pissing contest.

I despise the old MS commercial that prominently displays a Quicktime VR-like clip as if Microsoft came up with the concept.

Intel commercials also imply that they are to credit for cool software like Photoshop, etc.

About time too :)

Right, so I just want to mention something here. I've been a PC user for 10 years, and only recently also became a Mac user. I have a P4 2.26GHz PC with 512MB of RAM and an Apple iBook 700MHz G3 (Snow) with 640MB of RAM. I really love both computers. The iBook is fantastic, OS X is beautiful, and every moment I spend on it is great. I also, however, love my PC. It's as fast as I could want, opens Photoshop in 5 seconds, allows me to have everything open at the same time, etc, etc.

What I don't understand, and the reason I wrote all of that, is that I've noticed since joining the Mac community how disgusting a majority of the people are when it comes to Wintel news/rumors/pictures(!)/comments and anything else including the words Microsoft or Windows or PC. I mean, spend 2 minutes on SpyMac.com looking through the gallery (do a search for Microsoft or Windows or PC), and read the comments. 99.9% of them will be extremely ridiculous and harsh. It's especially great when you find a picture of someone's 'setup,' in which there is a desk with two machines on it--one, a Dual G4 1GHz; two, a 2.0GHz P4--and everyone says the same thing: "Great setup, but burn that piece of crap PC."

I've never really noticed this on the PC side, however. The harshest comment I've ever heard about a Mac was, "I don't want one because their processors aren't fast enough and they're ugly." That's about all. But if you ask a Mac user, they go into this round of insults and almost always ridiculous comments.

Todd, you actually do this yourself in your about page: "I also have a rapidly yellowing Dell PII tower, which I only turn on for cross-platform debugging tests. Slow as hell, and a soul-robbing misery to work with. [The old Dell was sold in January 2003 for a cocktail and a neverending supply of Goldfish.]" I'm sorry, but I had a PII 350 until about 8 months ago and I was using it fine. Quite well, in fact. I'd like to know what's wrong with yours. If you say it's too slow, maybe you shouldn't compare a legacy chip to your G4? I mean, I'm sure you would consider a PowerMac 9600 (200-350MHz) slow too in comparison, yes?

I'm not trying to be a jerk here, I'm just stating the fact that on the Apple side, there tends to be a lot more of this crap to deal with. I think what someone said to me once sums it up: "You got an iBook? Oh, what, so you're better than me now?"

Garrett: There's plenty of anti-Apple sentiment in the PC community (if you could call it that). The main difference between the two crowds is that many Apple users tend to be more attached to the Apple aura than the actual machines. For these users, it's all about being different (unintentional pun), sticking it to the man, and being one with the god otherwise known as Steve. To use a Windows machine is essentially to have sold out to the evil Microsoft empire. Naturally, this isn't the entire Apple fanbase, but generally speaking fanatics remain their loudest proponents.