As a Mac salesman at the time, I loved this transition. Margins on iMacs were super low, but adapters always had very high margins. USB to ADP, USB to Parallel and USB floppy drives were a hot commodity for quite a few years after the iMac came out. Man were Apple users grumpy, though.
Exactly right. Apple users were grumpy.
The hallmark being Apple’s willingness to take courageous risks — dangerous risks like the risk of turning customers off Apple forever had the iMac been rejected by the marketplace. And Apple quite literally going out of business if consumers panned the iMac as much as tech journalists did. (Many tech journalists PROMISED at the time that the iMac would flop. As did the “braintrust” at CNBC.)
Yet, four months after its release, the iMac was the #1 selling personal computer in the U.S. (and it only took that long because Apple UNDERestimated demand and had to ramp up production). This was much to the consternation of all those tech journalists.
Intel’s CEO would later credit Apple with finally and single-handedly making USB an accepted industry standard — a standard Intel had long pressed PC makers to adopt, but had no takers. (PC makers are so craven and risk averse and lack anything resembling “daring.”)
(Apple is responsible for making 802.11[…] an industry standard too.)
What does that make Apple then? Microsoft had Windows 2000 out and compatible with most home PC software while Mac OS X was still in beta. When Windows XP came out, very few PC users had to worry about whether their software would run properly on it - almost everything did on day 1. The conversion to Mac OS X, on the other hand, was quite long and painful, and some very key software took years to make the transition (while some never did).
Yes, those were trying times. Step 1) Plug the card in the slot. Step 2) Insert the CD into the drive. This, of course, ignoring the fact that many broadband providers at the time were already providing PC users ethernet cards and free installation services as part of their standard installation packages anyhow. So the real steps were "Step 1 - call the Cable company and say you want to sign up for broadband."
1.) The conversion to Mac OS X was a heavier lift. Apple was transitioning to a completely different OS architecture with Unix as its base. The software technological differences were so radically different from OS 9 that the transition was tough and painful — but worth it. A necessary evil. I shudder to think what would’ve happened had Apple gone with simply grafting “Modern OS features” onto OS 9.
I’m not sure we’d even be talking about a company named Apple at this moment.
Microsoft’s OS transitions were
nothing compared to Apple’s transition to OS X and were more comparable to Apple’s transition to System 7. Microsoft was not replacing DOS with Unix. (And, btw, to this day, DOS is
still apparent in Windows and “winks” at you from time to time. The “C: drive” is still in your face.)
2.) I think you’re missing the point — and softballing the process PC owners endured. (Including extra cost$.)
Broadband providers didn’t need to so much as give Ethernet cards and driver install CDs to Mac owners. No modifications to Ethernet-integrated Macs were required.
I remember at the time, friends with PCs calling me, frazzled about what to do. And I remember helping them buy an Ethernet card. Then they insisted I come over and open up their machines to install it and then the drivers. (Carefully wearing a grounded static protection wrist band for the card install.) It was a PITA.
You might be thinking, “Big deal,” but not everyone is/was a geek like me (or you if the term applies) at the time.
You’re really bending over backwards to force the idea that there was zero difference between connecting to Broadband Internet on a PC vs. a Mac. Not every computer owner is a geek.
So the point remains, at the time of Broadband’s rollout, most reasonably recent Macs came with Ethernet ports already integrated and no messy driver installations required. And that was A Good Thing™.
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