There was one USB floppy drive capable with the iMac when Apple dropped the internal one. And after the customer paid $1299, they were supposed to for over another $150 for an external floppy drive, which many still needed. And what Apple PowerBook exactly had built in floppy drive after the iMac came out?
IIRC, there were three: Wallstreet, Lombard, and Pismo. I can't remember if the floppy drives were optional or not. It's possible that they might have been third-party. I forget. The point is that there were internal floppy drive options, which was critical for a mobile device, and irrelevant for a desktop.
And yes USB thumb drives were far superior to floppies but they were also incredibly expensive. More importantly, USB was a new standard, that even if someone did shell out the money for a flash drive, they weren't likely to have anywhere they could use it. I have to ask, were you there? Because I was. And it was nothing like the paradise you describe.
But USB was still a standard. Lightning isn't.
You really need a history lesson. When Firewire came out there were no products for it.
I never said that there were.
And what there were were incredibly expensive, and buggy as it took time for drivers to be fixed. Moreover, people weren't about to throw out thousands of dollars of perfectly good SCSI peripherals that worked just as well as Firewire, at the time, so Firewire to SCSI adapters appeared, and were hard to get they were in such demand.
A key difference here is that SCSI was a big, heavy cable that was a pain in the backside to use in a mobile device. FireWire was a huge improvement, albeit with some growing pains. There was no question whatsoever that FireWire was a better solution. The rest was a matter of timing. That's not the case here.
Of course it is. In the end, wireless is absolutely superior to wired, all thing being equal.
Not quite true. Wireless means carrying either spare batteries or an additional charger with you whenever you travel. That's a nonzero penalty when you're trying to fit your stuff into a suitcase and stay below airline weight limitations.
It also isn't possible to eliminate the latency inherent in wireless transmission of audio. They still haven't reduced it below what audio engineers consider to be the threshold of perception, and I have no reason to believe that they will do so any time soon.
1) You're stating this like a fact, without citing your evidence. but I'll bet it's just your opinion based on some anecdotal experiences. My experience has been vastly different. I've never had a Lightning connector break and I must plug and unplug my iPhone over a dozen times a day. On the other hand, I've had headphone jacks go bad routinely, cables go bad, and sometimes even a plug itself. As long as wires are in the mix, there will always be problems like this.
My evidence is Amazon reviews. Go look at reviews for third-party Lightning cables and connectors (including the MFI-certified ones) some time. It is not a robust connector. One good tug in the right direction can break it.
I used to have a lot of headphone jacks go bad twenty years ago. I haven't seen one fail since the mid-1990s. They've improved them a lot since then.
3) My Bluetooth headphones run for 8 hours on a single charge. Some run for up to 20. And that's only going to improve over time. $20 BT Adapters will do just fine, no need to replace your receiver. THat's just spreading FUD and you know it.
By "receiver", I was referring to those $20 Bluetooth adapters. They have to have electrical power, generally speaking, unless you buy one with batteries and keep unplugging it to charge it every day, in which case there's no advantage over wired connections.
