@rich_a: "Those of us who remember the original iMac also remember that Apple did a roaring trade in overpriced USB floppy drives and probably made them much more money than if they just inserted one inside the thing in the first place"
When I heard that Apple was dropping floppy drives from its lineup, I almost cheered. I had come to dread seeing anything come into the office on a floppy disk - you'd put the disk in, sit and wait while it sat whirring and grinding away for a while, then watch the progress meter with bated breath wondering if it would make it the whole way. The capacity of a floppy was already pathetic by that time, and they were the number 1 source of hardware failures.