Re: The full-blown Apple formula
It must be nice to live in a bubble of Reg readers (and commenters) who are certain of a point of view of the computing industry, but this simply does not match reality.
People — the people for whom the iMac was designed, consumers — flocked to the iMac when it was introduced. Not only did it do what Apple claimed (make it simpler to connect to the Internet), the machine ditched bad interfaces in favo[u]r of better ones. SCSI had never been anything but problematic on the Mac (unless you had a top-end machine and could afford an LVD card and similarly expensive cabling and peripherals), and ADB (the loss of which caused far more complaints in the Mac user base) was already well past simply "showing its age." The only possibly valid criticism of the port changes was the loss of serial ports — but of course, third parties were selling USB to serial adapters within year.
Apple was completely vindicated in chucking the old and less than functional in favo[ur]r of the news and functionally more agile. With a couple of years, PCs were sprouting multiple USB ports, modem ports, and the like, not out of slavish copying but because that's what consumers expected by then.
As a (then) minicomputer guy who also used high-end Macs for video production, &c. at the time, I only "got it" when I was in a Sears to pick up some tools, and was taken aback to see that (1) they had an iMac display, with several available for the punters to play with, and (2) that the punters went from quizzical looks to making their own movies in iMovie in under five minutes. It wasn't;t just the hardware.
And just a note for the o2 fans: At the time, I worked in a space mission science operations facility, which we had wisely (or more accurately, by blind luck) designed to depend on interface standards (like this TCP/IP thing that appeared to be so popular) rather than hardware or OS brands. Groups from several countries with instruments on the spacecraft had multi-workstation setups, all strung together and both receiving data from and sending commands to their onboard instruments via the mighty power of 10 Mbps Ethernet. There were Suns, Vaxes[/n], Alphas, Macs, IBM AIX machines, and.... one group with o2s. Everything played nicely together, except the o2s. Even if all the TCP/IP stuff weren't (initially) so broken, the complete lack of knowledge (not to mention practice) of simple security measures (e.g. "r" commands were a Really Bad Idea) amongst the university group that brought those meant we had a 2 - 3 year job of debugging all their issues. SGI was notoriously behind the curve in publishing security updates in those years (probably because they were hemorrhaging staff after the announcement of their switch to the Itanic), and we several times came within a hairs breadth of being kicked off the operational network for having unpatched vulnerabilities for month after month. Blecch.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
