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Quicksilver's Fatal Flaw
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My Turn is Low End Mac's column for reader-submitted
articles. It's your turn to share your thoughts on all things
Mac (or iPhone, iPod, etc.) and write for the Mac web. Email your
submission to Dan Knight
.
Andrew W. Hill
- 2001.08.01
My most esteemed colleague Eric Schwarz recently published an
article on his views of the keynote (isn't everyone) entitled
Is Apple to Blame or Not? One point
he raises deserves further discussion. This is at the point where
he says:
- People are complaining now about the G4 using the same basic
case as its predecessor and the Blue and White G3. What's wrong
with that?
As an owner of a Blue G3, I say
"plenty." As far as I'm concerned, that form factor has a serious
design flaw - the second forward facing bay. This is a 3.5"
third-height forward facing bay. I know of exactly three devices
that will fit in there: Iomega Zip, Iomega Jaz, and an internal
hard disk. DATs, magneto-optical drives, CD drives, and Syquest
drives are all half height. The latter two (and some MO drives) are
5.25" as well.
The new G4s with the internal CD-RW have a major disability over
your average Hewlett-Packard box in that duplicating a CD is that
much more complicated. The new G4 case looks like it can
have a 5.25" drive there, but on inspection of the internals it is
found that the installation of such a drive would not be for the
faint-hearted.
Personally I'm not a fan of the location of the drive bays
either, but you can't win them all. Personally, I would have liked
to have seen the 8600 -> Beige G3 minitower case around longer
than it was.  Everything was easy to install: RAM, PCI cards, and
drives. The DayStar Genesis had
a great case except for its huge size. Two external 5.25" half
height bays were present, so you could have a CD-ROM and a CD-R, or
a big magneto-optical or even a tape or Zip drive. In addition,
there was space for six hard disk on sideways slideout
trays. It's a pleasure to work in, but not to move. (The Genesis
weighs 50 pounds!)
Eric mentions the IIcx and SE cases as examples of long-lived cases.
Both, however, were retired when they could no longer fulfill their
function. Neither case had the space for a CD-ROM, which wasn't
important when the machines came out, but after a while  became more and more common. The LC500 series provided what the original
compacts couldn't: a CD-ROM and a big color display. Likewise, the
IIvx provided the CD-ROM that the IIcx
case couldn't house. Both of the replacement cases lasted for many
years - through to the 5400 and
7100, respectively. The 7100 then had
the shortcoming that it couldn't handle an internal Zip drive (and
it was a PITA to install RAM) and was replaced by the 7500 case, which progressed for several years
until the Blue G3 replaced the Beige
G3.
I'd like to draw this parallel to the Blue G3. When the Blue G3
was released (1999), CD-RW drives weren't overly common in the
consumer market. Apple finally released internal CD-RW drives with
their G4s, but they offered no way to easily duplicate CDs. Sure,
Toast 5 will do that for you, but it involves switching CDs and
such. Its just not the same.
The time has come to supercede the old case with one that
supports multiple CD-ROM drives. Quicksilver is not the answer. Sure, it
looks nice on the outside, and I'm all for pretty cases, but unless
it's matched with fitting internal design, it's nothing but a
waste.
Andrew W. Hill (a.k.a. Aqua) has been using Macintosh computers
since 1987 and maintains that the Mac
SE is the perfect Macintosh, superior to all - including the
Color Classic. He is on the
verge of being evicted from the family home due to its infestation
of Macs (last count: about 50). Andrew is attempting to pay his way
through college at UC Santa Cruz with freelance web design and Mac
tech support.
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