> by 2001 virtually all new software you bought at retail would require you to have one.
Yeah, but a piece of consumer electronics requiring someone to own a computer produced in the last five years (as a Firewire Mac would have been at the time) is a surprising choice, and especially so in that era. The majority of scanners and printers produced in 2001 were still parallel-port driven, because peripheral companies couldn't be sure that most people even had a computer with USB1.0 support yet. Windows XP was CD-only, but Windows 2000 still had a floppy-disk edition!
I wasn't really implying that Apple forced the spec of "a Mac with Firewire" in order to guarantee access to a CD-ROM drive; but it certainly did help, in the sense that if they had supported USB (or god forbid, parallel) from the start, and perhaps Windows from the start, then there would almost certainly have been people who bought an iPod for use on their Pentium 120 (like the one I was still personally using in 2001!), only to belatedly realize that they had no way of getting music onto their PC in order to then offload it onto the iPod.
Yeah, but a piece of consumer electronics requiring someone to own a computer produced in the last five years (as a Firewire Mac would have been at the time) is a surprising choice, and especially so in that era. The majority of scanners and printers produced in 2001 were still parallel-port driven, because peripheral companies couldn't be sure that most people even had a computer with USB1.0 support yet. Windows XP was CD-only, but Windows 2000 still had a floppy-disk edition!
I wasn't really implying that Apple forced the spec of "a Mac with Firewire" in order to guarantee access to a CD-ROM drive; but it certainly did help, in the sense that if they had supported USB (or god forbid, parallel) from the start, and perhaps Windows from the start, then there would almost certainly have been people who bought an iPod for use on their Pentium 120 (like the one I was still personally using in 2001!), only to belatedly realize that they had no way of getting music onto their PC in order to then offload it onto the iPod.