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Dell Dropping The Floppy
adambwells writes "Dell wants to stop including floppy drives as standard hardware on its Dimension line of desktops, and will start this practice later this quarter, as reported in this Yahoo article. Says Dell's product marketing: We would like to see customers migrate away from floppies as quickly as possible, because there are better alternative technologies out there ... it's an antique technology. At some point, you've got to draw the line. You wouldn't think of using a processor from 15 years ago." They plan to educate their customers about recordable CDs and USB pen drives as replacements."
This has already happened. The other day, a vendor tried to sell me a motherboard with no FDD controller, no serial/parallel ports, and no PS/2 ports. Needless to say, I went elsewhere.
Yes, these features are old technology. But they're also mature technology - they work fine, now leave them alone!
You're not kidding... I seems the quality of drives and media has gone down. I remember being in high school ('86-'90), I'd carry about floppies with me all year around (blistering heat of summer and bone chilling cold of winter in Chicago). I'd never have a problem with them, I'd hope from one computer to another with the media. Try that now days... The floppy will work in one drive but not the next... WTF?!
When the source is open, the possibilities are endless.
There's nothing stopping you from adding a floppy to a Dell system that comes without one, is there? What's wrong with Dell removing a device from their standard configuration if most people (in Dell's opinion) don't want or need it? If you are in the minority of people who still need floppies (and BTW, I'm in that minority), just install your own.
Most device drivers can still fit onto one floppy disk, and thus the comparitive cost of CD vs floppy media would make it stupid to burn 1M of data onto a 650M CD
Agreed. It's much cheaper to press the CD.
You realize, don't you, that you can't press a floppy, right? You have to actually encode the data into it, which means actually inserting the floppy into a drive, writing to it, and removing it. Even done by machine this takes more time than pressing a CD. CD pressing costs are around $.20 in volume, and it doesn't matter if you have 1 byte or 700 MB on the disk - it's the same amount of time (although obviously defect rates can go up with more data).
Besides, if I'm supplying a driver, then nowadays I'll probably do things like supply the documentation electronically as well. And a viewer for the doc unless it's HTML or text.
Rescue disks can be put on CD nearly as easily as on floppy - and you can put more stuff on the disk for disaster recovery.
And yes, it's only $10 for the floppy hardware. But cut that out, along with the labor in attaching it and testing it, and you may save $15-30 total. When you're selling a $500 PC, upping your profit by 3-6% isn't a bad proposition.
Most of the personal computer industry is catching up to the changes Apple made 5 years ago, and they have been since the Apple ][.
Five(ish) years ago, Apple decided to allow 3rd party manufacturers of Mac hardware to bring down costs (much like the PC industry had done 15 years earlier). It almost killed them, and they stopped allowing this practice (well, very tightly clamped down on it) only a few months later.
Funny how one person's 5-years-too-soon may equal another person's 15-years-too-late, and what makes one can break the other.