Something about the discussion around the new MacBook Pros' (lack of) ports was bugging me. In particular, this tweet:
1998 desktops plugged into one keyboard/mouse (PS/2) and one printer (parallel).
— Marco Arment (@marcoarment) 2 November 2016
2016 laptops connect to lots of USB things, anywhere. https://t.co/nF4pRyYznk
Having re-found and re-read it, I realise now that Marco wasn't saying that pre-iMac Macs used PS/2 and parallel ports. Still, it's as good a jumping-off point as any for why I think comparing the MacBook Pro's move to USB-C ports only to the iMac's adoption of USB in 1998 is a false equivalence.
Prior to the iMac, Macs used ADB, serial via mini-DIN and SCSI. These aren't just legacy ports. ADB was a proprietary Apple connection. Serial and SCSI, while industry standards, were the less popular choices in their respective categories. And that, I think, is why they had to go from Jobs' volksputer. At a time when you could pick up a perfectly reasonable serial mouse for £2, replacement ADB mice started from around £20. [I can't find an information about whether you could use serial mice in place of ADB. Even if you could, you'd need a dongle.] The £99 ink jet printers were parallel (and increasingly USB); models with serial interfaces were available, but they were typically the more expensive pro models. And the SCSI variants of external devices generally came at a premium over their parallel or USB counterparts. Adopting USB — unlike dropping the floppy drive — was as much about opening up access to a world of commodity peripherals as it was about ditching dusty old legacy interfaces.
