editorial
November 4, 1998
. .
editorial
November 4, 1998
How to install a $49 iMac Floppy
or
How Apple saved 38 cents and cost me $248
(Bob's version)
If you have time, and didn't read Monday's intro,
read this first. When Steve Jobs and crew designed the iMac, a series of bloody battles must have taken place over the issue of whether to include a floppy. The primary issue wasn't, as commonly believed, if they should include a floppy or not, but an issue of cost. In the end, the bean counters obviously won and the iMac hit the streets with no floppy, at a great price point. But residing on every iMac motherboard are two rows of ten holes each just the perfect size for a floppy connector. And next to the holes are the letters FD. Which stands for floppy drive. I'm told it would have cost Apple 38 cents to solder a standard floppy twenty-pin connector! (I wish they had). We've announced a couple of new products lately and we needed to provide a manual. Typically when we run benchmarks on new products we take a screen picture of the results and transfer them to a floppy. Which creates a real problem when you're typesetting your manual on an iMac. Cute little critters but no floppy. And I hate being first on the block to buy anything so even though lots of people offer the Imation LS-120 Superdrive, I love saving money (cough), and the Superdrive costs a little more than what I consider reasonable for a floppy. Then I found a supplier offering an authentic original iMac floppy for only $49. In Miami that's what's called, "El Goodo Dealo." All you have to do is install it yourself. It's a "simple connector." Actually it's a 38-cent connector and "requires soldering and may void the warranty (if it were ever noticed)." I really needed a floppy. The price of $49 seems like a heck of a deal. I'm the biggest klutz here so I get to test everything new. If I can install it, anyone can. And this sounded simple enough. So I ordered two, for Saturday delivery($30). They arrived bright and early. I opened the box. Inside were two smaller boxes, each containing a floppy, a floppy cable and an unsoldered floppy connector. (Just like the one missing from the iMac). The best you can say for the floppy is that it is terminally ugly. This is just a floppy. No case, no Bondi Blue, no nothing, just bare drive. Beige. I immediately ran into a minor technical glitch. I lack a soldering device. This is the part of testing I love. Barb never asks me to do anything 'handy' nowadays because I always go crazy in the hardware store. We have a Home Depot and Builder's Square nearby. I love going there to buy things. I don't know how to use most of the stuff or even what it's for, but if you're going to do a job right, you have to have the right tools. Barbara has that sentence memorized, she's heard it often enough. So I jumped into my chariot and off I headed to The Home Depot. One soldering device later ($39.99) and some solder ($2.58), some flux brushes ($.88). I wasn't real sure what you do with them but everyone I have ever seen solder has one perched over their ear. It's sort of a badge to show you know exactly what you are doing. And some flux($7.92) (just for good measure). I got back and sat down to have my way with the machine. Naturally the hardest part of the whole installation is taking the bleeder apart. The iMac does not follow Apple's new policy of making it easy to upgrade machines. But it's built for the consumer market, not the professional market. The machine is supposed to be hard to get into. And it is. I finally had the guts out in front of me. Here I ran into a natural conflict between Barb's approach to computers and mine. Barb goes into a food store and starts reading every label while I do the hard work. By the time I have finished shopping, she has made it all the way into the crushed pineapple. She thinks you have to read everything. I think stuff should go together naturally and manuals are for wimps or PC weenies. I don't totally disagree with her-- but she does get carried away. I don't have as big a problem with her reading the labels at the food store as her reading every single label of every can in the theory Dole may have changed the ingredients between one batch of pineapple chunks and another. This is the reason I don't allow her in the food store any more. The canned pineapple goods would be out of date long before we ever made it to the Refried Beans. In the case of the goodo dealo $49 floppy, I figured I might as well at least glance over the installation thingy that came with the unit. I lifted up the instructions and saw only a blur. The words were easy enough to read but I couldn't pick up the details on the pictures. So I spent 15 minutes looking for my reading glasses, in a mild concession to the problems of creeping old age, only to realize I was in fact wearing them. What looked to be blurry pictures of the inside of an iMac were actually blurry pictures of the inside of an iMac. So I put the instructions aside. Actually the instructions concerned assembly and disassembly of the unit and had one picture of what you actually need to know. Barb did in fact later point out to me that with a $49 floppy drive I was lucky to get instructions at all, blurry or not. They show you where the connector plugs in and where to solder it. They just don't make it clear which way it fits. Naturally it can go in two ways, the right way and the wrong way. I called for assistance from my Head Assistant. The silence was deafening. And I could feel myself starting to get a bit teed off. She and I looked at the holes in the motherboard and the plug and tried to figure out which way it should go in. "After all, you have 50/50 odds of getting it right by guessing," Barb said. (If you really believe that, try dropping toast with jelly on your most expensive new white rug and count how many times it lands jelly side down). We went outside to have a cigarette and an off-site conference. I laid all my tools out and put my flux brush over my ear. I tried to look serious despite hearing what sounded like stifled laughter in the background. And I set about soldering the connector to the motherboard. Ten minutes later I was finished. I reassembled the unit, plugged in all the cords, my new floppy drive and hit the start key. I got the startup chimes (always a good sign after major surgery) and up she booted. Casually I inserted a floppy disk into the unit and waited for the disk to show on the desktop. And waited. Maybe it was just a little slow to read the disk. I waited some more. I know Barb was peeping thru the door jam. What was it with that woman? A few minutes later I realized I had a problem. The disk didn't show up on the desktop and I didn't have any way of testing if the drive even worked or if it had power to it. And I realized I was going to have to start over. But what I really needed was something to enable me to see inside the case better. I snuck out the door. Off to the store again to buy my New Magnifying Stand. ($38.28). If the floppy didn't work, I pondered on the way back, maybe I'd put the connector in backwards. So I took the damned thing apart, again. And set about changing the cable. After 30 minutes of sweating and cursing, I figured out it's a whole lot easier to solder a connector than to unsolder a connector. After much work, I finally got the connector off the motherboard. Destroying the connector in the process. Now I had solder everywhere, including covering two of the holes; a connector with pins missing and a very bad temper. Meantime the little neighborhood kiddies were begging for candy at the door, it being Hallowe'en and all. I snapped at Barbara to offer our bowl of goodies to the little monsters with the grubby hands, I was too busy, but she was well out of earshot. (So now I get to eat 3lbs candy by myself. Every cloud has its silver lining). I examined the motherboard carefully and realized I probably had the connector in correctly the first time. Luckily, I had another connector. But while Home Depot sells soldering kits, I don't know if anyone even makes unsoldering kits and I didn't have the right tools. In a panic, I went to plan B. We have a dear friend who does handywork for a living. And other than the fact he charges a pretty standard $60 even if all you wanted was a light bulb changed, it's handy to have someone handy around. So I called Trig for help. I left messages for him three or four times that Saturday night. And Trig made it over Monday. Too late to fix the connector in time to make the promised Monday announcement of our brilliant discovery. He looked over my work and mumbled under his breath. It took him a good hour to undo all my hard soldering so he could start over. Then it took him maybe five minutes to do it right. I reassembled the iMac and plugged it in. All the cables went in, including the floppy and I fired it up. Screen came up, desktop showed up. I inserted a floppy disk and even held the unit so I could feel it spin. But I couldn't feel it spin. I frowned and waited for the floppy icon to appear on the desktop. After what seemed to be an eternity, there it came. I opened the floppy folder and moved some files to and from the hard drive and the little critter even made noise. It worked. Trig's bill this time a non-standard $80. Conclusion How good a deal it is depends pretty much on your perspective. You might end up with a total of $60 and have an iMac floppy happily humming along. Mine cost $248.65 and it's ugly. It works but it's really ugly. If you want to buy one, in either case, go to CSC. There is a sort of hidden ending to the story which PC weenies probably wouldn't understand. Often, they can't see the forest for the trees. Did you pick up on it? iMac or not, $49 for a new Apple floppy is a hell of a deal. Just don't bother installing it in an iMac, there are better alternatives. Bob |
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