green_leaves
green_leaves on Hacker News
Norway data from statcounter doesn't seem reliable. In just 4 months, July->October 2024, there's a 14% upswing in iphone total marketshare. Which implies that at least 14% of users bought a new phone, assuming (wrongly) that everybody would have changed from Android to iPhone (ignoring also deceases and teenagers getting their first phone).
And the period doesn't even include Black Friday or Christmas. And barely the iPhone 16 launch that happened in September 20, 2024.
You can see USB ports in computer adverstised in the magazine I linked. Laptops and desktops alike. A majority of PC chipsets had support for it since at least Aug97:
https://www.anandtech.com/show/72
It's true however that until year change 97/98 USB devices were very rare. Windows got support half a year before in Aug97.
Windows 95 OSR2 got official USB support in Aug97.
The change to USB was on the move already much before the iMac launches. Just check magazines since the end of 97, there are reviews of products before the launch. The iMac rode the wave with the rest. Sure a few USB peripherals would have been made translucent, so what?
Check my other comment for data and arguments. USB was already pretty much standard in new PCs and all kind of peripherals were available many months before iMac release. By the time the iMac was released the yearly computer sales were in the 90 million range >90% PCs, easily were 10s of millions of PCs USB equipped by Aug-1998. I find it hard to justify that a computer that sold 5 million units over 3 years made USB mainstream.
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2001/04/19Apple-Ships-5-Milli...
Edit typo.
I'm not sidestepping it. My point was of mass market adoption and innovation.
I remember testing the original iMac at a computer trade fair back in it's day, and I was not impressed at all. For me it was a cheap looking plastic computer that didn't have a floppy drive (but hey they sold you one) and _forced_ you into an integrated monitor.
USB ports not only existed, but were standard in new PCs.
A quick search shows peripherals and monitors with USB hubs in PC World May-1998 (4/5 months before iMac launch). From that months number:
"UNTIL RECENTLY , USB hardware was as scarce as hen's teeth . Now, after almost two years of foot-dragging, hardware companies are fina ll y delivering peripherals. We tested 18 of these new products"
Among the products there are keyboards, mouses, joysticks, cameras, scanners, speakers... you name it.
>Apple wasn't the first to market with USB (and Snell didn't claim it was), but Apple most certainly drove its mass-market adoption.
Sure they were scarcely used, support began with Windows 95 OSR 2 in Aug-97. And relatively new computers were only a fraction of the market. But the real market driver was the PC.
I pretty much see adoption of technology as innovation. Not technical innovation for sure, but innovation in the sense of significant improvement over other solutions.
Don't you consider the original Mac adoption of the 3.5" floppy drive as innovation?
> The iMac gets remembered for a lot of things, and rightly so, but it doesn’t get enough credit for essentially kick-starting the USB revolution
That's not true. USB ports were already standard before the iMac release. A quick check of old PC World magazines from Dec-97 for example shows it. The iMac was released in Aug-98.
Apple innovated a lot, but frequently get credit for many that didn't come from them.
Not an original PC game, but the PC port of Caveman Ninja, VGA and also from 1991, was amazing. Smooth parallax scroll with tons of sprites in screen. It recently got a remake on Steam.
I remember playing that game in CGA (and speaker) back in the day. Fond memories :)