Explain to me again why Macintoshes don’t have disk drives?

I’ve never been an anti-Mac person — in fact, I used to run a Macintosh network back in college — but I can’t say I ever particularly favored them. The negatives (not having as much software, having higher prices) were things I cared about, while the things they were touted for, like their interface, wasn’t as important to me. In fact, being the type of person who grew up on Commodores and moved to PCs when you could still write your own BASIC programs, I actually found the touch-and-feel of the desktop rather irritating; I like a machine where you can get at the guts and, say, mess up the autoexec.bat file all on your own.

Apple’s decision to not include disk drives with their machines, though, is now beginning to really piss me off. When the newest Macs came out, and I read that they were disk-drive-less, my thoughts were along the lines of, “Eh. Interesting. Whatever.” Now that I’m working on a Mac and can’t freaking up- or download anything, I’m somewhat less sanguine.

The thinking, I gather, went something like this: People don’t transfer stuff on floppies anymore; everybody’s networked, and you can burn stuff to CDs pretty easily, anyway. Well, yeah, in theory — a theory that would make more sense if the machines were shipped with — oh, I dunno, maybe a CD burner. As it is now, there’s no way to get two machines not connected by a common network to share information. If Apple was in charge of human reproduction, I can see someone saying, “Hey, we’ll develop telephathy sometime in the future — so let’s sew up everyone’s mouth when they’re born!”

All of that’s to say that I’m making changes to the site, most of which you won’t see for a while, since I can’t get them off my laptop. For now, the only new things are the permalinks below each post (enabling you to link directly to an entry you like) and the Tell a Friend feature over on the right. You can use these together, if you so desire, to let everybody else on the Web know about my blatherings. If, of course, you have any desire to.

Damn dirty Macs.