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Comment by undersuit | Hacker News Reader

There seems to be a lot of hate for the left side disk drive. Are right handed people so incapable that they can't handle a bit of ambidexterity? /s

I just went and tried inserting a floppy disk with either hand and it was exceptionally easy.

Wouldn't a left side disk drive and the standard right side mouse placement be a superior workflow?

Was the dislike just because of the change?

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IIRC no in the real world cared about the left sided mounting of the drive.

I've never heard that complaint mentioned before, so that article is the first I've heard of it.

My anecdata is working at Apple and Apple Dealers in the mid 90s to 2001.

But then not many of them got sold in my sphere IIRC. We were selling 8600s and then G3s into Ad Agencies etc.. at that point.

I suspect it’s more just that it doesn’t “fit“ the way all the other machines were, it stands out and not in an impressive way. It just sort of increases the otherness.

I agree the stuff about being harder for right hand is probably just made up after the fact as color commentary.

I think there’s just a bit of snobbery. It’s an off the shelf LPX chassis with a “Logic Board LPX-40” that Apple also supplied to clone makers. The floppy drive being on the “wrong” side is just proof that it somehow lacks that special something.

> Was the dislike just because of the change?

It's just because it looked like a WIntel PC and thus was a threat to the collective illusion that 1996-Apple offered anything substantially different or better than Windows '95 (source: was a 1996 Macintosh user who used the term “WIntel”)

Compare:

- Compaq DeskPro https://serialport.org/pcs/compaq/compaq-deskpro-en-c300a/#p...

- Packard Bell Legend https://old.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/hjomez...

- HP Pavilion https://www.hp.com/hpinfo/abouthp/histnfacts/museum/personal...

- Gateway 2000 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Gateway_...

Downvote all you want but I was there and literally heard people complain about it for this reason lol

> the collective illusion that 1996-Apple offered anything > substantially different or better than Windows '95

PowerPC

I love PowerPC but I still don't believe CPU architecture alone is a motivating factor for why any person would choose to use a particular computer over any other. If that were true then Stebe Jovs never would have told me about The Megahertz Myth, now welcome Phil S[c]hiller to the stage to run the PentiumⅡ machine for this specially-scripted Photoshop benchmark, et cetera.

Reads like it was just a bad Mac all-around but the left-hand floppy drive was a visible symbol of that on the face of the machine because it was different from what was normal for a Macintosh in a machine that was full of things that were different from a normal Macintosh.

Also knowing Stephen Hackett, I don't think he's capable of hate for older Macs. He seems to love even the oddest of ducks and has a lab full of them.

Whole thing seems like a bunch of whining about things that don't matter and are good ways to reduce cost with minimal impact.

The auto voltage switching - how often are you taking your PC to another country with a different voltage?

The lower quality case finish - how many mac users ever dared open the case?

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