Once again, I don’t what

Once again, I don’t what all the fuss is about. I already have a full-sized keyboard and precise optical mouse for my PC. Of course, it’ll be nice for the Mac users to catch up. Now, if only there was more than one button and one of those scrollie deals on that mouse….

The new Apple G4 Cube, however, is a thing of beauty. I’d love to have a computer that small on my desk. A downside of the Cube is that it’s not all that expandable. In this Failure Magazine interview, Steve Wozniak, one of the founders of Apple, points out that one of Apple’s early strengths was the expandability of the Apple II:

Woz: “Tandy, like Commodore with their Pet, was non-expandable. You would buy it with 4k of memory and you’d have 4k of memory for life. Early on we came out with our floppy disk drive. How do you add a floppy disk drive to a Tandy? It turns out there was no designed way built in. So the Tandy machines and the Commodore machines, because of their lack of expandability, lost out in the early exciting things, which were floppy disks and VisiCalc. They had to go back to the drawing board. They tried to make their products go for a while longer, which was another mistake. They would have been smarter to get to the drawing board sooner. That’s really where Apple won out.”

Now, the situation with the Apple II then and that of the Apple G4 Cube now is not really the same, but I think there are some interesting parallels and lessons to be learned there.