<<The new laptops will lose their serial ports, but who cares,>>
Actually, quite a few people would care.
Laptops are designed to be mobile and to work in different locations where you may not have control over what kinds of devices (printers, scanners, networking stuff, etc) are available.
We ran into that problem with Win NT. We standardized on NT for everything including laptops. Seemed logical at the time - we have all our corporate stuff geared toward NT.
The problem we found later was that people on the road go to their homes, client sites, other networks, etc. They suddenly could not connect to the zillions of low-end printers and devices out there.
No one was making NT drivers for cheap printers. The logic "if you are on NT, you must be on a corporate network and have access to heavy duty network printers and devices.
Brand X Printer company does not want to target the small percentage of corporate users out there for their cheap printer. They want to target the masses who are using Win95. Why go through the cost and hassle of NT drivers for printers that may never see NT machines?
Result, we had to setup our laptops on Win95.
Here, we see USB potentially becoming standard on PowerBooks. Not everyone on the road will be using USB. It helps to be a Boyscout and - Be Prepared!
USB AND Serial for Powerbooks! At least for a transitionary generation. Wintel laptops have USB AND Parallel. Why not the Powerbooks.
-Bill_H |
