The company has a good track record for success, too. Two of its other forced obsolescences have largely been forgotten by today’s users. The removal of floppy drives upon the launch of the iMac in 1998 felt similarly aggressive at the time. Most computer users had dozens of disks loaded with software and files, all rendered useless. And the MacBook Air, first introduced in 2008, removed the optical drive to allow for a thinner, lighter laptop body. Today, none of Apple’s computers feature built-in CD/DVD drives, and nobody seems terribly bothered. Thinner computers are far more important.

But Nicer’s parody underscores an unseen motivation: Apple’s aggressive battle against the retrograde pull of hardware standards also exerts an implicit control on its users. Buying an Apple product becomes an exercise in trust for the future it will bring about. And the problem with the future is that it’s very hard to think about how it might have been different once it arrives.

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When the iMac came on the scene, floppy disks were already insufficient to carry the increasingly bloated files produced by computer use. The CD-ROM drive had been delivering multimedia content for half a decade already, and big graphics files were commonplace well beyond the domain of graphic design and publishing that had been Mac mainstays since the 1980s. External, high-capacity floppy disk storage had been around for some time, but Iomega’s 1994 Zip drive, with its 100 MB disks, had become the standard for those who needed to move more than a high-density floppy’s 1.44 MB of data around. In 1996, the Universal Serial Bus (USB) connection standard had also emerged, allowing easier, cheaper attachment of peripherals, among them external disks and, later, flash drives. And of course, the internet was becoming popular beyond universities and research labs, offering access to network storage and transfer of files large and small.

But the ordinary home computer user—the target of Steve Jobs’s bold new entry-level iMac—was less likely to see external drives, FTP, and even email attachments as obvious solutions to the problem of file creation and management.

If anything, the iMac suggested that computers weren’t tools with which to generate things that left those computers. The first models came with a CD-ROM drive, but writeable optical drives didn’t appear until 2001. The iMac was a fun, colorful, and self-contained unit of computer experience. It purposely eschewed disturbance from without. A 1998 television spot for the machine overlaid the sound of traffic as it panned over a boring, complex PC before giving way to the calming chirp of birds as the iMac came into view.

With iMac, Apple began to shift computers from their role as tools with which to make materials for work and play, to a device with which to view previously-created media. In 1977, Apple had touted the fact that its first computer would let users “start writing your own programs the first evening.” By 1999, iMac print ads boasted, “The thrill of surfing. The agony of choosing a color.” The computer was already becoming the device that the iPhone and iPad would later realize: fashion-forward digital media distribution endpoints, rather than utilitarian machines for creating materials for use or output in other contexts.