Our recent blurbs on the iMac sparked a valid question from inSync reader, Marc C.:
“You have mentioned a few potential problems with the iMac (the foremost being USB and no serial, thus no MIDI interface for a while). Another that I have not heard is that with iMac, Apple is departing from their standard of SCSI hard drives and implanting the iMac with an IDE drive instead. How will this effect the music applications, for example CD recording, data transfer with existing SCSI, etc?”
Actually Apple began to depart from SCSI drives a few models ago. Virtually all G3 Macs come stock with an IDE hard drive and CD-ROM, though SCSI drives are still an option. IDE drives perform very well nowadays and are less expensive to use than SCSI. We haven’t found that this causes any significant problems with most software with the exception of software that is designed to pull audio files off of a disc in the CD drive for use in some types of editing programs. Most of these programs broke when used with IDE CD-ROM drives, but they are now being updated.