I’m thoroughly familiar, but hoped to avoid any misinformed eye-rolling based on modern HTML and JS being good. In 2007 - they sucked. We were barely out of the DHTML era. JS was interpreted. Chrome didn’t exist yet. Canvas would remain bizarrely slow for another decade. The video tag was barely a proposal. (And Lemmy still fucks up by erasing anything between angle brackets.)

When the iPhone launched, Flash was the only way cool shit happened, inside a browser. Java sucked and nobody used Silverlight. Android phones offering janky Flash support was a genuinely important feature that I routinely relied on for years to come. But all anyone remembers is ‘iPhones killed Flash!’ as if he didn’t completely fail to make “web apps” work, launch the iron-grip App Store, and cushion his reputation with all the money that took.

Same shit happened with the iMac - it could not move data. All anyone remembers is ‘iMacs killed floppies!,’ but literally every candy-colored iMac I ever saw had a candy-colored USB floppy drive attached. How else were you supposed to get stuff off it? None of them had CD-R drives. USB thumb drives did not meaningfully exist. E-mail attachments had comically tight file-size limits. But that fucker in the turtleneck sold people the moral superiority of being beyond floppy disks, and got fawning press coverage for the radical new… absence of an important feature. Not for the first time and not for the last time.

The lesson you should take from Apple is that people are predictably irrational. They can make good decisions - but under certain conditions, they simply won’t. And it’s so much easier to fool someone than to convince them they’ve been fooled. Even as they buy a color-matched floppy drive for their fancy new floppy-less computer.