That's why Apple can't make laptops fast enough and Dell is sliding further in the dumper.

 

I miss the old floppies. I saw a stack of old 5 1/4 disks at the yard sale the other day....

 

It has been so long since I have seen or used one... I forget their capacity. What was it?

 

Can't they at least stay within a couple of years of where Apple is at with its laptops??

Dell serves a different marketplace than Apple. Sure, they sell to consumers but their base is in the corporate and educational marketplaces. The corporate world has different parameters than consumers. Corporate clients sometime (maybe even often) demand certain legacy requirements, such as a floppy disk drive. It shouldn't surprise you that Dell still provides them as options.

 

True. For a more competitive comparison, check out some of the HP or Sony laptop offerings. Not too bad specs, decent design/materials, and a heck of lot cheaper...except they don't run OS X.

 

Well, don't know how old that model of Dell is that you have, but the models I've seen as of late have quite modern architecture.

 

Brand new, but as I said, I have not had a chance to play with it yet. Don't even know the model number or line.

 

Dell....the home of the $350 laptop...

 

I see plenty of Dell computers. I myself have a dell desktop at home. Unlike a lot of you I am not 100% Mac ONLY. I will and do use Windows computers and I like them. For what I do, I can use a Mac or a PC, whichever is available. Yes, one thing I do notice as the Dell laptops are HUGE. Thick and heavy. It comes down to price. Many people cannot afford $1299 for a 13" laptop. They would rather spend $600 for a 15" dell which does the same thing.

 

.... Yes, one thing I do notice as the Dell laptops are HUGE. Thick and heavy. It comes down to price. Many people cannot afford $1299 for a 13" laptop. They would rather spend $600 for a 15" dell which does the same thing.

THis one is a Latitude D830 and sells up here for around $1,400 ....

 

I use a pc (don't attack I'm unarmed) and I haven't had a floppy drive installed for years now. Obviously in the bios you have to disable the floppy boot seek option and if you're like me you'd disable the floppy disk drive (fdd) controller as well.

They are pretty useless in my opinion. I mean if you're worried about data portability you can always use a usb thumb drive/key. Even if you don't own one you can always use email to transfer small files. A lot of new motherboards also allow you to flash your bios from within the operating system. So why do you need a floppy drive? Not to mention the diskettes are sensitive to magnets...

 

Sometimes in the business world, there are situations where old data may be on floppies. Just the other day at our company someone needed data from some floppies. Something that was saved ages ago. Luckily we had access to a box that had a floppy drive.

While you can get a USB floppy drive for any notebook, this Dell comes with one standard...Its targeted for corporate use so I think it should have it as a just incase (or at least an option when going through the BTO process to have a floppy if teh customer requires one).