Enter USB 2.0Įverything changed when USB 2.0 was introduced in April 2000. Further, because of protocol overhead, the maximum throughput over USB 1.1 was about 8 Mbps (1 MBps), a far cry from the 10 MBps SCSI Macs had used for years or the 16 MBps EIDE hard drive interface common in those days. That’s fast for a mouse or keyboard, decent for a printer or scanner, but abysmally slow for a hard drive. The G3 iMacs and other computers of the era supported USB 1.1, which has a bandwidth of 12 Mbps (Megabits per second, or 1.5 MBps ).
Anyone who wanted to sell a printer, scanner, hard drive, mouse, keyboard, or touch tablet to iMac owners would have to embrace USB. While the PC world was content to add USB as one more port in addition to parallel and serial ports, the iMac dispensed with legacy ports in favor of a USB-only architecture. USB has been around since 1996, but it didn’t come into its own until Apple unveiled the first iMac in May 1998.
