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Originally posted by quantumfluff:
I'm very seriously considering getting one of these. I've never owned any Apple machines, but this may be the one that does it. The hard part is convincing my wife that we need this.

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Tell her she can use it to make DVDs of the kids' home movies (if you don't have kids, cite the cat or the dog instead). That'll do it.

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Originally posted by rjung:
Tell her she can use it to make DVDs of the kids' home movies (if you don't have kids, cite the cat or the dog instead). That'll do it. [/URL]

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Originally posted by Zwilnik:
The whole point of USB and Firewire is that they are Hot Plugable. ie you don't have to have everything connected at the same time!
Not only does having all those things permanently connected to your machine make your desk untidy, having your digital camera, mp3 player and PDA connected to your computer kind of limits their portability.
I just plug things into the keyboard or monitor of my Cube whenever I need to use them. Very simple and no clutter.

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Sharing a limited number of ports among several portable devices that are connected only occasionally does of course make sense. But it does not make sense to try to share several ports among several desktop devices - scanner, printer, Zip drive, keyboard, mouse, drawing tablet, etc. would not be practical. Swapping plugs, especially with the majority of the USB ports being located on the back of the machine, would be rather annoying and not really doable, as the original poster mentioned, without a hub.