The advance of technology involves learning what you can do without. When the first iMacs arrived in the late 1990s without floppy disk drives, the omission was a talking point. Remarkably quickly, it became the norm. What Apple had spotted was that connectivity to the net would be the all-important factor in the future, and the days of transferring data to a removable disk were on the way out. The iMac allowed you to get on the net quickly, straight out of the box: “there’s no step three!” This emphasis on web-based computing has continued with the iPhone and iPad, and, most recently, with the planned launch of the long-rumoured iCloud cloud computing service.