...But, GCR vs. MFM is irrelevant since software exists to write that format on either platform. The compatibility problem between PCs and Macs for half-a-decade was not an encoding problem, but rather the ingenious method Apple employed to cram an extra 10% of data onto the same physical space, resulting in a hardware incompatibility which cannot be overcome on the PC side. For that, I do not fault Apple but the cheap PC industry.
Today I consider the difficulty of getting an original compact up and running a badge of honor for the foresight and level of quality to which Apple chose to hold the computer industry.

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That is the weirdest, most blinders-on-to-reality propaganda-dripping kool-aid soaked rant in favor of a proprietary product entirely born of a certain company's self-destructive "Not Invented Here" mindset towards industry standards I've read in a long time. Bravo!

Apple's magical custom multi-speed drives are nothing other than a sad measure to salvage some barely worthwhile crumbs from the work they wasted on the "Twiggy" drive. Solely in order to prevent the complete destruction of their fragile egos they thus ensured that the Mac would be marginalized from the mainstream of business computing, forcing users to use "unconventional" and clumsy methods to transfer data rather than simply having the option of equipping their PCs with a 3 1/2 inch disk drive. (Said drive was already being shipped in several Hewlett-Packard machines and a slew of Japanese pseudo-PC clones and CP/M machines. And the Macintosh, predictably, suffered badly in business penetration until the Superdrive equipped models shipped several years later and finally provided some commonality in disk formats.) The "ghost of Twiggy" also saddled the Macintosh with a disk controller which *completely* monopolizes the CPU and requires *perfect* uninterrupted timing to work properly. A tradeoff like that was "acceptable" when the Disk ][ system was designed, as good off-the-shelf single-chip disk controllers didn't exist then, but they were present in vast abundance by 1980.

(And if you really want to crow about that 10% difference in capacity, take note that IBM shipped the AT the same year the Macintosh was introduced with 1.2 MB capacity 5.25 inch floppies, which makes Apple's 400K disks look pretty pathetic by comparison.)

Anyway. Whatever. EVERYTHING ABOUT THE MACINTOSH IS THE BEST THING THERE WILL EVER BE AND APPLE DOES NO WRONG... EVAR!