2.88MB floppy drives, IE "ED" drives, did exist in the PC world. Presumably Apple was considering making a Mac version of it. They're really rare in the wild, however. Late model IBM PS/2s shipped with the drives and the floppy controllers in most PCs made in the second half of the 1990s technically support them, but almost nobody had one. (There was an adoption issue with them because most PCs in circulation when they were introduced would have required a new floppy controller to drive them, unlike the 1.44MB which ran at the same data rate as the old 1.2MB high density floppy in the PC/AT. Most AT class machines had the floppy controller on the same board as the hard disk controller *and* there was the issue of BIOS support so the standard pretty much bellyflopped. By the time generic PCs had the requisite floppy controller and BIOS support the world already had things like ZIP drives.) I can understand Apple just saying "forget it" given the reception they had in the PC world, since pretty much the only reason 1990's Macs had floppy drives was to exchange data with PCs.