The Macintosh external drives were the first to widely introduce Sony's new 3+1⁄2-inch rigid disk standard commercially and throughout their product line.

3.5-inch single-sided floppies had been used on several microcomputers and synthesizers in the early 1980s, including the Hewlett Packard 150 and various MSX computers.

Finally, the Mac OS routines were considerably more complex and disk access had to be synchronized with the mouse and keyboard.

However, if the internal circuit board (which consisted of its own CPU, IWM chip, RAM and firmware) was bypassed it could operate on a Macintosh as an 800-kilobyte drive.

It came in the Snow White-styled case and color to match the Apple IIc and had a pass-through connector for the addition of a second daisy-chained drive.

The use of Apple's GCR with variable speed (as used on the 400-kilobyte drive) accommodated a higher storage capacity than its 720-kilobyte PC counterparts.

However, with its increased storage capacity combined with 2-4 times the RAM available on the Mac Plus, the external drive was less of a necessity than it had been with its predecessors.

Beginning in September 1986, Apple adopted a unified cross-platform product strategy essentially eliminating platform-specific peripherals where possible.

In 1987 a newer and better, MFM-based, "high-density" format was developed which IBM first introduced in their PS/2 systems, doubling the previous storage capacity to 1.4 MB.

In Apple's pursuit of cross-compatibility with MS-DOS and Windows-based systems to attract more business customers, they adopted the new format, thus confirming it as the first industry-wide floppy disk standard.

However, Apple could not take advantage of the less expensive fixed-speed systems of the IBM-based computers, due to its backward incompatibility with their own variable-speed formats.

The external drive was offered only briefly with support for the Apple II, coming late in that product's life.

To take advantage of the drive's extended storage and new capabilities, it required the new SWIM (Sander–Wozniak Integrated Machine) floppy disk controller chip to be present on the Macintosh and Apple II, the latter requiring the Apple II 3.5 Disk Controller Card which integrated the chip.

The interface card was necessary for the Apple IIGS to make use of its greater storage capacity and ability to handle PC formats.

The Apple IIe could not utilize the drive in any form, unless it had the specialized interface card installed, much like the UniDisk 3.5 which the SuperDrive replaced.

PowerPC Macs dropped the original auto-eject Sony drives and went to a manual eject mechanism.

Manufactured exclusively for use with the Macintosh PowerBook line, the Macintosh HDI-20 External 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive (M8061) contained a low-powered, slimmer version of the SuperDrive and used a small square HDI-20[5] proprietary connector, rather than the larger standard DE-19 desktop connector, and was powered directly by the laptop.