Dear Apple,
Your newfangled OS really is quite swank and it works nicely and all that. However, every single peripheral object I ever bought is now sitting around as a paperweight-- scanners, webcams, etc. Your newfangled system is also gargantuan enough that I can’t keep the old OS on my system to reboot every time I needs to do, oh, anything. I am absolutely not going to fill my machine with TWO operating systems, so don’t even suggest that I boot up into 9, fuckers. I stuck with 9, with which I was perfectly happy, as long as I possibly could until your lack of support forced me into X: now I have to stand around with one foot in the past? I am sick to death of booting into 9-- it’s 2005. This platform was difficult enough to find supported devices for in the first place, and now you’ve hurled a big crapload of obsolescence into my life. Thanks a lot. I’m going to stick with you, like a battered wife or Stockholm syndrome victim, because although you’re wild and you’re crazy and sometimes just plain bad, I need you to keep me satisfied and love you on some level and we’ve spent so much time together, but I want you to know that this has all irritated me.
Dear HP bastards,
(bcc: 3Com bastards)
Where are my god damn scanner drivers, already? This is not what I’d call an old scanner. You mean you don’t actually support OSX? Why did you say these drivers were in the works for 800 years? These drivers don’t really exist and they never will, will they? Let’s be honest with ourselves. Guess I’m going to give this scanner to a friend who runs Windows and go buy a Canon, fuckers. I don’t have to stick with you as your product isn’t a hell of a lot different from any of 80 other companies.
Araghhhhhh grumpy! No, it’s not rational. I feel better now, though. I just moved furniture around so I could get my scanner plugged in correctly to a clear outlet, and discover it’s a paperweight. Now I have to move the furniture back.
Every single peripheral object I use noe works much better with OS X than wth any OS I’ve used before. What are there “dri-vers” you speak of? Ask someone.
Yeah, if I had a couple of hundred dollars for every peripheral that got left behind on the road to progress from 1992 to now, well, I would have pretty much almost the amount of money that I spent on those peripherals.
Do you want to talk SCSI hard drives, scanners, and CD writers? All these things are dirt cheap now, but cost big bucks when I bought them. Not too mention all the various special cables for connecting Powerbooks back to back as hard drives. Every once in a while I make a pass through the spare room and pick up a bunch of old hardware to drop in the trash. Only good thing about this is that new hardware is a lot cheaper than it used to be.
Troy, are you saying there is no such thing as an older device that needs a driver for OSX? That all devices, even pre-OSX, are plug and play? That when I plug my 3com HomeConnect USB webcam in and hit “start my webcam” in Yahoo messenger that this is, like, going to work somehow, someday? Is there nothing in your Library/Extensions with the word ‘driver’ in it? Should I be able to stick a 3d party pci card in and have ‘en1’ show up in network prefs ports with no magical intervention? I’m glad that you’ve been lucky with your devices-- I haven’t been as lucky. For newer stuff, yes, OSX rocks. IF you have newer stuff.
Yes, OS-X does need drivers for some things. E.g. my Epson printer. It’s pretty good about generic things like USB memory devices and Firewire hard drives and DVD burners, though.
Well, it’s not really Apple’s fault that drivers for MacOS 9 don’t work on OSX - that’s the inevitable result of migrating to a completely new OS core. No, this is HP’s fault; I find it impossible to overestimate the shittiness of their drivers, or their lack of commitment to updating or indeed ever providing the same. It is as if their programming team consists entirely of gibbons bent on world domination. Witness their low-end printer/scanner, which has no option to print in black and white if a document has any colour in it; a move which their customer service freely admits is designed to make you spend more on colour cartridges. Their advice? “You should have read the box.”
Why anyone would use any manufacturers drivers for scanners is beyond me. Once I had a grayscale Microtek scanner tha had a decent UI, but that was long ago, before the Elves rode the white ship to the west.