A recent forum post I read reminded me of a beef I have with Apple.
One of the selling points Apple claim is that the Mac just works out of the box. No need to waste time downloading drivers - just plug in your equipment and play away. Or so Apple would have you believe.
Well, here’s two examples of when this isn’t the case and Mac users can look darn right stupid to our PC colleagues.
First example: my aunt has a PowerPC Mac Mini which, as you know, doesn’t come with an inbuilt iSight camera. So, in order to stay in touch with her son who is traveling the world with his Mac laptop, she thought she’d buy a nice USB webcam that she could simply plug and play into the Mac Mini and use with iChat. You can’t blame her for thinking this would work: the webcam did say it was Plug ‘n Play and she’d heard how Apple Mac’s “just work”. Well, it didn’t give me any pleasure to tell her that she’d bought a device that wouldn’t actually “just work” out of the box and that Apple’s external iSight camera, which used to be an expensive option, wasn’t even available any more.
Second example: an acquaintance had this nightmare story, “I was intending to do a presentation using Keynote, trying to show off my Mac and the power of Leopard to my PC colleagues. I plugged in the projector system via KVM and the MacBook Pro would not recognize it. Several attempts led to my humiliation and caused endless amounts of grins on the PC users’ faces. Finally, I connected a VGA monitor which it recognized and then hot-swapped it for the KVM. It worked but my MacBook Pro’s resolution was downsized. I had egg on my face!! To add insult to injury, one ‘friend’ brought out his Sony Vaio and connected it to the KVM without problems. I just don’t understand what happened. It is all supposed to PnP! I won’t be waxing lyrical about Mac anymore”.
So, are we being told a lie by Apple or are these just isolated examples? It’s not like we’re trying to run a piece of Windows PC software on Mac OSX and are complaining that it’s not working. These are everyday pieces of hardware that many people would like to use and PC users would be bemused to find out that they don’t “just work” with a Mac. For me, the lack of hardware compatibility is the main reason I don’t bring my Mac into my business meetings - I don’t want the embarrassment of my presentation not working.
Mat Pancha // 21/11/2007 at 11:32 pm
I’ve actually experienced both examples you wrote of.
When I got my first mac back in 2001 (iBook G3 dual USB), I tried plugging in a logitech and microsoft webcam only to find out they wouldn’t work. At that time I figured Apple just hadn’t gotten around to geting the drivers prepared. Then the iSight came out, but I still wanted to use my Logitech or MS webcam, and when I brought it up in the forums, the resounding answer was “get an iSight”. At $150, it was way out of my budget for a mere webcam (I know spec wise it was better than the competition at the time. Needless to say, I still can’t use a non-Apple webcam on my iBook or latest aquisition, a MBP (not so much an issue with the builtin iSight on the MBP)
With the KVM issue, I’ve never tried, but I am now curious to see how that would work on my MBP. I have had trouble with Projectors in the past though, of the roughly dozen projectors I’ve attempted to connect to, I’ve only successfully connected to one. However, if I boot into XP or Vista in Bootcamp I can connect with no problems. With the iBook, I’ve never had any success with a projector.
Aria Rajasa // 14/12/2007 at 1:48 am
for webcams, i use macam (macam.sourceforge.com), it recognize most webcams, even the chinese models that I got for about $15 or so.
For projectors, I never really had a problem on my powerbook, or my current macbook. Maybe I haven’t found a projector that doesn’t fit
mark // 14/06/2008 at 9:14 pm
10.4.9 and later support USB webcams that are UVC (USB video class) compatible. Even as of today 6-2008 lots of cameras are not UVC compatible.
Basic features are supported as part of UVC, but obviously effects and controls that are dependent on manufacturer’s windows software and drivers aren’t part of the basics…and autofocus isn’t going to work unless they’ve written a mac-specific driver.
As far as you aunt goes, macs working vs 3rd party peripherals working with a mac that don’t have any indication of mac compatibility on the box isn’t really Apple’s fault, that’s a noob mistake…hopefully she was able to return it, or, she was able to rely on helpful folks like you that would’ve used Google and found IOXperts 3rd party driver that’s been available for years for $$, or the MACAM project’s more recent free offering listed above.
The KVM thing is odd, and probably with some time you could’ve licked it….Oh, wait, it was “an acquaintance”…well, not everyone is blessed with decent troubleshooting skills. And, to the point, it’s annecdotal, not typical, and lacking any detail…but there have been many stories of TVs not supporting computers, gaming machines, etc.. until firmware was updated…or perhaps it was the macbook pro out of whack? We’ll never know, without detail…
So, you have one story of completely off expectations, and a questionable anecdotal story of a problem that may, or may not have been with the mac (vs the user vs the KVM)…but that was enough fuel to write a BLOG entry??
you go boy!