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I would argue that Microsoft's greatest weakness is also their greatest strength. My 13 year old scanner works just fine in Windows 10 with it's XP drivers, th

I would argue that Microsoft's greatest weakness is also their greatest strength. My 13 year old scanner works just fine in Windows 10 with it's XP drivers, the same can't be said of my Wife's 5 year old scanner on her Mac. I didn't dare tell her it worked fine on Windows too for fear she might throw her Air through a window.

FussyZeus 11y ago
To be fair, printers and scanners in OS X are much like they are in linux: They either work perfectly immediately, or they'll never work no matter how much you try. There is no middle ground in my experience. I don't know enough about how print services/drivers work to make any meaningful statements, I'm just happy I got a printer/mac combination that works well.
- cptskippy 11y ago
  That's generally been my experience as well with Macs but I've never had much trouble getting a printer or scanner to work on Linux. That might just be a function of when I tried however because I remember around 2008-2009 when it was pretty futile to get WiFi working reliably on Linux, that is no longer the case.
Finnucane 11y ago
If you're trying to run an old scanner on a Mac, look into Vuescan scanning software. My wife is still running a very old Canoscan scanner on her iMac with it. Vuescan supports almost everything that's not a drum scanner.
- cptskippy 11y ago
  This is what really irks me about Apple and OSX. Things work fine until they don't at which point you need to pay a third party $40-90 so that your hardware will work again. If I were sitting on some professional multi-thousand dollar hardware this might be acceptable, but I'm not pay that much for a cheap USB scanner I spent less than $100.
  - Finnucane 11y ago
    Is it Apple's fault if the manufacturers discontinue the drivers?
    - cptskippy 11y ago
      The problem isn't manufacturers discontinuing drivers, it's that Apple changes the requirements for a driver to operate with each release of it's OS making it necessary for driver manufacturers to produce new or updated drivers. For a company like HP or Canon with 10s of thousands of products in it's portfolio that's untenable, and with OSX only being a minuscule portion of their user base it becomes a huge waste of time and money.

FussyZeus 11y ago

To be fair, printers and scanners in OS X are much like they are in linux: They either work perfectly immediately, or they'll never work no matter how much you try. There is no middle ground in my experience. I don't know enough about how print services/drivers work to make any meaningful statements, I'm just happy I got a printer/mac combination that works well.

cptskippy 11y ago
That's generally been my experience as well with Macs but I've never had much trouble getting a printer or scanner to work on Linux. That might just be a function of when I tried however because I remember around 2008-2009 when it was pretty futile to get WiFi working reliably on Linux, that is no longer the case.

Finnucane 11y ago

If you're trying to run an old scanner on a Mac, look into Vuescan scanning software. My wife is still running a very old Canoscan scanner on her iMac with it. Vuescan supports almost everything that's not a drum scanner.

cptskippy 11y ago
This is what really irks me about Apple and OSX. Things work fine until they don't at which point you need to pay a third party $40-90 so that your hardware will work again. If I were sitting on some professional multi-thousand dollar hardware this might be acceptable, but I'm not pay that much for a cheap USB scanner I spent less than $100.
- Finnucane 11y ago
  Is it Apple's fault if the manufacturers discontinue the drivers?
  - cptskippy 11y ago
    The problem isn't manufacturers discontinuing drivers, it's that Apple changes the requirements for a driver to operate with each release of it's OS making it necessary for driver manufacturers to produce new or updated drivers. For a company like HP or Canon with 10s of thousands of products in it's portfolio that's untenable, and with OSX only being a minuscule portion of their user base it becomes a huge waste of time and money.