8 ms·

To stress out again; OS/X has the poorest hardware support for 3rd parties; even compared to Linux. Just "think different" and buy some hardware and you ll see

To stress out again; OS/X has the poorest hardware support for 3rd parties; even compared to Linux. Just "think different" and buy some hardware and you ll see what I mean..

atirip 14y ago
Hardware? What hardware? Frankly, I havent bought nothing over last 10 years. I have laptop, you see...
- icebraining 14y ago
  Laptops are not hardware now?
- snitko 14y ago
  I bought Samsung Galaxy S3 recently, plugged it in via USB and was not able to browse it because, as far as I understood, MacOSX has no support for "media devices" whatever that is. I had to download some obscure Samsung "Kies" software through which I was able to get to the filesystem and upload some files. Wasted hours.
  - raverbashing 14y ago
    Oh my This is 100% to blame on Samsung, sorry. Even though my Samsung phone is seen as a USB device (and it works on MAC OS X), but maybe in the newer models they removed this functionality (and called it a feature) People may complain that iPhones need iTunes but then again it's iTunes not the gigantic pile of crap that is Kies
    - Danieru 14y ago
      No it has nothing to do with Samsung. In ICE Google changed how the partitions are handled: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=11714077&postcount=1 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=11714077&... It was pure engineering tradeoff to improve things in the long term. If anything OEMs would have preferred the old 'just works', sub-optimal, gives-an-excuse-to-obsolete-a-phone, lower support issues, solution. The ball is now in operating systems' court to support this standard in a way it wasn't envisioned to work a few years ago. Even ubuntu has been slow on this front.
      - raverbashing 14y ago
        Nice explanation, if it's to facilitate upgrades I'm all for it!
  - Joeri 14y ago
    That's the thing about samsung. They copied the bad stuff as well: weird connectors, itunes / kies.
  - nirvana 14y ago
    This is samsung not following USB standards. OS X has perfectly find support for media devices, and has worked fine with every digital camera, SD Card or other card reader, etc, that I've attached via USB in the past decade!
    - andybak 14y ago
      Actually it's lack of MTP support in OS X. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      Everything under the sun supports UMS, that OSX does is nothing special. That is not what his device was using though.
    - cageface 14y ago
      Wrong. It's Google's decision to abandon direct mounting Android drives in ICS in favor of the MTP standard. Which is the right move in the long term, although it's certainly causing some pain in the short term.
  - teach 14y ago
    This is not an issue with Apple or Samsung, it's an Android decision. Support for the USB Mass Storage protocol has been deprecated in Android in favor of MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) starting with Ice Cream Sandwich. The experience in Windows and on Linux is just as poor with this phone. (I love the phone, though.)
    - tesseractive 14y ago
      I haven't had any trouble using a Nexus 7 with Windows, it's worked like a charm. What's supposed to be the huge problem with MTP, exactly?
      - teach 14y ago
        I take that back, my Galaxy S III does work as expected using MTP with Windows 7. Previously my workplace was using an older Windows.
    - thwarted 14y ago
      Why can't Apple support MTP? Linux gets cited for lack of hardware or protocol support (MTP to an Android device works fine in Linux, btw), but it's not Apple's fault when they can't or don't provide drivers for common, standardized consumer electronics?
      - jlgreco 14y ago
        It seems fairly obvious that the reason is that facts which do not fit the narrative are not talked about. Confirmation bias in action.
      - teach 14y ago
        MTP does not work fine in Linux (specifically, Ubuntu 12.04). You can read the files but not write arbitrary files into arbitrary folders.
  - lvillani 14y ago
    Starting with Honeycomb the storage partition is exposed through MTP (or PTP), this way it can be accessed concurrently by both Android and your computer. Before Honeycomb, said partition could be accessed as an USB mass-storage drive but that required it to be unmounted, thus making all data unavailable to Android while it was connected to a computer. In my experience only Windows 7 has passable MTP support. On Linux I had mixed results with gvfs and mtpfs (slow and crashy). jmtpfs [1] is a nice replacement, though. Google also released an application for OS X [2] but I can't try it since I don't own an Apple computer. My solution to the problem was to install a WebDAV server (such as [3]) on my device (Galaxy Nexus) and access it wirelessly. [1]: http://research.jacquette.com/jmtpfs-exchanging-files-between-android-devices-and-linux/ [2]: http://www.android.com/filetransfer/ [3]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.theolivetree.webdavserver
wsc981 14y ago
Printer drivers seem fine. Scanner drivers seem fine. USB mouses and keyboards work fine. Most Apple products can't really be expanded in many other ways. I'd say the hardware support is fine for what little customisability Apple allows on the hardware that they sell. Perhaps the Mac Pro might have some issues with internal cards (I honestly wouldn't know ...), but those devices are not affordable for 99% of the people.
colmvp 14y ago
Wait what? Every scanner, printer, tablet, mouse, and even color correction device I've bought has worked on my Mac.
- vidarh 14y ago
  Then you've been selective about what you've bought. It's trivial to find devices that are Windows specific and/or have only gotten Linux and/or OS X support after extensive rounds of reverse engineering. Low end printers and scanners in particular are notorious for skimping on the logic in the device itself and depending on a large blob of Windows driver code, with manufacturers that couldn't care less about supporting anything other than Windows.
nirvana 14y ago
I've been using OS X going back to the betas. I've never seen OS X have problems with third party hardware that conformed to standards. I have seen problems with third party hardware that required its own driver (poorly written generally) or that was half assed crap that was designed to work with windows but marketed as supporting standards like "USB". Meanwhile, Linux has trouble dealing with the computer itself, let alone getting hardware attached to it. Constant pain in the ass. Currently I'm in a country in a different hemisphere from the USA. I walked into a store and bought and off the shelf no-name brand displayport to HDMI adapter. Worked no problem. I've gotten used to being able to do that... and haven't had much trouble getting things to work with OS X in years. Course, I also stopped buying things that require custom drivers-- that's a clear sign you're not going to have a good time. To claim that Linux is better in this regard is, quite frankly, asinine.
- planckscnst 14y ago
  In my experience, Linux works great with standards-compliant hardware. Linux is typically the first platform with support for a new standard. The problem is there is so much hardware that is not standards-compliant. Your comment looks about as asinine to me as the as the parent comment does to you.
  - coffeeaddicted 14y ago
    Being the first platform supporting it in the kernel - and then you have to wait for another few months (or years in case of Debian) until you finally have the driver in your distribution. The alternative is compiling kernel-modules yourself - which then get broken again by the distro whenever it updates the kernel without warning. And to even compile you have to follow hints on several websites until you figure out the way to compile a module just for that kernel-version you are having (this all is from experience trying to get a Wacom tablet running - I gave up on it when it broke again after a distro update and the compiling mechanism then also no longer worked for some reason. Now waiting for Debian Wheezy to save me).
- georgemcbay 14y ago
  "Currently I'm in a country in a different hemisphere from the USA. I walked into a store and bought and off the shelf no-name brand displayport to HDMI adapter. Worked no problem." That really has nothing to do with the OS you're running. The OS isn't driving the DisplayPort<->HDMI protocol conversion in any way (your 'no-name' brand adapter is probably relying on DP++ and just passing through the HDMI signal anyway). This is like saying your VGA cable is compatible with Macs with a VGA port. Of course it is.
thronemonkey 14y ago
I have no idea where this sentiment coming from. I'm typing this from an MBP with a das keyboard, navigating with a razer mouse and viewing with a samsung monitor, everything works fine.
thronemonkey 14y ago
I have no idea where this sentiment is coming from. I'm typing this from an MBP with a das keyboard, navigating with a razer mouse and viewing with a samsung monitor, everything works fine.
- 4ad 14y ago
  All keyboards are the same, all mice are the same, spectral analyzers are not the same, software-defined radios are not the same, USB-Serial adapters are not the same, FPGA interfaces are not the same, sensor boards are not the same, laser cutters are not the same, need I go on?
rahoulb 14y ago
The real difference is that on OSX is if something doesn't work it doesn't work. Under Linux it may work, or work badly, or you can probably hack it to make it work well. I used to think I liked the latter but there's something appealing about the binary clarity of OSX.
- jeremyjh 14y ago
  Part of it is you won't spend as much time thinking about it. Say you have a wireless keyboard that is a little dodgy on Linux, but works most of the time. But every now it fucks up and really pisses you off. If it never worked on OS X you wouldn't even remember it because you would have sent it back or resold it.
- DeepDuh 14y ago
  Thank you, that's exactly how I think, it's even this way with Windows. On other systems I would waste days after days of my life to set things up 'just the way I want' only to find that it's never gonna be quite that way. Macs just let me accept the things as they are and get back to work. Very often, I'd get to see after a while, why things work the way they work (say, Window management). Anyway, this has been almost 100% true up from 10.3 through 10.6.x. Recent developments both on Apple's as well as on MS's side have closed the gap between the two systems quite a bit. I still prefer OSX but it's gotten close. The real reason I continue to buy macs nowadays is the hardware quality.
  - hollerith 14y ago
    >On other systems I would waste days after days of my life to set things up 'just the way I want' only to find that it's never gonna be quite that way. Macs just let me accept the things as they are and get back to work. This. It's almost as if Linux is a collection of parts and tools from which a sufficiently good designer can build a usable desktop whereas OS X is a usable desktop. That's an exaggeration, but for me there is some truth to it. Note that Linux was my only desktop from 1997 through 2009.
    - DeepDuh 14y ago
bpatrianakos 14y ago
Oh well now that you said it the argument is settled. You can't just say OS X has the poorest hardware support ever and not back it up with anything except "go buy some hardware and see what works and what doesn't". Is there maybe a table online that lists these incompatibilities you can link to? Please don't say "do some research" because the onus is on you to prove yourrself right, not on me to prove you right. You also said "even compared to Linux". That's interesting. That statement there gives the impression that you're more interested in defending your own beliefs and/or choices rather than being truly interested in explaining to us what OS has objectively terrible hardware support. "even compared to Linux" sounds like something an apologist would say. Then when you added in the "think different" line you made it seem even more like your comment was based off some kind of blind loyalty to Linux rather than loyalty to facts. Me? I've used Mac, a handful of Linux distros, and Windows for a long time. I don't know which has the best or worse hardware support but I do know when someone says something based on what camp they're in rather than what the facts are.
- RegEx 14y ago
  > Then when you added in the "think different" line you made it seem even more like your comment was based off some kind of blind loyalty to Linux rather than loyalty to facts. Don't read too far into things, and "...loyalty to facts" eye roll. Anyway, It's pretty common knowledge to Linux users that hardware/driver support on Linux can be a challenge. Sometimes things work right out of the box, other times you have to do a lot of work and a lot of Googling. That being said, I don't agree with the parent. For basic hardware needs, Windows and OSX have a fairly high success rate of plug-and-play functionality. For me on Linux, it's about 50/50.
  - ekianjo 14y ago
    On windows, a fairly high success rate? This must be a joke. Try installing a graphics card without driver, you will see how well it is supported under windows. I consider that basic functionality. Same for wifi dongles, they usually need drivers to be installed in windows, while this is all taken care of at the kernel level in Linux. In Linux you very rarely have to install any driver. True, some hardware remains unsupported, but the list of compatible hardware without any installation required is pretty long. On windows, you'll need to install stuff for most of new hardware you try to plug in, no matter what.

To stress out again; OS/X has the poorest hardware support for 3rd parties; even compared to Linux. Just "think different" and buy some hardware and you ll see what I mean..

atirip 14y ago

Hardware? What hardware? Frankly, I havent bought nothing over last 10 years. I have laptop, you see...

icebraining 14y ago
Laptops are not hardware now?
snitko 14y ago
I bought Samsung Galaxy S3 recently, plugged it in via USB and was not able to browse it because, as far as I understood, MacOSX has no support for "media devices" whatever that is. I had to download some obscure Samsung "Kies" software through which I was able to get to the filesystem and upload some files. Wasted hours.
- raverbashing 14y ago
  Oh my This is 100% to blame on Samsung, sorry. Even though my Samsung phone is seen as a USB device (and it works on MAC OS X), but maybe in the newer models they removed this functionality (and called it a feature) People may complain that iPhones need iTunes but then again it's iTunes not the gigantic pile of crap that is Kies
  - Danieru 14y ago
    No it has nothing to do with Samsung. In ICE Google changed how the partitions are handled: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=11714077&postcount=1 http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=11714077&... It was pure engineering tradeoff to improve things in the long term. If anything OEMs would have preferred the old 'just works', sub-optimal, gives-an-excuse-to-obsolete-a-phone, lower support issues, solution. The ball is now in operating systems' court to support this standard in a way it wasn't envisioned to work a few years ago. Even ubuntu has been slow on this front.
    - raverbashing 14y ago
      Nice explanation, if it's to facilitate upgrades I'm all for it!
- Joeri 14y ago
  That's the thing about samsung. They copied the bad stuff as well: weird connectors, itunes / kies.
- nirvana 14y ago
  This is samsung not following USB standards. OS X has perfectly find support for media devices, and has worked fine with every digital camera, SD Card or other card reader, etc, that I've attached via USB in the past decade!
  - andybak 14y ago
    Actually it's lack of MTP support in OS X. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol
  - jlgreco 14y ago
    Everything under the sun supports UMS, that OSX does is nothing special. That is not what his device was using though.
  - cageface 14y ago
    Wrong. It's Google's decision to abandon direct mounting Android drives in ICS in favor of the MTP standard. Which is the right move in the long term, although it's certainly causing some pain in the short term.
- teach 14y ago
  This is not an issue with Apple or Samsung, it's an Android decision. Support for the USB Mass Storage protocol has been deprecated in Android in favor of MTP (Media Transfer Protocol) starting with Ice Cream Sandwich. The experience in Windows and on Linux is just as poor with this phone. (I love the phone, though.)
  - tesseractive 14y ago
    I haven't had any trouble using a Nexus 7 with Windows, it's worked like a charm. What's supposed to be the huge problem with MTP, exactly?
    - teach 14y ago
      I take that back, my Galaxy S III does work as expected using MTP with Windows 7. Previously my workplace was using an older Windows.
  - thwarted 14y ago
    Why can't Apple support MTP? Linux gets cited for lack of hardware or protocol support (MTP to an Android device works fine in Linux, btw), but it's not Apple's fault when they can't or don't provide drivers for common, standardized consumer electronics?
    - jlgreco 14y ago
      It seems fairly obvious that the reason is that facts which do not fit the narrative are not talked about. Confirmation bias in action.
    - teach 14y ago
      MTP does not work fine in Linux (specifically, Ubuntu 12.04). You can read the files but not write arbitrary files into arbitrary folders.
- lvillani 14y ago
  Starting with Honeycomb the storage partition is exposed through MTP (or PTP), this way it can be accessed concurrently by both Android and your computer. Before Honeycomb, said partition could be accessed as an USB mass-storage drive but that required it to be unmounted, thus making all data unavailable to Android while it was connected to a computer. In my experience only Windows 7 has passable MTP support. On Linux I had mixed results with gvfs and mtpfs (slow and crashy). jmtpfs [1] is a nice replacement, though. Google also released an application for OS X [2] but I can't try it since I don't own an Apple computer. My solution to the problem was to install a WebDAV server (such as [3]) on my device (Galaxy Nexus) and access it wirelessly. [1]: http://research.jacquette.com/jmtpfs-exchanging-files-between-android-devices-and-linux/ [2]: http://www.android.com/filetransfer/ [3]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.theolivetree.webdavserver

wsc981 14y ago

Printer drivers seem fine. Scanner drivers seem fine. USB mouses and keyboards work fine. Most Apple products can't really be expanded in many other ways. I'd say the hardware support is fine for what little customisability Apple allows on the hardware that they sell. Perhaps the Mac Pro might have some issues with internal cards (I honestly wouldn't know ...), but those devices are not affordable for 99% of the people.

colmvp 14y ago

Wait what? Every scanner, printer, tablet, mouse, and even color correction device I've bought has worked on my Mac.

vidarh 14y ago
Then you've been selective about what you've bought. It's trivial to find devices that are Windows specific and/or have only gotten Linux and/or OS X support after extensive rounds of reverse engineering. Low end printers and scanners in particular are notorious for skimping on the logic in the device itself and depending on a large blob of Windows driver code, with manufacturers that couldn't care less about supporting anything other than Windows.

nirvana 14y ago

I've been using OS X going back to the betas. I've never seen OS X have problems with third party hardware that conformed to standards. I have seen problems with third party hardware that required its own driver (poorly written generally) or that was half assed crap that was designed to work with windows but marketed as supporting standards like "USB". Meanwhile, Linux has trouble dealing with the computer itself, let alone getting hardware attached to it. Constant pain in the ass. Currently I'm in a country in a different hemisphere from the USA. I walked into a store and bought and off the shelf no-name brand displayport to HDMI adapter. Worked no problem. I've gotten used to being able to do that... and haven't had much trouble getting things to work with OS X in years. Course, I also stopped buying things that require custom drivers-- that's a clear sign you're not going to have a good time. To claim that Linux is better in this regard is, quite frankly, asinine.

planckscnst 14y ago
In my experience, Linux works great with standards-compliant hardware. Linux is typically the first platform with support for a new standard. The problem is there is so much hardware that is not standards-compliant. Your comment looks about as asinine to me as the as the parent comment does to you.
- coffeeaddicted 14y ago
  Being the first platform supporting it in the kernel - and then you have to wait for another few months (or years in case of Debian) until you finally have the driver in your distribution. The alternative is compiling kernel-modules yourself - which then get broken again by the distro whenever it updates the kernel without warning. And to even compile you have to follow hints on several websites until you figure out the way to compile a module just for that kernel-version you are having (this all is from experience trying to get a Wacom tablet running - I gave up on it when it broke again after a distro update and the compiling mechanism then also no longer worked for some reason. Now waiting for Debian Wheezy to save me).
georgemcbay 14y ago
"Currently I'm in a country in a different hemisphere from the USA. I walked into a store and bought and off the shelf no-name brand displayport to HDMI adapter. Worked no problem." That really has nothing to do with the OS you're running. The OS isn't driving the DisplayPort<->HDMI protocol conversion in any way (your 'no-name' brand adapter is probably relying on DP++ and just passing through the HDMI signal anyway). This is like saying your VGA cable is compatible with Macs with a VGA port. Of course it is.

thronemonkey 14y ago

I have no idea where this sentiment coming from. I'm typing this from an MBP with a das keyboard, navigating with a razer mouse and viewing with a samsung monitor, everything works fine.

thronemonkey 14y ago

I have no idea where this sentiment is coming from. I'm typing this from an MBP with a das keyboard, navigating with a razer mouse and viewing with a samsung monitor, everything works fine.

4ad 14y ago
All keyboards are the same, all mice are the same, spectral analyzers are not the same, software-defined radios are not the same, USB-Serial adapters are not the same, FPGA interfaces are not the same, sensor boards are not the same, laser cutters are not the same, need I go on?

rahoulb 14y ago

The real difference is that on OSX is if something doesn't work it doesn't work. Under Linux it may work, or work badly, or you can probably hack it to make it work well. I used to think I liked the latter but there's something appealing about the binary clarity of OSX.

jeremyjh 14y ago
Part of it is you won't spend as much time thinking about it. Say you have a wireless keyboard that is a little dodgy on Linux, but works most of the time. But every now it fucks up and really pisses you off. If it never worked on OS X you wouldn't even remember it because you would have sent it back or resold it.
DeepDuh 14y ago
Thank you, that's exactly how I think, it's even this way with Windows. On other systems I would waste days after days of my life to set things up 'just the way I want' only to find that it's never gonna be quite that way. Macs just let me accept the things as they are and get back to work. Very often, I'd get to see after a while, why things work the way they work (say, Window management). Anyway, this has been almost 100% true up from 10.3 through 10.6.x. Recent developments both on Apple's as well as on MS's side have closed the gap between the two systems quite a bit. I still prefer OSX but it's gotten close. The real reason I continue to buy macs nowadays is the hardware quality.
- hollerith 14y ago
  >On other systems I would waste days after days of my life to set things up 'just the way I want' only to find that it's never gonna be quite that way. Macs just let me accept the things as they are and get back to work. This. It's almost as if Linux is a collection of parts and tools from which a sufficiently good designer can build a usable desktop whereas OS X is a usable desktop. That's an exaggeration, but for me there is some truth to it. Note that Linux was my only desktop from 1997 through 2009.
  - DeepDuh 14y ago

bpatrianakos 14y ago

Oh well now that you said it the argument is settled. You can't just say OS X has the poorest hardware support ever and not back it up with anything except "go buy some hardware and see what works and what doesn't". Is there maybe a table online that lists these incompatibilities you can link to? Please don't say "do some research" because the onus is on you to prove yourrself right, not on me to prove you right. You also said "even compared to Linux". That's interesting. That statement there gives the impression that you're more interested in defending your own beliefs and/or choices rather than being truly interested in explaining to us what OS has objectively terrible hardware support. "even compared to Linux" sounds like something an apologist would say. Then when you added in the "think different" line you made it seem even more like your comment was based off some kind of blind loyalty to Linux rather than loyalty to facts. Me? I've used Mac, a handful of Linux distros, and Windows for a long time. I don't know which has the best or worse hardware support but I do know when someone says something based on what camp they're in rather than what the facts are.

RegEx 14y ago
> Then when you added in the "think different" line you made it seem even more like your comment was based off some kind of blind loyalty to Linux rather than loyalty to facts. Don't read too far into things, and "...loyalty to facts" eye roll. Anyway, It's pretty common knowledge to Linux users that hardware/driver support on Linux can be a challenge. Sometimes things work right out of the box, other times you have to do a lot of work and a lot of Googling. That being said, I don't agree with the parent. For basic hardware needs, Windows and OSX have a fairly high success rate of plug-and-play functionality. For me on Linux, it's about 50/50.
- ekianjo 14y ago
  On windows, a fairly high success rate? This must be a joke. Try installing a graphics card without driver, you will see how well it is supported under windows. I consider that basic functionality. Same for wifi dongles, they usually need drivers to be installed in windows, while this is all taken care of at the kernel level in Linux. In Linux you very rarely have to install any driver. True, some hardware remains unsupported, but the list of compatible hardware without any installation required is pretty long. On windows, you'll need to install stuff for most of new hardware you try to plug in, no matter what.