Text 36892, 66 rader
Skriven 2007-09-08 12:00:19 av Alan Zisman (1:123/789.0)
  Kommentar till text 36851 av ROBERT FOWLER (1:123/140)
Ärende: *ac was not
===================
In article <37959$WIN95@JamNNTPd>,
 "ROBERT FOWLER -> ALAN ZISMAN" <1:123/140> wrote:

 -=>> ALAN ZISMAN wrote to ROBERT FOWLER <=-

 AZ>> The Mac model all along has been to keep the box harder to fiddle with,
 AZ>> but make the systems easily upgradable using external boxes.

 AZ>> From the late 1980s to 1990s, this was done through SCSI, which was a
 AZ>> rarely used option (and harder to configure) on PCs of the era, but
 AZ>> standard on every Mac (starting with the Mac Plus around 1987 or so)...
 AZ>> more recently, this has been done with USB-- which was standard on the
 AZ>> first iMac and then the whole Mac product line at a time when Windows
 AZ>> USB implementation was spotty, and then with Firewire, which has been
 AZ>> built into all Macs since about 2000.

 AZ>> External devices are a bit more expensive than internal equivalents,
 AZ>> but easier to install and easier to carry over to your next computer or
 AZ>> share among several computers.

 AZ>> Mac owners, from the beginning, have been far more likely to use
 AZ>> external drives- CD, DVD, burners, Zip, Jazz, Bernoulli, etc etc etc
 AZ>> and other external devices than PC owners.

 AZ>> One model is neither better nor worse than the other-- it's just a
 AZ>> different route for upgrades.

 RF>   That approach would seem consistent with Apple's ease of use philosophy.
 RF>   What about drivers, though?  If neither Apple nor the manufacturers of
 RF>   generic external peripherals supply Mac drivers, then the user is
 RF>   forced to use Mac peripherals.  That would include peripherals that
 RF>   are more accessory than upgrade, as well.


Drivers ARE sometimes an issue... it's been hard to find drivers for USB
webcams in many cases, for instance. But it's much less common these
days than it was a decade ago. The change to USB as the standard
connector for printers, scanners, etc has helped this trend.

Some of the change dates back to the 1998 release of the iMac, which
depended on USB for pretty much all its connections.

While USB had been available on PCs, in theory, for several years-- I
first wrote about the potential benefits of USB in 1995, for instance,
PC manufacturers and Microsoft had been very slow about providing good
support for USB; few PCs had USB built-in' even though many models had
pins for USB on the motherboard, few manufacturers bothered adding the
ports to the case.

With the iMac release, the market for USB devices exploded-- and
virtually all of them had Mac drivers. When Microsoft released Win98
several months later, it included improved USB support, and PC
manufacturers finally started including USB ports on computer systems as
a matter of course... but since then, most product categories have
included both Mac and Windows drivers as a matter of course.

(It's not perfect, however- along with webcams, non-iPod media players
also tend to lack Mac support, and in some cases there is a smaller
feature set for Macs-- Blackberries are an example of that).

-- 
- email: alan (at) zisman (dot) ca
- website: http://www.zisman.ca

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