August 9th 1999
"Using USB devices is like a relationship, one woman at a time works best." |
Barb sat cringing as I tapped away on my iMac for 30 mins (I can type a heck of a lot in half an hour and it takes her eight hours to abridge it) and spewed out the latest offering from the controversial keyboard of MacCPU. As this is a big page she has put my usual Apple bashing section here and the useful USB stuff at the beginning where it
belongs. |
In the Mac world, we are used to dropping in an installation disk, clicking on "Install" and going to work. You may want to forget that approach, that depends on the operating system actually supporting that class of device. If you want to install and use USB peripherals, you must reverse the process. You make the operating system support the USB class devices and then, by and large, ignore the device installation software. And if that doesn't sound goofy, you haven't been a Mac user for long (pardon the double negatives). I decided that we would start to offer some USB devices about 10 weeks ago, and it's taken all this time to get the products to work - and to get the products. Get the correct software installed Forget system 8.5 or 8.5.1 for most USB devices, you may be able to make one device work using the traditional installation procedure but when you go to more devices or change your version of OS, I can guarantee problems. To give you an idea of how poorly Apple has implemented USB support, these are the system upgrades you must install before using a variety of USB devices, especially mass storage devices. |
1. iMac Firmware Update Version 1.2 The following actually are updates to 8.6 and should be installed on all iMacs after installation of System 8.6. Grrrr. 3. ATI Video SW Update Version 1.0 4. Mac OS ROM Update Version 1.0 5. USB Mass Storage Support Version 1.3.5 (added 8/16/99) If you will install all of the above software, you will be able to use most USB devices. Like their PC counterparts, USB devices for the Mac are far cheaper than what we are used to. Unfortunately, like their PC counterparts, there is a lot of hocus pocus and voodoo to their use. I will comment on the devices I have used and the limits everyone considering USB should think about before purchase. USB floppy drives |
USB hard drives USB CD burners With any peripheral using disposable supplies, the cost of the supplies often exceeds the cost of the device. It's true of ink jet printers and is the reason manufacturers will practically give the printers away just to get you to use their unique ink cartridges. But a wise computer shopper can find perfectly acceptable blank CDs at his local computer store on money-back offers which often reduce the net cost to less than $1 per CD. And in one case I heard of the rebate was more than the cost !@#$%. At that price they are as cheap as floppies were just a few years ago and make a CD burner far more useful than a floppy. Not everyone has a floppy but everyone has a CD. Adaptec's Toast software which comes with all Mac USB CD burners is about as close to zero brainer software as any you can use. Anyone smart enough to push the on button on the drive is smart enough to burn custom CDs at a dead-low price. |
When you use an external USB CD burner on either the iMac or B&W, you need to know the OS will not support two CD readers. So your external device may say it is a 2X2X6 or 4X4X16 but in reality it is a CD burner only. You cannot read other CDs or use it to play music CDs, even with external speakers plugged in. If you want to read CDs or play music CDs, you must use your internal CD. USB hubs and mice Literally you can just plug them in and forget them. They work. |
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Almost a year ago, Apple released the iMac to great fanfare, promising an entirely new class of upgradeability, the USB bus. USB promised a wide variety of low-cost devices which could be hot swapped leading to more flexibility than ever offered before. Apple lied. USB has been a failure. So far. With millions of USB computers in the field, sales of USB peripherals proved to be a disaster with sales in the tens of thousands rather then millions. Don't blame the manufacturers, blame Apple. So soon we forget the past, the lessons we knew, the lessons we let slip from our minds so we can make the same mistakes all over again. It's 'Deja Vu Revisited.' How many of us still remember the initial failure of the Macintosh? Until Adobe came up with a $7000 Laser printer which actually printed words you could read - and Aldus invented PageMaker so Mac owners could produce something on their computers. |
How many Apple aficionados remember the financial strength of Apple Computer from 1984 until its untimely death in 1993 really came from the Apple II series rather than the Macintosh platform? As much as Steve Jobs would like to dictate how you and I use our computers, each computer user has different needs. The strength of the Apple platform isn't rows of millions of identical computers with exactly the same capability but a myriad of different computers that every user can individualize to fit his needs rather than the needs of the manufacturer. |
I read all the announcements from the manufacturers about the wonderful and inexpensive USB devices just around the corner. But when you tried to actually buy a floppy drive or hard drive or CD burner, they all seemed to be on perpetual backorder. Since I'm in the retail end and know how manufacturers work, I suspected vaporware. But it wasn't vaporware, it was a dreadful implementation of USB support on the part of Apple Computer. I like floppies, I may be old-fashioned but I like the convenience of dragging and dropping onto a floppy and sneaker-netting it over to another machine. I became one of the world's first iMac floppy owners in October. Unbeknownst to most iMac owners, Apple actually incorporated motherboard floppy support in the original iMac. Steve Jobs, the rat, disabled use of the floppy port with the later required update to the OS ROM and I may never forgive him. |
And as an aside, I know some unlucky B&W owner is going to be madder than a wet hen when Motorola/IBM announce the G4. Steve Jobs demanded Apple engineers sneak in software into one of the system "updates" which disables the ability of the B&W to be upgraded to a G4. So somebody will buy a B&W one day and it will be less functional than a 4-year-old machine the next. Neat trick. But Steve Jobs doesn't care for upgrades and the idea of someone other than Apple actually making money from selling computer stuff to Mac owners doesn't sit well with him. The iMac is perfectly upgradeable but Jobs refuses to license the technology to third party vendors. Apple or Motorola or IBM could all be shipping iMac CPU upgrades and aren't. That's really dumb. In December, one of our customers in Japan wrote to tell us of a USB floppy actually on the shelves there. We asked that he send us one so we could evaluate it. We did and the here's the report. We installed the software required - a fairly neat trick because it was all in Japanese and we had to guess where "install" might be. Barb was using System 8.5 on an A model iMac bought on August 15th of last year when we got that Japanese drive. One day she was humming along running her usual gazillion applications and the machine crashed harder than I have ever seen a machine crash. We had to reformat her hard drive and reinstall the operating system and all her software. I still haven't quite figured out what happened. It took months to find out no one wanted to actually say to us USB by and large didn't work. The manufacturers could produce USB products, they just didn't work. Over time we managed to accumulate a couple of third-party hard drives, two more floppies and eventually a CD burner so we could test them with the thought of maybe selling a USB line. Almost without exception, the installation instructions didn't really tell you how to install the devices or they were simply incorrect. Bob Moriarty |
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