On Wednesday, January 30, 2002, at 11:49 AM, Tom Sheppard wrote:
> why does Apple support the cards in OS 9? I suspect there's some tiff
> between Lucent and Apple that results in the customers losing.
I suspect, instead, that Apple chose to focus instead on making drivers
for other devices they do sell, rather that making modifications to the
AirPort's driver to get it to work with a 3rd party card. Further, I
don't think that Apple ever advertised that their OS 9 drivers worked
with Lucent's cards... it was just a bonus, a happy coincidence.
> That's going to be a real problem because any time I buy any
> peripheral I
> have to say to myself, "Gee, I'm buying this new quantum flux capacitor
> that
> has a driver for OS 12.2.1 but I really shouldn't expect Apple to
> support it
> when 12.2.2 comes out. Apple is supposed to be releasing a speed bumped
> G7
> CPU too but I probably won't be able to use my 3 month old quantum flux
> capacitor on it.
There is a huge difference between the changes in a whole number release
and the changes in a point release. This has happened before, though in
the past it was usually with software rather than hardware, because
until the 9-to-X conversion, there had never been such a major shift in
the OS. But does anyone else remember how upset people were when System
7 came out? They said the same kinds of things. "This is so much slower,
and so bloated! It won't even fit on a floppy! It uses too much RAM!"
And, they complained that their old software had to be upgraded to work
with the new OS, in many cases. This was a comparatively minor OS
upgrade!
You are taking my argument to ludicrous extremes. No one is saying that
an x.x.1 release should break hardware that extremely. But when you have
a whole-number version change, these things happen. When they do, it is
the responsibility of the perepherial manufacturer to make updates to
the driver, if possible.
sj
http://homepage.mac.com/stevehj
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