A recent forum post I read reminded me of a beef I have with Apple. One of the selling points Apple claim is that the Mac just works out of the box. No need to waste time downloading drivers – just plug in your equipment and play away. Or so Apple would have you believe. […]
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When Macs Don’t Want To Plug ‘N Play

Nov 21st 2007 by

When Macs Don't Want To Plug 'N PlayA recent forum post I read reminded me of a beef I have with Apple.

One of the selling points Apple claim is that the Mac just works out of the box. No need to waste time downloading drivers – just plug in your equipment and play away. Or so Apple would have you believe.

Well, here’s two examples of when this isn’t the case and Mac users can look darn right stupid to our PC colleagues.

First example: my aunt has a PowerPC Mac Mini which, as you know, doesn’t come with an inbuilt iSight camera. So, in order to stay in touch with her son who is traveling the world with his Mac laptop, she thought she’d buy a nice USB webcam that she could simply plug and play into the Mac Mini and use with iChat. You can’t blame her for thinking this would work: the webcam did say it was Plug ‘n Play and she’d heard how Apple Mac’s “just work”. Well, it didn’t give me any pleasure to tell her that she’d bought a device that wouldn’t actually “just work” out of the box and that Apple’s external iSight camera, which used to be an expensive option, wasn’t even available any more.

Second example: an acquaintance had this nightmare story, “I was intending to do a presentation using Keynote, trying to show off my Mac and the power of Leopard to my PC colleagues. I plugged in the projector system via KVM and the MacBook Pro would not recognize it. Several attempts led to my humiliation and caused endless amounts of grins on the PC users’ faces. Finally, I connected a VGA monitor which it recognized and then hot-swapped it for the KVM. It worked but my MacBook Pro’s resolution was downsized. I had egg on my face!! To add insult to injury, one ‘friend’ brought out his Sony Vaio and connected it to the KVM without problems. I just don’t understand what happened. It is all supposed to PnP! I won’t be waxing lyrical about Mac anymore”.

So, are we being told a lie by Apple or are these just isolated examples? It’s not like we’re trying to run a piece of Windows PC software on Mac OSX and are complaining that it’s not working. These are everyday pieces of hardware that many people would like to use and PC users would be bemused to find out that they don’t “just work” with a Mac. For me, the lack of hardware compatibility is the main reason I don’t bring my Mac into my business meetings – I don’t want the embarrassment of my presentation not working.

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