With much of the performance examination now nail on Apple ’s recent pile of Intel - power computer hardware releases , I ’ve been using my excess time to undertake another motion : Will quondam computer peripheral continue to work on an Intel - based Macintosh like my lotion using the Rosetta emulation applied science do , or will their drivers want an update ?
This is not an undistinguished issue . Veterans of the OS 9 - to - OS X transition will remember plenty of initial headaches in beat printer and scanner to work decent with the young operating system . Would history retell itself with this latest passage ?
To find the answer , I rounded up a small heap of hardware and secure them into the 20 - inch iMac Core Duo . I ’m well-chosen to account that , for the most part , things just work . See for yourself in the chart below :
Driver Performance on Intel Macs
The only two problems I ran into were with devices ask installation of preference panes in the Mac ’s arrangement preferences window . If a peripheral or coating requires a preference window pane , the software will take to be update before it will work on the unexampled Macs as it can not run under Rosetta . The two devices in question — thePowerMate from Griffin , and theOzone from M - Audio — just would n’t work on our unexampled iMac . headphone calls to each ship’s company support the problem and I was say they were working on new machine driver . True to their parole , both company released software update that work on Intel Macs early last week .
Other remark devices , like the Mouse BT from Macally , worked fine with druthers adjustable via the Keyboard & Mouse preference Lucy in the sky with diamonds in System Preferences .
canyon was the first printer company I found to have worldwide equipment driver available to download , but not all of their apps have been updated . For instance , Canon’sPixma MP950 , an inkjet multifunction machine , has an update pressman machine driver available from for download , but the scanning software and MP admin app are still PowerPC apps that postulate to melt under Rosetta on Intel - based Macs . Canon ’s vane site state that the current PowerPC software works with Intel Macs and therefore new versions of the software will not be offered . And it ’s true — I had no trouble read or using any of the buttons on the multifunction gimmick to interact with an Intel iMac scarper Photoshop CS2 under Rosetta . Yes , it took for a while for Photoshop to load , but scan and print stop number were n’t painfully sluggish .
HP and Epson included some updated drivers for their pressman with Mac OS X 10.4.4 , but HP ’s Web site has not been update to include the drivers . Epson ’s drivers were n’t on-line during my first attempts to track them down , but many are useable now , and the troupe now maintains apage list all supported printersand includes estimated release dates for others .
My test obviously involve only a small sample of all of the peripheral hardware that family will desire to use on these novel Macs , but the good news is that everything I tried act — eventually . And as evidenced by the fast turnaround by Griffin and M - Audio , Mac peripheral companies are taking this Intel changeover seriously and are making literal advancement toward compatibility .
So , if your specific peripheral machine is n’t work now , chances are the developer is on the character . If you ’ve run into any hassle , let us know in the assembly thread below . We ’d like to discover about your experience .
