Freeminded.org

I’m a long-time fan of Hewlett Packard products. They work and keep on working. And, very important, they work perfect with the Linux platform. However, turns out users on Mac OS are not so fortunate.

My parents had a HP Scanjet for many years. Then it died but they bought a newer one, the Scanjet 3600c (launched in 2003 if I’m correct). It worked flawlessly on their Mac Book with OS X.

Then along came Apple, with OS X 10.7 Lion and the lack of support for PowerPC applications (which Apple called “Rosetta”). Then it became clear that HP’s drivers were actually PowerPC drivers, they cannot be installed on OS X 10.7.

So we head over to the HP website for support. Surely, they must have updated drivers!

Unfortunately, HP released its last updated driver for this type of scanner in 2008, of OS X 10.4. So no using this scanner in OS X Lion. HP’s statement in a few fora I found around the web, is that “this is a very old scanner and users can better buy a new one”.

So there we have it, HP creating products which last (I still use my Laserjet introduced in May 1993) but they are simply obsoleted by a proprietary software vendor’s change in software (Apple discarding PowerPC support) and HP’s reluctance to update its driver. And I can’t blame them, they’re a company and want to make a profit, so users should buy new stuff.

Luckily, I’m on the Linux platform (hence I can still use the nearly 20 year old printer!) so I don’t need to worry about this consumerism crap. But its a shame that we need to trash perfectly good hardware because of some software issue.