Comments on: Apple’s Snow Leopard to load printer drivers on demand

By: Ephilei

Ephilei — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 23:04:48 +0000

Just as important as saving disk space, it means Snow Leopard will have built in drive for support for printers that don’t even exist yet!

This is literally a fantasy come true for me. For years I’ve wondered why OSes don’t do this for all drivers. The technology is relatively simple and the user frustration saved is tremendous.

By: daGUY

daGUY — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:56:50 +0000

True story: We bought a printer recently and I was helping set it up on my sister’s MacBook. The instructions in the manual had a bright orange box that said, very clearly, “plug the printer into your computer before installing the included software.” So I took the included USB cable, plugged one end into the computer, and went to plug the other end into the printer. Covering the printer’s USB port was a bright orange sticker that said, very clearly, “install the included software before plugging the printer into your computer.” ?!

By: daGUY

daGUY — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:47:11 +0000

@Planeten: I’m sure you’ll still be able to do that. From what the article’s saying it just sounds like the default now will be to install only what’s absolutely necessary, rather than everything.

By: cy_starkman

cy_starkman — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:09:42 +0000

Usually you can customise for SOE rollout.

I’m still waiting for the more logical solution.

That the printer is internally equipped with the drivers and software for the very few OS, so you plug it in, the system says, hi I’m OSX and the printer sends up what is needed. If not, it can pass through to the net and grab them itself from the device manufacturer.

It has always seemed dumb that the OS needed to come with a billion printers. Ah, and no I don’t mean driver discs, that’s way backward.

By: Planeten Paultje

Planeten Paultje — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 03:37:53 +0000

I sure hope they leave in an option for installing a bunch of stuff as that will be handy for corporate installations.
At my school I have users with many native languages taking out laptops which will be connected to printers which I myself will never see. I need to have all languages and printer drivers pre-installed.