Saturday, November 06, 2004

OS X QA outsourced to Microsoft XP team: Another firewire debacle with 10.3.6

Apple - Discussions - 10.3.6 Possible Firewire Incompatibility
I just installed 10.3.6 using the software updater, and was surprised to find that my external firewire drive could no longer boot. I tried to mount using disk utility, but neither it or techtool can see the drive. The funny thing is, the system profiler does see the drive, but not the volume. Anyway, I'm sure it isn't the drive, as that works fine, and the case it is in is a brand new MacAlly external firewire 400 case (installed yesterday).

A convincing series of user reports are coming in: OS X 10.3.6 has run into firewire compatibility problems.

Just like about 5 other OS X updates.

The most likely explanation is that Apple has outsourced OS X tech support to the Microsoft XP team. Note that XP SP2 ALSO breaks Firewire.

Or, alternatively, OS X Firewire support is profoundly hacked and broken.

Or, alternatively, Firewire is a botched standard.

Or all three.

It is astounding. USB 2.0 is a much better choice for peripherals on Macs that support it.

Firewire is a cool name though, maybe we can use it for some other standard.

This is seriously ridiculous.

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