Remember way back in 1984 when the Macintosh came out. "The computer for the rest of us" was Apple's primary slogan. The interface was intuitive and almost every thing worked right out of the box. No messy commands to remember. Typing was only for when you had something to write, otherwise it was point and click.
In fact, a joke for a long time and still valid in many situations was "Macintosh users never read the manual."
For many people, Macs are a joy to use right out of the box and many still don't read the manual. Updates often come automagically and when they have been downloaded, the user goes to the Apple menu and clicks on restart.
But then Apple and other vendors forget to co-ordinate their updates. Or one doesn't provide certain features in all circumstances.
One that happened to us was that we could no longer scan with our HP 3310 All-n-One when we reconfigured the AIO to be a wireless printer for two computers.
I've been looking for a solution every so often for a couple of years. I've been to apple.com forums, HP forums, and independent forums. And support articles. Dozens and dozens of people have complained about this problem, but I never found a clear solution.
This week I tried sending a webform to Hewlett-Packard.
Chris of HP Total Care responded. His suggestions might have worked but he only wrote about connections through Ethernet or USB. I wrote back that I wanted wireless.
Michael responded. I tried his suggestions and I noted all the things that didn't work as stated. Still scanning didn't work. I wrote back with these problems.
Priscilla responded. She gave five pages of instructions. I started working through them one-by-one. One of the steps was to download software from Apple. That page was down for a good part of the afternoon. When I finally got the download and installed it, one part of the installation ran over five minutes with "Install time remaining: About a minute"!!!!
Then I had to download some HP software. That process was a bit more automatic than Priscilla described, but the installation began. At one point I was sent to System Preferences to do some selection or other. When I clicked on Scan another window opened. It said "Press scan to start". So I pressed the scan button on the AIO. That gave weird results I won't go into. Aha! I have to CLICK the SCAN button in the window.
Away the scan went, wirelessly, scanning a piece of paper I had on the scanner bed. Whoopee! The first scan in over two years!
OK, let's try a slide. I put in a favorite from Sweden of a big, white ferry dwarfing some apartment buildings on a bluff behind it. It scanned and scanned. But like years ago, the scanned photo had a blue wash over it. I got a better and faster result taking a picture of the slide shown through a table-top viewer. WYSIWYG is really WYSAWYG! "What you see is what you get" has become "What you see ain't what you get!"
Oh, well! At least I'll be able to scan all those pieces of paper that I don't want to file or that I want to email copies of to others.
And finally, despite all these complaints, I'll keep buying the "latest, greatest" Mac every few years. They are still easier to use than the competition.
