All Things

I wrote last fall about how Apple Needs Better Support for Mac Printer/Scanner Problems. Thankfully, it appears Apple may be aiming to invest more in printer functionality, as it has reportedly acquired the rights to CUPS, the Common Unix Printing System.

My previous post described how I’d continued to see occasional problems with printers on OS X, noting a particularly difficult problem I was having at that time with my HP 1320, that ended up taking up more than a day of my time and several weeks to get resolved. I still get fairly regular hits from Google searches for “hppostprocessing” error messages, so if that’s you, check out the comments to the previous post.

One of my main complaints involved the lack of diagnostics. While Mac OS X printing support through the Printer Setup Utility is fairly automatic, when there is a problem, there’s virtually no diagnostics to help you sort it out. I’d hope that improving such diagnostic support would be a priority for Apple.

Besides that, I’m still noticing various little quirks with printing on OS X (and am still running 10.4.8). Usually these aren’t showstoppers, but the system is doing something unexpected, which makes you wonder if there are lingering bugs. The bugs do occasionally bite, as they did the other day when everything kept printing with my 2 pages/page preset, regardless of what I entered in the print dialog (restarting resolved that).

As I wrote before, I hope Apple will put somebody in charge of this, say a “driver evangelist”, who will work with peripherals providers to iron problems out. The Ars Technica article does suggest that “The purchase could also be a good thing for CUPS, since Apple’s support for the project could lead to further improvements (if Apple chooses to release them) and to more pressure being placed on printer manufacturers.”

In any event, it’d be a lot more efficient for Apple and the peripherals folks to get together and iron things out, before millions of users have to scratch their heads - and then bang them against the keyboard in frustration.

Back in March, I wrote a post entitled My Own Ten Peeves About the Mac. The last of the ten was the need for Apple to tackle printer/scanner/etc. driver issues more aggressively:

“10. Third-party driver issues. I know this, too, isn’t really Apple’s fault, but I’ve read of so many people having problems with scanners, multi-function devices, etc., that the plug-and-play capability of the Mac seems seriously threatened. I hope Apple will put somebody in charge of this, say a “driver evangelist” who will work with peripherals providers to iron problems out. I also wonder if the Intel transition will make this situation better or worse.”

In the eight months since I wrote that, I’ve continued to see problems with printers. I’ve recently upgraded my Mac to one running the newest OS X (10.4.8), and still haven’t managed to get my laser printer to work. It isn’t some odd-ball model either, but an HP 1320. I had to mess with it a fair amount as well on my last Mac, which ran 10.2.

The key point here is that chasing down driver problems is a huge waste of time. I’ve spent probably 12 or more hours on the latest case, over the course of a week, which is worse than usual, but not as much as you might think. Other problems have typically drained an afternoon or so of my time, maybe once a year in recent years, something which never used to happen with the Mac in times past.

What’s particularly frustrating is that in theory, it’s supposed to be very easy (pretty much automatic in many cases) to set up a printer on a Mac, using the Printer Setup Utility or Print Center (as it used to be called). Unfortunately, the diagnostics are extremely weak.

If you do run into a problem, there’s almost nothing to help you on the Mac itself. The latest problem apparently - this message only appears intermittently - involves some sort of stoppage of “hppostprocessing, status 2″. I’ve checked the Apple Discussions and other places on the net, tried perhaps a half dozen or more things, with no success so far.

I’m fairly technically inclined, though not a computer geek, and wonder what average Mac users do in this sort of situation. Even the technical types on the forums often claim to have spent many hours troubleshooting their printer problems.

If others have had similar experiences, I’d like to hear about them. This seems like a situation that is getting worse rather than better. It’s also made me very reluctant to take the plunge on a scanner, even though my wife has been bugging me to get one for some time. Scanners are fairly cheap now, but I really don’t want to get stuck troubleshooting another bunch of problems!

I just want it to work, without getting in my way, which is why I bought a Mac in the first place.

I had a curious shopping experience this morning at OfficeMax. My LexMark laser printer died recently and I’ve been thinking about getting a new one (or maybe repairing the old one). Since my son recently bought a laser printer, I’ve just been handing him PDFs to print whenever I need to; this has worked surprisingly well (there’s a reason why Microsoft hasn’t been able to stamp out Adobe). Of course, it helps that print to PDF is built into Mac OS X (and I wish I could get Classic to do it so I could convert a lot of old newsletters to PDFs and easily put them on the web).

For these reasons, I haven’t been too eager to quickly go out and buy another unit, even though I absolutely LOVE laser printers. Nevertheless, OfficeMax had a good sale on printers this week so I thought I’d go down to the store and look at an actual printout; I was considering an all-in-one unit since my fax is only half working (scans or copies look terrible) and the price was quite good.

The curious part was that once at the store, I had a fairly tough time actually trying any of the printers out. I never did try out the all-in-one unit I came in to look at. I’m pretty ambivalent about spending money on fax capability; the technology seems mostly obsolete for most people. My inclination was either to get something cheap with print and fax to replace my old fax (in the rare case I need it, which is hardly ever nowadays), or else get a good mono laser printer with duplexing (the one thing I missed on my LexMark). I guess the more I thought about it, it seemed pointless investing in a machine that would fax but was a fairly crude laser printer.

So I started looking at the other machines on display, and did manage to get one plugged in (with some difficulty), but had to ask for paper to print. The folks there were very happy to help, but told me that they don’t usually turn on the machines anymore, and some of them may not even have toner inside. That made me wonder, “Why should I even bother to go to the store, and why do you bother to build them???”

Besides this, there have been several times where OfficeMax would send me a coupon good only for online orders. Sometimes I would go in to the store to look at something, and then go home to order it (with free shipping), when I could have just brought it home with me, because of the coupon! The folks at the store knew about this and weren’t fazed when I explained why I couldn’t buy from them.

Because those deals were often pretty good, I wasn’t so much upset at OfficeMax as simply bewildered why they were working at cross-purposes with their brick-and-mortar stores. When I went in today, I was expecting the same thing, but this time the sale was at the store, too, maybe because a coupon wasn’t involved.

OfficeMax seems like a nice company (though I’m still waiting on the rebate check for my son’s printer; I’m going to have to chase that down since emailing is getting me nowhere), but the online vs. physical store dilemma seems to show up a lot of places. Barnes & Noble, for example, is one of my favorite retailers, but they can’t seem to get this right, either. Whereas Borders gives you readily-accessible terminals that let you check their online inventory, bn.com is chained behind a counter at Barnes & Noble.

What retailers need to grasp is that they need a seemless linkage between their physical, online and other forms of interfacing with the customer (e.g. phone and email). I order a lot online and some companies seem to get it, even offering a way to pay for an order filled out online via phone, for customers concerned about giving out their credit card info over the net. Customers should be able to deftly move from one type of interface to another, without running up against barriers such as at Barnes & Noble.

One company that seems to get this is GM, at least to some extent. I recently used their BuyPower website to locate the particular van we wanted for our sizable family, and was even able to print the window sticker off the net. When Susan and I took this in to the dealer (you should always take your wife to buy a car; studies have shown you usually get a better deal), the BuyPower consultant didn’t even know they had any in stock, but since I had the VIN number it was no time till he found it and we were taking a test drive. There were probably five or more closer Chevy dealers (who didn’t have any left in stock), so I would not have looked there except for the internet.

The lesson here is that retailers should take advantage of the strengths of each customer interface, instead of creating barriers between them. Computers are very good at searching, and so I was able to find just what I was looking for. On the other hand the physical dealership, with a vehicle to be seen and test-driven and an experienced salesman (or woman, who are often better to buy cars from), will do a better job of overcoming customer uncertainty and actually closing the sale.