I used to like gadgets from Samsung’s electronics division. They have caught up to the times and been making really great stuff compared to the more expensive Japanese brands. But this recent incident makes me think twice about Samsung’s support for Macs.
When Samsung first came out with their low end printer line, the ML series, it supported almost everything under the sun — even Macintosh computers. But now that a lot of Mac people have embraced it, Samsung decided to stop support of its printers on Macs universally, in North America, that is, where the Macintosh market is still the largest.
After installing Tiger on Grace’s Mac, I forgot to install the printer driver for our old Samsung ML-1710. I started looking for its latest driver on Samsung’s support site. But to my disappointment, it offered drivers for almost everything else but the Mac. That’s odd; they used to have Mac drivers all over the place!
I decided to dig deeper into this issue and discovered that Samsung’s North American operations have pulled all support for Mac drivers. And the only place to get them is from Samsung’s Asian site. Luckily I have a copy of the driver that I downloaded a year ago, and apparently it’s still the “latest” driver to date.
This taught me a lesson: Never to buy Samsung again. Stick to HP, Canon, Brother and other brands who have long time support for Macs.
UPDATE 04.22.2007: Apparently Samsung had a change of heart and decided to make drivers of some old printers available again for Mac users. But for my good’ol ML-1710 on Mac OSX 10.4.9, it’s available here. For all other OSX versions, they can be found from Samsung’s driver download site here.