But Apple does have control where the "serial port issue" was concerned. And they chose not to write support for the serial port into the OS. And this was a major issue to a lot of people. Especially those who had big bucks wrapped up in peripherals (laser printers, scanners, cameras, modems) that suddenly wouldn't work anymore.
With laser printers at least you do have other options. Most support a network protocol. For $60 on ebay you can pick up an appletalk to ethernet bridge. OS X has basic support for all printers (most printers will work from a generic driver), and you can add in the gimp print drivers (which add specific support for a great many legacy printers, so long as they are hooked up to a USB or ethernet port).
Some standard serial port printers will also work with USB-serial adapters. Not all of them will, though. There are several adapters out there. Belkin makes a few. Can be had on ebay for around $30-45 used. These may also work for modems, though I am not sure. Go to the Belkin site for more info.
IIRC, OS X will support the internal modems of older systems.
Scanners are a different matter. Generally, the scanner maker is to blame if it doesn't work with OS X. It's up to them to write drivers. For instance, OS X supports my SCSI card but the driver for the scanner (a photoshop plugin) doesn't work. The reason is that with OS X, plugins/software don't talk directly to hardware (such as ports, PCI cards, etc.) the way they did in 9. It's up to the manufacturer to re-write the plugin.
Digital cameras should also work with a serial-usb adapter. Not all of the will work this way. Depends on whether Apple has written in support directly to iPhoto. Otherwise, contact the manufacturer. Like scanners, it's their job to make this work. Not Apple's.
Our only other choice was to trash our serial stuff, buy a USB card and USB peripherals, and hope they had drivers for X.Generally speaking, this isn't an issue. If you're at the store, it says right on the box if they support use in OS X. If you're buying online, you may need to research a little more. In either case, you should never ever have to purchase something before knowing it will work with OS X.
Hamlin
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