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A mac printer?
- Thread starter adrake86
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they used to, check out apple-history.com. they made a whole series of ink jet and laser jet printers, but were eventually phased out by the time steve made his return. the printers use Apple's ADB bus which was the same for mice and keyboards. you can ideally use an apple printer with your current system with first an ADB to USB adapter and then some patch for the driver or something....i dont have any knowledge on this. i do know however, that you can only use newer laserwriters with mac os x as the old ones didnt have "quickdraw"
you can totally argue this with any computer accessoryOr why don't printer manufactures make printers that look nice next to macs???
Apple printers had any of very ports, depending on the price. The ADB (Apple Desktop Bus) was used for mice and keyboards, not printers. The cheapest "QuickDraw" (host-based) printers sported only the DIN-8 RS-232 serial port. Slight more expensive "QuickDraw" printers sported LocalTalk network ports. In the early days of the laser printer, Apple's LaserWriter sported LocalTalk and a parallel port for use by MS-DOS and later, Windows. As Ethernet rose in prominence, Apple added its proprietary AAUI Ethernet port. It later switched to RJ-45 (10/100 Base-T) Ethernet. Originally, LaserWriters were primarily PostScript printers. In fact, the LaserWriter took PostScript beyond the domain of professional typesetters into the departmental office. The combination of Macintosh System 6, the LaserWriter, and Aldus PageMaker created the desktop publishing industry. Later, Apple sold cheap "QuickDraw" LaserWriters.
Apple doesn't make printers today because they are dirt cheap. You can easily buy a printer for less than $100. Even the expensive printers are cheap by historical standards. I bought a Xerox Phaser 8550DP color duplex genuine PostScript 3 printer for less than $1000. Apple cannot profit in today's printer market so it leaves it to others.