Any Mac users of VXI/VME

[SpinEcho]

Dear fellows, having invested in several PCI-MXI2-VME
controllers we are in the sad situation that NI seems not willing to
develop the necessary drivers for OSX. I received from them yesterday: For VXI: "We
currently do not have definitive plans to develop a NI-VXI driver to
support PCI-MXI-2 with Mac OSX. As requests for this driver increase, we
will reevaluate the decision." idem for PCI-GPIB drivers.
If there are VME/VXI - MXI2 users with Mac out there please manifest yourself to NI to ask for maintaining the support. OSX being essentially UNIX I do not see whay NI can not afford to port their LINUX drivers to OSX.

[Julianna]

Hello,

Macintosh is moving towards Apple's vision of the computer as a digital hub, and designing computers without any PCI slots. So the future for Mac would not provide you with the option of using a PCI-MXI-2, or any PCI cards for that matter.

On the Macintosh Products section of our website, we discuss the position of our support for Mac OS X. Here is a link:
http://www.ni.com/mac/lv_macos.htm

[WLN]

There have been Macs for years without PCI slots (just as there are PC's). The "Digital Hub" is supposed to be positive marketing tool, not a statement on the end of PCI. Apple makes its biggest margins on its G4 PCI based machines. You are jumping way ahead of yourself unless Apple is telling you something that it is keeping from the rest of creative, scientific and engineering communities.

Where have the Mac advocates at NI gone?

[SpinEcho]

Your PCI cards are identical for PC and Mac. I do not see any new bus standard emerging where wide band data transfer is important.
If you would need to make new (like nubus) cards I would understand, but writing a driver? Come on! If NI is not able to afford that! Do you have an agreement with M$ and Intel which is so favorable that you are ready to drop hundreds of customers even if they represent only a small fraction of yours? Have you ever heard about loyalty?

[Julianna]

I am an Applications Engineer at NI. Mac OS X released about a year ago, and during that time, our VXI Applications Engineering group has been contacted by 2 customers inquiring about Mac OS X support. I did convey and forward all correspondance to the people involved in making the decisions of supporting Mac OS X. I believe another constructive path would be to contact your Local Sales Representative and/or, as it suggests in the Mac OS X link I provided above, "please let us know if you have questions, concerns, or feedback by sending e-mail to mac@ni.com."

[WLN]

I think the dozen or so LabVIEW developers I know personally assumed that NI would come out with a complete LabVIEW package for MacOSX as soon as it was stabilized. I didn't think there was any reason to badger you guys when most of the Mac community had yet to make the transition. But now that we have tried MacOSX and many of the other major applications are now available, we are ready to make the switch. I think you'd be surprised how much interest there is now even from the other UNIX communities. They are very interested in MacOSX.

[SpinEcho]

OK. I stop "slinging mud". I know personally three other people who sent email to NI + WLN on this forum. This does not add up to 2 customers.
There is no need to reply to this comment.

[Holcomb]

I have a similar problem. I am using an old NuBus-MXI-VXI card until NI gets Firewire support (which I would prefer over MXI) into Labview for the Mac. I also have a PCI-MXI2-VXI card that I would very much like to move to a Mac if I could get OSX drivers. I have been asking for a Firewire-slot0 VXI controller for several years now and NI continues to say that there is not a Mac market for this.

[Jankjo]

I am a mac user, our machines are going to OSX, and I use DAQ and GPIB. I don't know what I am going to do. My collegue at another school is in the same boat. Please add a couple more to your list.

[Rich In Space]

I am very sorry to read that your Julianna Forrest claims to have been contacted by only two (2 !!!) customers regarding NI support for MacOS X. This means that none of all our demands have reached her, or quite possibly any developer at NI.

We are about a hundred of Mac users only at Lund University (Sweden) that demands full NI support for the DAQ cards (USB and FireWire DAQs as well) and other NI PCI equipment. All over the scientific community in the world I meet people who desperately needs this.

Maybe NI should check up on their internal routines for handling customer needs? You can start by looking at all discussions on your own web pages on the MacOS X matter. One thing you might notice is that the ammount of comments have
rapidly dropped during the year 2003. Now I am telling you - This is NOT a sign of MacOS X users being more content with the NI products, but rather a consequence of people giving up on you(!!!).

How hard can it really be to port those driver routines to the MacOS X environment any way? I mean, it's not like you need to do any hardware adjustments or anything like that. Also, MacOS X is a Unix system so why don't you just write the source code once and for all for this entire OS community and then just port the source code and recompile between each specific flavor?

By the way - Now you cannot even use the email address supplied in Juliannas comment above. It simply bounces (!!!).