At Target earlier today, my wife and I saw what would be a great toy for our son – the Elmo Knows Your Name cell phone. Perfect, in fact! And being able to customize the name? Awesome!
I brought it home and was pleased to see it was a USB device. I pulled out the instructions and noticed that Macs were conspicuously absent from the requirements list (which wasn’t on the outside of the box, of course). “Hm,” I thought, “Surely this is just an oversight!”
But as the site itself proves this is not the case. It downloads an .EXE file which then pops the name onto the device. Which is probably just some crazy-ass DRM around an MP3 file or something like that. A quick search of Fisher-Price’s site shows that at least one other USB toy they sell isn’t Mac compatible. Nonsense!
I can’t understand how this can happen in modern times, really. It’s not rocket science, and it’s not like Macs are these fringe computers anymore.
What a disappointment. And some people wonder why so many folks hate computers.
Posted in Technology