> I've never seen OS X have problems with third party hardware that conformed to standards.
The problem is that hardware often doesn't really conform to standards, even those it claims to.
One of the reasons device support in Linux (and other OSes which target a wide range of platforms) is difficult, is that it's necessary in practice to cope with and have workarounds for buggy and out-of-spec hardware and firmware. Just "coding to the standard" isn't good enough.
Such buggy hardware/firmware is rarely documented as such, and finding these problems and the appropriate way to handle them is painful and difficult work. In some cases the only practical way to figure out what actually works is to reverse-engineer what Windows does (the hardware manufacturers generally make sure that Windows works with their hardware, but rarely make such information public).
Apple's main goal is their own hardware, over which they obviously have a lot of control and information, so they really don't need to worry so much about this.
The problem is that hardware often doesn't really conform to standards, even those it claims to.
One of the reasons device support in Linux (and other OSes which target a wide range of platforms) is difficult, is that it's necessary in practice to cope with and have workarounds for buggy and out-of-spec hardware and firmware. Just "coding to the standard" isn't good enough.
Such buggy hardware/firmware is rarely documented as such, and finding these problems and the appropriate way to handle them is painful and difficult work. In some cases the only practical way to figure out what actually works is to reverse-engineer what Windows does (the hardware manufacturers generally make sure that Windows works with their hardware, but rarely make such information public).
Apple's main goal is their own hardware, over which they obviously have a lot of control and information, so they really don't need to worry so much about this.