Limited Printer Drivers on Apple’s Snow Leopard

Apple’s Snow Leopard is due for release in the next few months. The latest Mac OS X release will have limited printer drivers installed on it as opposed to before. Snow Leopard will only have a select number of printer drivers that will be installed. It will only install drivers for printers that are currently attached to the computer or previous printers that had been installed on the same Mac computer using older versions of Mac OS X.

This move of Apple will considerably save you or your Mac valuable memory space. Usually, printer drivers eat up several gigabytes of space since all drivers are being loaded into the computer even though the user don’t have or will not use the specific printer that the loaded driver was for. But with the Snow Leopard this will not be the case. Only printer drivers for devices that already exist will be loaded. The Mac user can load more printer drivers in the future though if needed. Also Software Update can be used to obtain new drivers that are needed should it be the case. According to insiders the Software Update will also search for new drivers online if a new printer is attached.

Source: AppleInsider