I recently came across a bizarre problem, the solution to which was both unusual and irritating. I have used some form of personal digital assistant since the early days of Apple's original Newton.
I have a box with about four Newtons in it, including the last two Apple made. It was a great idea that came too soon and was flawed in many ways. The Palm Pilot did change the world and I have had some version of the Palm from its beginning. My latest was a Handspring Visor and a few weeks ago it simply died. It shut itself off and has never come back on.
This created the perfect opportunity to buy a new Sony Clie with its beautiful screen and high resolution. Unfortunately, I soon discovered that I could not sync it with my Mac OS X Titanium PowerBook.
I did manage to get it to work with Virtual PC but that is not an ideal solution.
An Apple engineer told me that this was a surprisingly common problem.
The Clie connects to a desktop via a USB port, among others. I can buy any digital camera, take a few snaps, plug the camera into my Mac and the pictures are there. There is no need to buy or download extra software. Why, then, must I spend a few hundred dollars on a piece of software that performs a function the device ought to perform in the first place? One must wonder what Sony is doing.