[mr.steevo]

Hi,
A friend of mine bought an MP3 player (Panasonic something or other). He doesn't have a computer though! So he came over tonight with some CD's and asked me to load them onto his MP3 player. Looking at the instructions it states quite clearly that this player won't work with Windows 3.1, 95, 98, NT, and Macintosh. I plugged it in, saw it appear on the desktop, opened it up, and dropped a song into the folder. It worked! So why does it work when Panasonic says it won't? Is this a Microsoft thing or do they just not know about Apple computers? Any guesses?
s.

[jdb8167]

In reply to:

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So why does it work when Panasonic says it won't? Is this a Microsoft thing or do they just not know about Apple computers? Any guesses?

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It is probably mounting on the desktop as an MS-DOS FAT file system. Apple has drivers in OS X that recognize FAT file systems and mount them automatically.
So in a sense it is a Microsoft thing but really the reason it works is because Apple very much cares about interoperability with other operating systems.
Panasonic is probably saying it doesn't work with their supplied software and also that they don't want to support the Mac even if it does work. In reality though their hardware just looks like a FAT initialized hard drive.