Agfa SnapScan Touch no longer supported by MacOS thanks to Snow Leopard

Question

Since Snow Leopard my Agfa ScanScan Touch scanner is useless. ThanX to Snow Leopard... Even application VueScan cannot get the SnapScan to work. Thanx to this great new OS...

Answer 1

1. I have a long Apple history and know who is responsible for drivers. I just want to remind you to the situations where Apple came with new OS's or ports and lots of stuff did not work. I will not spend time here to write a history lesson on this.
But your example was of a currently shipping product (Time Capsule) that is supported by SL. I would have known that you understood the problem if you had chosen a product that had actually been abandoned. I'm guessing that some products that are currently shipping, will not run with 10.7 or 10.8, but almost all of the products I have now will be in the trash or scheduled for replacement due to repair costs which are often higher than replacement. This has happened to us as drive belts fail in printers and scanners. Luckily the $1200 scanners of the '90s have improved to the point where we get better quality/speed in a $100 model shipping today.
The obsolete 32 bit drivers problem is going to continue and could actually get worse. It's been projected that each new version of OS X from here on out will probably have tighter requirements for drivers to be 64 bit. SL is a transition OS, with very few visible changes for the user. Security updates are still coming out for Leopard, and I think I saw one recently for Tiger but I don't look there very often.
There is no business reason to upgrade from Leopard for at least another year or until high end applications actually need or take advantage of a 64 bit OS. The additional ram handling is to solve a problem that doesn't exist yet and the programs don't know how to use multiple CPU cores very well, yet.
They could save MORE environment if they supported larges installed base peripherals. I know the industry needs to keep me selling new stuff which I love to buy, but it hurts my eco feeling to now through something away which is 6 or 8 years old and still technically is perfect....
More responsible packaging, recycled materials in the actual product, ongoing support for older OS's - that's what I see from companies like Apple. We will see more, as energy efficiency requirements change in the next decade.
We are also doing something to help. Our older devices are not going into a landfill. There is a local recycling center that is accepting our outdated or defective hardware. The replacement products use less energy and are more productive. We don't feel that the older devices are technically perfect if they consume too much electricity, run slower than our work flow, or require us to keep older inefficient computers on-line. The older machines are wearing out and need new power supplies and hard drives.
In order to keep using the old SCSI scanner we did keep a Dual G4 that came with Jaguar running in Tiger for a couple of years (Adaptec SCSI drivers disappeared with Leopard). We finally got rid of all SCSI devices and re-purposed one old machine to be a headless Leopard server but the maintenance bills are starting to pile up, it runs hot, it's very noisy (Windtunnel fans), it's not very energy efficient, it's not upgradable to SL server and the new ReadyNAS arrives on next Tuesday. We look forward to shutting of the old power hogs. The server room will be quite a bit cooler and will require less air conditioning. We might even be able to turn the room back into a workspace. The noise and heat made the room uncomfortable to work in.