Seems this is getting blown a little out of proportion. Some thoughts ..
This problem has existed for a very long time, and workarounds have existed for a long time.
The problem affects an incredibly miniscule number of mac users ... I'm guessing less than one in 10,000 ... probably even a lot fewer than that.
It isn't a major printing glitch. It's not like Mac printing is broken. Normal printing using CS4/leopard/snow leopard functions just fine, and output is fine. Out of all the media being printed by Macs every day on Epson printers, how much of that is actually targets for profiling? And of course this is targets for machines not using a RIP. Saying the affected output is miniscule is an overstatement.
the ONLY thing affected is trying to print an unmanaged image directly to a printer. What percent of mac users actually need to do this? sure on this forum it's pretty commonplace, but outside of our little world it's really quite rare.
I don't know who is to "blame" but to me that's a pointless exercise. There is no conspiracy here, just an extremely rare problem occurring to an amazingly small number of Mac users, with lots of documented work a rounds. My original post wasn't in reference to the work around or bringing this issue to light ... I myself was very involved in the original thread and was probably the first to verify what Ryan was observing. He, myself, and others have been working around this problem for some time. Because the problem affects so few users, no one paid any attention, and unfortunately we don't have any inside pipeline to any of these companies to get them to listen.
The real problem seems to stem from miscommunication between parties as well as perhaps some assumptions. For example, I wonder if any of the OS X and ColorSync engineers are aware of how critical it is to be able to send an unmanaged file to a printer for a few very specialized users. While we can criticize apple, what they have done with ColorSync has actually made it relevant to the OS and their own applications. For example you can actually print from iPhoto now and easily apply a profile to get decent results ... something very difficult to do before leopard. It seems the OS is simply assuming data pushing through it as been "color managed', and if not attempts to do so. For nearly all applications and users this isn't necessarily a bad thing. In this one small isolated instance there is an issue. Obviously using the null profile method tricks the OS. But the entire premise of the Mac is to simplify things for the user, so the assumption, while perhaps problematic in this very rare case, is somewhat valid in the context of the philosophy of the Mac and the Mac OS.
Thanks to Mark some engineers are actually listening, and now understand this very remote issue. With feedback from people like Mark, Eric, Jeff and others, maybe the annoyance will go away. But in the meantime the explanation of why the workaround actually works provides some confidence in the accuracy of the targets. I have tried several workarounds before, but I was never completely confident in them. I found myself always reverting to using an old OS and and old versions of Photoshop to "verify" them ... I finally gave up and just resorted to doing that in the first place. this left me without a good way to profile my 7900. Targets looked OK, but I never trusted them so I stuck with papers that had good profiles available from other sources. I've been asked to test some new papers from a vendor meaning I have to build profiles, I'm a little more confident now that one of the workarounds I've tried before is actually valid ... which means I can actually try them on my 7900
