I have found FTDI devices to perform more consistently. Of the two, I found the open source PL2303 driver to be slow and observed occasional data corruption (I did not try the closed source driver but heard worse things). For instance, two common chips include the FTDI series (official driver here) and the Prolific PL2303 chipset (open source driver here, closed source driver here). Given variability in driver quality and compatibility, you may want to try a few models and driver implementation. You probably want a USB to serial converter, of which there are a variety. The first step is to get an RS232 serial port on your Mac, which hasn't been built-in for a long, long time.
Serial terminal program os x for mac#
People have generally had more success with the Xserve OS X server versions. Many were quite old, and it appears that the process has gotten more difficult with more recent versions of OS X (at least Snow Leopard 10.5+).
I first tried googling around, and I encountered a few references to this issue on various Mac forums. One of two things is generally meant by this, either using a Mac as the interface to a serial device (accomplished by running a terminal emulator program on the Mac), or using another machine to connect to the Mac over serial and accessing the shell provided by the Mac. Setting up a Serial Console in Mac OS X Setting up a Serial Console in Mac OS X