Board malfunction

Hi Folks,
It seems I have had a boards failure, or at least something to wrong with the way my mac is reading the ports. Any advice or help appreciated.
I bought a nano v.3 and an uno r3, cheap ones from China, DX to be precise, and it seems neither of them connect to my mac. Both boards power on and seem to light up and function, and the uno blinks the on board LED, but neither show up for me to set the port. I get the Bluetooth port but not Com1, and I cannot send sketchs to either board.
I have followed the online guide to set the port multiple times, swapped USB leads and USB ports, checked the original Duinotech uno (works fine) shows up the correct selected port. I have followed a guide to instal FDTI drivers to no avail. Other than turning it off and on again I don’t really know what else to do,
Running the latest OS Sierra, with the latest arduino (1.6 I think), is this more likely to be a software issue or a (cheap) hardware issue?
Regards,

Cup

I’ve heard FTDI drivers can be an exciting cause of difficulty on Windows or Mac OS X. There was some feature of the official drivers that would disable non-genuine chips. I’ve vague memory of having trouble on Mac OS X even when I was using genuine chips, but I do all of my development with Linux, and the built-in drivers for FTDI devices seem to work quite well on Linux.

You might try the About This Mac, More Info button to call up System Information, System Report, USB, and look for the Product ID and Vendor ID of the devices. Compare between working Uno and non-working Uno. See if the ID has been erased as the references below suggest may happen;

References:

Given this, my preference has been to avoid boards that use FTDI chips, if there’s a choice.

You might also mail the vendor and ask them how to make them work.

After looking into this in more detail, it seems their are big issues with the cheap USB chips and OS Sierra. Now after following one fix the cheap boards just crash my laptop. Well, so much for access to easy to use cheap boards, I think will drop into Jaycar and pick up a full price one tomorrow…
Regards,

Cup