Off topic: the consent dialog on this page was hilarious and simultaneously a great social commentary on the typical dark patterns.
> In order to offer an "ad-filled experience" and maximize our profits, LinuxReviews would very much like you to allow our Google AdSense ad-partner to use tracking and cookies so we can show ads from them on our website.
> Options: Resist, Approve (2x bigger)
As a web developer, this was refreshing, but as a user didn't immediately make me want to accept. I wonder what their opt in rate is like compared to the "best" practice
That's what they suggest using in "more information" article, which is hilarious.
Your information is, quite frankly, not very important to us. ... The only reason to store any information on random users would be to sell that information to third parties. We are not willing to do that. Thus; your user data is worth zero and that is why we don't collect your worthless information. When other sites write "Your information is very important to us" they actually mean that "We are collecting and selling your personal data and that revenue stream is very important to us".
First, understand that we, and other websites on the Internet, can not set cookies or store data in your browser. Web-servers can ask web browsers to store cookies. It is up to you to configure your web browser running on your computer to behave according to your desires. Politicians and law-makers who think "cookie warnings" and similar web pollution make sense are blundering morons who simply fail to understand how the Internet works. You can configure your web browser so you do not get any third party tracking when you use this website using any of these alterantives: ...
You can do that, of course many of us do. But can the average user? Does the average user even know this sort of tracking goes on? And that just blocking cookies is a small part of the battle?
The cookie law was a crude measure, but with both that law and the GDPR something crucial always gets missed -
You don't need the banners if you're not doing this stuff.
> You don't need the banners if you're not doing this stuff.
Ah, but now that every website under the sun has the banner, nobody thinks twice about them beyond (in the back of their minds) "these are annoying" and "fie on the EU and their foolishness". Much like every overused obtrusive dialogue box in the history of graphical interfaces, users learn to dismiss it and whatever it was trying to achieve eventually becomes irrelevant.
Average users are certainly discovering Brave and other privacy extensions.
I know, because they're regularly writing me confused and angry emails complaining legitimate functionality on my websites is broken as a result of them.
> You can do that, of course many of us do. But can the average user? Does the average user even know this sort of tracking goes on? And that just blocking cookies is a small part of the battle?
Well, if the average user can't configure their browser to block cookies, then forcing every website to implement a popup to re-implement cookie blocking on a semi-voluntary basis (a feature already available on the client side) seems nonsensical.
The era of asking for cookies has already become a thing of the past for me, it's gone the way of autoplaying videos, advertisements, tracking cookies and paywalls. All things to look back on with a feeling of nostalgia.
It's the same old story, dumbed down systems to accommodate the masses. As soon as you want to do something out of the ordinary you will be out of luck.
I bought a usb laser printer for a few hundred dollars about a decade ago. It gets detected and installed on Mac and Windows without issue. It still prints without issue. I am on the original toner (to help you understand how exceedingly rare it is for me to need to print).
Inkjet Printers are such a pain to make work in general, have such high costs for ink, and rarely hold up well. I would rather buy a color laser if I needed to print color and I’d probably go find a used one that was loved before dealing with the new ones.
Reminds me of 20 years ago when people kept the early HP LaserJet models going for their needs because they were such workhorses.
A Brother printer by any chance? My Brother printer is just like the one you descibed but it is not exceedingly rare that I print. It is just infrequent.
Same for me. I had an HP 1200n that was a workhorse forever and ever, but was completely phone-unfriendly. AirPrint? Not in this life, bucko! I replaced it with a Brother HL-3120CDW and that things a freaking tank.
I did that, but at least at the time when I was trying to make that work, the Pi wasn't up to it. The short version was that the drivers available at that time couldn't translate from the AirPrint-wrapped format to the one that the HP expected, on a Raspberry Pi, in realtime. It was worth it to me to replace the printer so that I didn't have to listen to my wife hate on the poor HP every time she tried to print and had to wait a minute or two for it to start.
If you print a lot of color and want cheaper ink, also look at Epson's EcoTank line. They fill up from ink bottles, like the continuous ink supply systems that people had been rigging up to avoid ink cartridges.
If you're printing a LOT of color, especially photo paper, those seem to be about the only good option around for most people.
I'm pretty happy with my color laser, I don't print much, just replaced my black and about to replace the color tonor cartridges after about 5 years on the ones that came in the box.
Same for me. I bought a used 2008 HP LaserJet (usb+ethernet duplex, prints double letter size / DinA3) some 8 years ago for like 30€ and converted it to a wifi CUPS printer via a RaspberryPi. Runs hassle free ever since, usable from Android, Windows and MacOS
Inkjet printers are for photos and fine art. If you're not printing those, you should probably go with a laser printer. If you are printing those, you should probably go with a laser printer anyway for all the miscellaneous documents you use.
(That said, I just got an Epson P900 which will do borderless 17x22"/A2 printing with archival pigment inks <3 <3 <3 which is a little bit prone to clogging as a general rule, but still)
Lasers, even relatively inexpensive ones, are often better than cheap inkjets for photos and fine art, too.
Expensive inkjets, usually with additional fancy options and paper, are for photos and fine art, but most inkjets are just a rip-off leveraging the ability to conceal high printing costs behind low initial buy-in cost.
School auctions are great for finding printers going out of service, got about 7 years out of an old HP 4000 (BW only) before it died, and probably had 10 years in service before that, best $35 I think I ever spent, and never even had to order toner, it had a fresh large capacity cartridge when I got it.
I'm on my second HP Color LaserJet, the first one started jamming after 5 years before it finished the starter toner cartridges. I stupidly bought a replacement black cartridge.
The cost of replacing toner is more than the printer so the next time it acts up I will just replace it.
I recommend you buy a Brother printer - unlike HP, they don't follow the Gillette/razor blade pricing sale strategy. Brother printers are great quality, and their toners and drums are reasonably priced.
I have nothing against Brother laser printers but their inkjet based units are garbage. Their price point is great. Their laser printers produce crisp clean black and white prints but their color laser printers are mediocre at best.
That being said, if you pay attention you can pick up a very nice HP Color Laser at a really low price point.
Same for me. I bought a Lexmark E232 for school and it's been a solid printer on the rare occasion I've needed to use it. The only thing I've had to do is apply Rubber Renue to the pickup rollers when it stops feeding paper correctly.
I did replace it with an HP Colour LaserJet, primarily so that I could get colour prints and not have to worry about ink drying up due to very infrequent use.
My grandma used an original HP Deskjet (from 1988) on a Pentium one computer running Wordstar and Wordperfect 5 on MSDOS until she moved to an elderly home in 2015. My dad replaced the rubber rolls on the printer a few times, and I think he had to refill the old cartridges with 3rd party ink, but other than that it still worked perfectly.
No idea what happened to it though... I suspect finding replacement parts for the things that wear out has become close to impossible, but I doubt that thing was broken in any other way.
I don't own any Macs, but I have setup far more printers on other people's Macs than on my own PCs. No Windows user ever asks me for 'tech support' to get a printer working. But the few Mac users need it all the time.
It is so odd to me that setting up a printer on Mac is so much harder for the average user, apparently. My current printer worked by just plugging it into the computer. Windows downloaded the drivers and it all just worked.
If your printer is well supported out of the box in CUPS you might do ok, but that does not seem to be that common if your printer is new-ish.
No Windows user ever asks me for 'tech support' to get a printer working
I wish. We do have some problems on Windows, but the Mac is so, so much worse. I get the feeling its one of those things that Apple just doesn't value.
I do wonder why there hasn't been a universal printer protocol? You would think that we could get to some set of properties that could describe any printer.
10 years ago - it hasn't worked in practice unless you remember all your capitalized Apple buzzwords and are willing to pay extra for it (I say this in disappointment, I was able to be a full time dev _because_ of iOS 4.2 and AirPrint)
What kind of problems have they had (on Macs)? I've never had an issue in 14 years of OS X (now macOS) as my daily driver with printers.
Except for one HP printer because HP made everything too complicated (I was able to find a way to connect directly to it rather than through their software, I just had to corrupt my phone with their app to get the printer on the network the first time).
> My current printer worked by just plugging it into the computer
I couldn't figure out where the disconnect between your experience and mine was, as I never have to help Mac family and friends, but the windows users wind up throwing their printers out the window.
The disconnect must be that - you're plugging them in! I haven't used a USB printer in over a decade, and back when Idid the printer makers were almost hostile to Mac users, so their drivers sucked, installed crapware, and frequently hogged resources so they could throw up a splash screen to sell you new ink/toner.
For probably close to 15 years, and especially in the decade since the advent of AirPrint, I stopped doing all of that. Printer gets on the network, macs all see it as an AirPrint device, and it works.
I find Ethernet, when available tends to work out best... I've yet to see a wifi printer that works well/consistently. Though lots of higher end routers can act as a USB print server as well.
WiFi printers work great--assuming you assign them a static IP address and you set it up by telling Windows/OS X to use that IP address as the port address instead of any goofy auto detect nonsense pushed on you by the manufacturer.
I usually just put printers in the reserved list on my router to keep getting the same IP. Haven't really done wireless on a newer than 5yo device, but have had a couple issues back then just in maintaining a connection.
My wired printers have had no issues though, even from wifi devices.
Honestly in recent years I haven't even had to do that. Got a small-office style HP printer/scanner, it's on wifi, everything just seems to be able to talk to it. Couldn't be happier...
Hmm, odd. I bought the cheapest AIO printer with wifi at Walmart years ago and it has worked flawlessly. Besides the ink cartridges being terrible. Connectivity though...perfect.
> The disconnect must be that - you're plugging them in!
Right when Apple switch to having the only plug on MacBooks be USB-C, I was talking with an (older) friend who I often end up as tech-support for. He'd just upgraded his iPhone and his MacBook, so I repeated the popular-on-HN-at-the-time line about how it was bone-headed that you could buy a top-of-the-line iPhone and a top-of-the-line MacBook, and you couldn't plug one in to the other without buying a separate adapter. He said it had been years and years since he'd wanted to actually plug his phone in to his computer; he uses WiFi.
I recently bought a new printer. I plugged an ethernet cable in to it and the router. And yet, its menus still tried to get me to go through WiFi setup, I had to press "back" and go through some hoops to tell it "no, just use the Ethernet plug". That's not a great design--it should have just detected that I'd plugged something in to the Ethernet port, but it helps show:
Somewhere along the way, WiFi absolutely became the expectation, wires became an oddity, and a lot of us techies missed it.
I've got Macs, ipads, Windows and Android at home and they all work without issue or additional setup with the Brother Wifi printer I have. None is better than any of the others, it's seamless with all of them. (Actually, thinking about it, I'm not sure I've ever printed from the ipads, since they're my kids' and I don't use them much, but the other three work fine).
After a decade without a printer at home, I bought one this year for WFH, a HP Tango X. "Installing" meant getting it on wifi via WPS, after which it was immediately visible and usable on Mac, iPhone, Android. On Windows it was visible under printers, but it started to download some extra HP software before it would allow printing for the first time.
I don't see the point of plugging a printer into anything. How would I plug it into my phone?
Not to discount your experience at all, but my immediate reaction to this was to think "Why would I ever want to print from my phone?" I think the answer to both of our questions is that other people have very different workflows, so something that might be a show-stopper or a killer feature for one person could be an afterthought for another.
Because the thing I want to print is already on my phone? I don't move stuff that's on my laptop that I want to print to my phone first, nor the other way around. Both seem somewhat pointless.
I have the opposite experience. At my previous work (new job has no office, nor printers) windows ran the full gamut of "things that can go wrong with printers": couldn't detect them, could detect them couldn't print, could print before - now can't. There wasn't a week that went by when the person who was blessed by the printer gods didn't randomly change.
I've been a fan of HP Laser printers connected via Ethernet. Every device I've tried connects and loads the drivers without issue (including a macbook).
Aside, I really wish Google hadn't removed the Print options from Android/Chrome. Being able to buy tickets and send them to my printer from my phone was awesome... having to save/share links and go to my desktop to print something, less so. I know I can often show a code on my phone, but there are times and places where wifi and mobile connections aren't reliable.
Not really in favor of HP over other mfg's, only that I've had far fewer issues with them than any other mfg for laser printers at least. Been using a color laser (m451nw) for about 5 years now. I don't really print that often, a couple pages a month, and always had issues with ink printers gumming up when I'd go a couple months without printing anything.
> Aside, I really wish Google hadn't removed the Print options from Android/Chrome. Being able to buy tickets and send them to my printer from my phone was awesome... having to save/share links and go to my desktop to print something, less so. I know I can often show a code on my phone, but there are times and places where wifi and mobile connections aren't reliable.
I generally just print to a PDF on my phone (or download them directly that way, if that's an option). That way, I can get them scanned even if I don't have internet. That said, I did use to worry about my phone running out of battery or something, but at this point I haven't had my phone run out of battery while I'm out for several years now, so it isn't much of a factor for me.
You and me must live in alternate universes, as my experience is the opposite. I have used Macs for 22 years or so and cannot really remember ever having much problems with printers. Usually drivers are already installed and it is plug and play.
With Windows you often had to fiddle with installing drivers. Don’t know the current situation as I use Windows as little as possible. Every time I have to use Windows I think my blood pressure goes up a few nothces.
I have been using Mac for 14 years. There was exactly one HP printer that worked with Mac straight off the box. For every other printer, whether at office or home, I had to perform some additional manual steps to print using my Mac.
So, looking at the various comments, experiences do seem to vary widely.
Just to contrast, I never had a problem with WiFi on my Macs, while one of my colleagues had incessant problems with one of theirs!
I spend my time working with printers and I don't see much distinction between macOS and Windows anymore. Where the big difference comes is different printer manufacturers. The worst of them produce bug ridden, bloated and privacy invading software.
Off topic: the consent dialog on this page was hilarious and simultaneously a great social commentary on the typical dark patterns.
> In order to offer an "ad-filled experience" and maximize our profits, LinuxReviews would very much like you to allow our Google AdSense ad-partner to use tracking and cookies so we can show ads from them on our website.
> Options: Resist, Approve (2x bigger)
As a web developer, this was refreshing, but as a user didn't immediately make me want to accept. I wonder what their opt in rate is like compared to the "best" practice
Between uBlock origin and Privacy Badger, I didn't even see the request.
That's what they suggest using in "more information" article, which is hilarious.
Your information is, quite frankly, not very important to us. ... The only reason to store any information on random users would be to sell that information to third parties. We are not willing to do that. Thus; your user data is worth zero and that is why we don't collect your worthless information. When other sites write "Your information is very important to us" they actually mean that "We are collecting and selling your personal data and that revenue stream is very important to us".
First, understand that we, and other websites on the Internet, can not set cookies or store data in your browser. Web-servers can ask web browsers to store cookies. It is up to you to configure your web browser running on your computer to behave according to your desires. Politicians and law-makers who think "cookie warnings" and similar web pollution make sense are blundering morons who simply fail to understand how the Internet works. You can configure your web browser so you do not get any third party tracking when you use this website using any of these alterantives: ...
I enjoy the first paragraph, but the second...
You can do that, of course many of us do. But can the average user? Does the average user even know this sort of tracking goes on? And that just blocking cookies is a small part of the battle?
The cookie law was a crude measure, but with both that law and the GDPR something crucial always gets missed -
You don't need the banners if you're not doing this stuff.
>You can do that, of course many of us do. But can the average user?
Isn't that the point? To make the average user aware. Every little bit helps when spreading awareness.
The other thing is that if you allow those cookies by default then a site that doesn't care about EU law can still track you whenever they want.
>You don't need the banners if you're not doing this stuff.
And yet even the EU commission's own site has one: https://www.europa.eu
> You don't need the banners if you're not doing this stuff.
Ah, but now that every website under the sun has the banner, nobody thinks twice about them beyond (in the back of their minds) "these are annoying" and "fie on the EU and their foolishness". Much like every overused obtrusive dialogue box in the history of graphical interfaces, users learn to dismiss it and whatever it was trying to achieve eventually becomes irrelevant.
With Brave browser it’s trivial to stop the crookies, even for the average user. Problem is, no average user uses Brave.
Average users are certainly discovering Brave and other privacy extensions.
I know, because they're regularly writing me confused and angry emails complaining legitimate functionality on my websites is broken as a result of them.
> You can do that, of course many of us do. But can the average user? Does the average user even know this sort of tracking goes on? And that just blocking cookies is a small part of the battle?
Well, if the average user can't configure their browser to block cookies, then forcing every website to implement a popup to re-implement cookie blocking on a semi-voluntary basis (a feature already available on the client side) seems nonsensical.
The era of asking for cookies has already become a thing of the past for me, it's gone the way of autoplaying videos, advertisements, tracking cookies and paywalls. All things to look back on with a feeling of nostalgia.
I think this is the most commonly used plugin for that: https://www.i-dont-care-about-cookies.eu
(and yeah, it does accept all cookies by default, but the adblocker already deals with that).
Odd, I'm not seeing that. I don't have an ad-blocker, and I explicitly turned off Firefox's enhanced tracking protection in case that was the cause.
Same, no consent screen. Tried refreshing many times also in incognito. It must be some sort of A/B testing.
As far as I can see, everyone has switched over to driverless printing via the Internet Printing Protocol.
Apple calls it AirPrint. Microsoft calls it Universal Print. Google killed CloudPrint and has adopted IPP as well.
What's left of CUPS seems to be the ability to allow a machine attached to a legacy printer to function as IPP print server.
Newer printers support IPP out of the box.
But then you have to type your wifi info into a tiny little screen with buttons and deal with memory unqble to handle giant PDFs.
> you have to type your wifi info into a tiny little screen with buttons
WPS has been a thing for the last 10 years.
I feel like I've seen a half dozen articles on this site alone on why WPS is horrible and insecure.
My printer doesn't even have that, you gotta do it through the WebUI with an Ethernet cable or over USB.
Dedicated drivers provide finer control than driverless. ICC profiles calibrated for a third party paper for example.
It's the same old story, dumbed down systems to accommodate the masses. As soon as you want to do something out of the ordinary you will be out of luck.
I bought a usb laser printer for a few hundred dollars about a decade ago. It gets detected and installed on Mac and Windows without issue. It still prints without issue. I am on the original toner (to help you understand how exceedingly rare it is for me to need to print).
Inkjet Printers are such a pain to make work in general, have such high costs for ink, and rarely hold up well. I would rather buy a color laser if I needed to print color and I’d probably go find a used one that was loved before dealing with the new ones.
Reminds me of 20 years ago when people kept the early HP LaserJet models going for their needs because they were such workhorses.
A Brother printer by any chance? My Brother printer is just like the one you descibed but it is not exceedingly rare that I print. It is just infrequent.
Is there a phone version of ThinkPads and Brother printers?
Nokia bricks, haha.
Same for me. I had an HP 1200n that was a workhorse forever and ever, but was completely phone-unfriendly. AirPrint? Not in this life, bucko! I replaced it with a Brother HL-3120CDW and that things a freaking tank.
Or add a "Raspberry Pi + CUPS"-dongle to the HP-1200n and it starts working on phone
I did that, but at least at the time when I was trying to make that work, the Pi wasn't up to it. The short version was that the drivers available at that time couldn't translate from the AirPrint-wrapped format to the one that the HP expected, on a Raspberry Pi, in realtime. It was worth it to me to replace the printer so that I didn't have to listen to my wife hate on the poor HP every time she tried to print and had to wait a minute or two for it to start.
If you print a lot of color and want cheaper ink, also look at Epson's EcoTank line. They fill up from ink bottles, like the continuous ink supply systems that people had been rigging up to avoid ink cartridges.
If you're printing a LOT of color, especially photo paper, those seem to be about the only good option around for most people.
I'm pretty happy with my color laser, I don't print much, just replaced my black and about to replace the color tonor cartridges after about 5 years on the ones that came in the box.
Same for me. I bought a used 2008 HP LaserJet (usb+ethernet duplex, prints double letter size / DinA3) some 8 years ago for like 30€ and converted it to a wifi CUPS printer via a RaspberryPi. Runs hassle free ever since, usable from Android, Windows and MacOS
Inkjet printers are for photos and fine art. If you're not printing those, you should probably go with a laser printer. If you are printing those, you should probably go with a laser printer anyway for all the miscellaneous documents you use.
(That said, I just got an Epson P900 which will do borderless 17x22"/A2 printing with archival pigment inks <3 <3 <3 which is a little bit prone to clogging as a general rule, but still)
> Inkjet printers are for photos and fine art.
Lasers, even relatively inexpensive ones, are often better than cheap inkjets for photos and fine art, too.
Expensive inkjets, usually with additional fancy options and paper, are for photos and fine art, but most inkjets are just a rip-off leveraging the ability to conceal high printing costs behind low initial buy-in cost.
School auctions are great for finding printers going out of service, got about 7 years out of an old HP 4000 (BW only) before it died, and probably had 10 years in service before that, best $35 I think I ever spent, and never even had to order toner, it had a fresh large capacity cartridge when I got it.
I'm on my second HP Color LaserJet, the first one started jamming after 5 years before it finished the starter toner cartridges. I stupidly bought a replacement black cartridge.
The cost of replacing toner is more than the printer so the next time it acts up I will just replace it.
I recommend you buy a Brother printer - unlike HP, they don't follow the Gillette/razor blade pricing sale strategy. Brother printers are great quality, and their toners and drums are reasonably priced.
I have nothing against Brother laser printers but their inkjet based units are garbage. Their price point is great. Their laser printers produce crisp clean black and white prints but their color laser printers are mediocre at best.
That being said, if you pay attention you can pick up a very nice HP Color Laser at a really low price point.
Same for me. I bought a Lexmark E232 for school and it's been a solid printer on the rare occasion I've needed to use it. The only thing I've had to do is apply Rubber Renue to the pickup rollers when it stops feeding paper correctly.
I did replace it with an HP Colour LaserJet, primarily so that I could get colour prints and not have to worry about ink drying up due to very infrequent use.
> Reminds me of 20 years ago when people kept the early HP LaserJet models going for their needs because they were such workhorses.
My family used this until 2012: https://i.imgur.com/QedZrsm.png
(They're on a newer LaserJet model now, and they've been using that one for the past 8 years.)
My grandma used an original HP Deskjet (from 1988) on a Pentium one computer running Wordstar and Wordperfect 5 on MSDOS until she moved to an elderly home in 2015. My dad replaced the rubber rolls on the printer a few times, and I think he had to refill the old cartridges with 3rd party ink, but other than that it still worked perfectly.
No idea what happened to it though... I suspect finding replacement parts for the things that wear out has become close to impossible, but I doubt that thing was broken in any other way.
We are still using an Apple Laserwriter 12/640 PS postscript printer that we bought in 1998.
I't on the second cartridge and works perfectly. I had some old sticks of RAM laying around so I upgraded it to 64Mb about ten years ago.
I don't own any Macs, but I have setup far more printers on other people's Macs than on my own PCs. No Windows user ever asks me for 'tech support' to get a printer working. But the few Mac users need it all the time.
It is so odd to me that setting up a printer on Mac is so much harder for the average user, apparently. My current printer worked by just plugging it into the computer. Windows downloaded the drivers and it all just worked.
If your printer is well supported out of the box in CUPS you might do ok, but that does not seem to be that common if your printer is new-ish.
No Windows user ever asks me for 'tech support' to get a printer working
I wish. We do have some problems on Windows, but the Mac is so, so much worse. I get the feeling its one of those things that Apple just doesn't value.
I do wonder why there hasn't been a universal printer protocol? You would think that we could get to some set of properties that could describe any printer.
I mean there is Postscript. But the problem with standards, there are many to chose from.
Postscript doesn't do the printer configuration. I remember Printer Job Language, but I don't think that allowed control of printer features.
PPD does.
AirPrint is such a protocol and well-supported. They've just moved on to network printing instead of continuing to work on USB printers.
10 years ago - it hasn't worked in practice unless you remember all your capitalized Apple buzzwords and are willing to pay extra for it (I say this in disappointment, I was able to be a full time dev _because_ of iOS 4.2 and AirPrint)
What kind of problems have they had (on Macs)? I've never had an issue in 14 years of OS X (now macOS) as my daily driver with printers.
Except for one HP printer because HP made everything too complicated (I was able to find a way to connect directly to it rather than through their software, I just had to corrupt my phone with their app to get the printer on the network the first time).
> My current printer worked by just plugging it into the computer
I couldn't figure out where the disconnect between your experience and mine was, as I never have to help Mac family and friends, but the windows users wind up throwing their printers out the window.
The disconnect must be that - you're plugging them in! I haven't used a USB printer in over a decade, and back when Idid the printer makers were almost hostile to Mac users, so their drivers sucked, installed crapware, and frequently hogged resources so they could throw up a splash screen to sell you new ink/toner.
For probably close to 15 years, and especially in the decade since the advent of AirPrint, I stopped doing all of that. Printer gets on the network, macs all see it as an AirPrint device, and it works.
I find Ethernet, when available tends to work out best... I've yet to see a wifi printer that works well/consistently. Though lots of higher end routers can act as a USB print server as well.
WiFi printers work great--assuming you assign them a static IP address and you set it up by telling Windows/OS X to use that IP address as the port address instead of any goofy auto detect nonsense pushed on you by the manufacturer.
I usually just put printers in the reserved list on my router to keep getting the same IP. Haven't really done wireless on a newer than 5yo device, but have had a couple issues back then just in maintaining a connection.
My wired printers have had no issues though, even from wifi devices.
Honestly in recent years I haven't even had to do that. Got a small-office style HP printer/scanner, it's on wifi, everything just seems to be able to talk to it. Couldn't be happier...
Hmm, odd. I bought the cheapest AIO printer with wifi at Walmart years ago and it has worked flawlessly. Besides the ink cartridges being terrible. Connectivity though...perfect.
> The disconnect must be that - you're plugging them in!
Right when Apple switch to having the only plug on MacBooks be USB-C, I was talking with an (older) friend who I often end up as tech-support for. He'd just upgraded his iPhone and his MacBook, so I repeated the popular-on-HN-at-the-time line about how it was bone-headed that you could buy a top-of-the-line iPhone and a top-of-the-line MacBook, and you couldn't plug one in to the other without buying a separate adapter. He said it had been years and years since he'd wanted to actually plug his phone in to his computer; he uses WiFi.
I recently bought a new printer. I plugged an ethernet cable in to it and the router. And yet, its menus still tried to get me to go through WiFi setup, I had to press "back" and go through some hoops to tell it "no, just use the Ethernet plug". That's not a great design--it should have just detected that I'd plugged something in to the Ethernet port, but it helps show:
Somewhere along the way, WiFi absolutely became the expectation, wires became an oddity, and a lot of us techies missed it.
> Somewhere along the way, WiFi absolutely became the expectation, wires became an oddity, and a lot of us techies missed it.
It's also extremely common now for people to use "Wi-Fi" as a synonym for "Internet connection"
It's the reverse for me. Setting up a printer on Windows is impossibly difficult. On Mac you just plug it in and it works.
Same with me. Strange how people can have such radically different experience.
I've got Macs, ipads, Windows and Android at home and they all work without issue or additional setup with the Brother Wifi printer I have. None is better than any of the others, it's seamless with all of them. (Actually, thinking about it, I'm not sure I've ever printed from the ipads, since they're my kids' and I don't use them much, but the other three work fine).
After a decade without a printer at home, I bought one this year for WFH, a HP Tango X. "Installing" meant getting it on wifi via WPS, after which it was immediately visible and usable on Mac, iPhone, Android. On Windows it was visible under printers, but it started to download some extra HP software before it would allow printing for the first time.
I don't see the point of plugging a printer into anything. How would I plug it into my phone?
> How would I plug it into my phone?
Not to discount your experience at all, but my immediate reaction to this was to think "Why would I ever want to print from my phone?" I think the answer to both of our questions is that other people have very different workflows, so something that might be a show-stopper or a killer feature for one person could be an afterthought for another.
> "Why would I ever want to print from my phone?"
Because the thing I want to print is already on my phone? I don't move stuff that's on my laptop that I want to print to my phone first, nor the other way around. Both seem somewhat pointless.
Routers still support WPS?
I have the opposite experience. At my previous work (new job has no office, nor printers) windows ran the full gamut of "things that can go wrong with printers": couldn't detect them, could detect them couldn't print, could print before - now can't. There wasn't a week that went by when the person who was blessed by the printer gods didn't randomly change.
In comparison, zero issues on my Mac laptop.
I've been a fan of HP Laser printers connected via Ethernet. Every device I've tried connects and loads the drivers without issue (including a macbook).
Aside, I really wish Google hadn't removed the Print options from Android/Chrome. Being able to buy tickets and send them to my printer from my phone was awesome... having to save/share links and go to my desktop to print something, less so. I know I can often show a code on my phone, but there are times and places where wifi and mobile connections aren't reliable.
Not really in favor of HP over other mfg's, only that I've had far fewer issues with them than any other mfg for laser printers at least. Been using a color laser (m451nw) for about 5 years now. I don't really print that often, a couple pages a month, and always had issues with ink printers gumming up when I'd go a couple months without printing anything.
> Aside, I really wish Google hadn't removed the Print options from Android/Chrome. Being able to buy tickets and send them to my printer from my phone was awesome... having to save/share links and go to my desktop to print something, less so. I know I can often show a code on my phone, but there are times and places where wifi and mobile connections aren't reliable.
I generally just print to a PDF on my phone (or download them directly that way, if that's an option). That way, I can get them scanned even if I don't have internet. That said, I did use to worry about my phone running out of battery or something, but at this point I haven't had my phone run out of battery while I'm out for several years now, so it isn't much of a factor for me.
It's not gone, it's become annoying: go to the three dots menu and select "share...". Then look for a thing that says "Chrome" with "print" under it.
Perhaps GP was referring to Google Cloud Print, which is being sunset at the end of 2020?
Okay, it's still in chrome, just not in brave or others...
Also cloud print is going away, which is disappointing. Have my hp eprint setup with it so I could print from anywhere.
You and me must live in alternate universes, as my experience is the opposite. I have used Macs for 22 years or so and cannot really remember ever having much problems with printers. Usually drivers are already installed and it is plug and play.
With Windows you often had to fiddle with installing drivers. Don’t know the current situation as I use Windows as little as possible. Every time I have to use Windows I think my blood pressure goes up a few nothces.
With Windows the drivers are mostly downloaded on-the-go through Windows Update.
I have been using Mac for 14 years. There was exactly one HP printer that worked with Mac straight off the box. For every other printer, whether at office or home, I had to perform some additional manual steps to print using my Mac.
So, looking at the various comments, experiences do seem to vary widely.
Just to contrast, I never had a problem with WiFi on my Macs, while one of my colleagues had incessant problems with one of theirs!
I spend my time working with printers and I don't see much distinction between macOS and Windows anymore. Where the big difference comes is different printer manufacturers. The worst of them produce bug ridden, bloated and privacy invading software.