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They can just switch to AirPrint or something really similar and immensely simplify things while keeping 99% of the functionality people need.


There is just so much stuff that that doesn't cover. Some companies have really complex printing requirements. There is a ton of legacy drivers, application software and printers that need supporting.


Yeah and all these things are not in the 99% most people really need


(Un?)fortunately Microsoft isn't Apple. They can't cut users arms off and then say "well just become left handed!" just because it suits them

Their entire business model is based on being a stable target that enterprises can build software on top of.

For what it's worth. I did once try spending a weekend trying to jury rig a cheap printer without Wi-Fi to my mothers iPad

The printer instantly came to life with Apple's CUPS software. Windows and Linux clients were more than happy to forward items to it to be printed once configured

The iPad however required Air Print. Something CUPS does not support, indeed Apple themselves refuse to implement it! At least according to the Debian Wiki

There's a bucket of alternative software like Avahi that is meant to expose CUPS as an AirPrint-able printer but I was never able to get it to work. And in true Apple fashion there were no error messages or the like from the iPad itself. Print jobs would simply fail silently in the background

If "make a crappy HP printer work on a home network and talk to an iPad" is in that 1% scope of yours then I cannot imagine the kinds of stuff Microsoft's customers would lose out on trying to squeeze into the AirPrint world


You can turn this into an Apple whine fest if you like but that has absolutely nothing to do with simplifying printing. Reality is that 99% of printing is a person clicking a button because he wants to have a piece of paper that shows the things he sees on screen.

You don’t need the insane complexity that is Windows printing for that. But you do need someone to say this printer driver is old and no longer supported. Now you may want to believe in a dream where your precious inkjet from the 90s will be supported forever. But just like Windows 10 dropped support for a ton of these museum pieces, so will Windows 11. And you can blame Microsoft (or Apple) for that and they’ll just point to the manufacturer.

Believe it or not, we are heading for a future where operating systems will not let manufacturers run their crappy code in the kernel or in privileged processes just because that was a right they had 20 years ago. It’s unnecessary and dangerous so it’s going away.

Your iPad does not support your cheap printer and Apple isn’t going to fix it. And guess what happened? The new cheap printers that are in store right now do support AirPrint so iPads can print to them. Because customers demand it. It’s not rocket science.


The 1% includes organisations that run print accounting software (pretty much every university in the world) to charge their clients, every warehouse that prints labels, secure sites that run print release printers, anybody who has a print to PDF workflow, Windows POS systems that print receipts, the list goes on and on.


The AirPrint workflow can actually create PDFs right from the applications. Because that is the main idea! The complex part of the drivers that every manufacturer wants to do for himself is turning the application commands into a bitmap to put on paper. AirPrint doesn’t require a driver because it says that part is always the same, you just send a pdf to the printer and it turns it into a bitmap and puts it on paper.

AirPrint actually supports authentication so you can build print accounting if you want.

And all these alternate uses like receipts and labels? They only work with specialty applications that do their own processing. It’s not like anyone is using Word to print receipts. And they can do that just fine outside of the normal printing infrastructure.


>AirPrint doesn’t require a driver because it says that part is always the same, you just send a pdf to the printer and it turns it into a bitmap and puts it on paper.

That's not quite how it works. AirPrint supports PDF, JPEG and a raster format (URF). The raster format is the only one that is required on the printer. Most of the cheap devices don't have the resources to render a PDF on the printer.

>And they can do that just fine outside of the normal printing infrastructure.

Not right now they can't, there are a lot of these sorts of applications that are relying on the existing system.

Even selecting a paper size in Word ends up with a query to the driver of the printer.


I fail to see how that makes any difference. It supports a limited number of ways to send a page description to the printer, which is why it doesn’t need a driver.

And as for these enterprise supported receipt printing solutions? Well guess what, they’ll need to find a new way to send their custom commands to a receipt printer. Or perhaps they’ll use some deprecated legacy service that is not available on home editions of Windows and is off or not even installed by default.

By the way, AirPrint knows the paper size just as well as any solution. It’s just standardized so it doesn’t require untrusted code to run in privileged places. And if Word uses some Windows 3 api to ask a driver for the paper size, that driver can be a generic Microsoft driver and if that isn’t enough, that’s what shims are for.




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