(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.
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