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thetaylor13

macrumors regular
May 14, 2010
148
0
Work
i don't get it. you have - for example - a printer attached to a airport express, or you have a printer attached and shared on a mac book. and still you can NOT use it for air print? why not? because apple wants to force you to buy a new printer???

sorry folks, but this is ridiculous! besides that: why is it so important to be able to print? we are living in a paperless age, everything goes virtual and still people get crazy over an air print feature. are you guys getting excited about EVERYTHING that is a new feature, or are you REALLY needing to print things on your iphone?

ps: what do you actually print with airprint? if it is a photo, then use iphoto on your mac! if it is an email then: why printing an email???

I print stuff all day at work. Not sure what type of office you work in, but ours definitely isn't high tech enough to become "paperless"....
 

Gee4orce

macrumors regular
Jan 12, 2004
120
121
i don't get it. you have - for example - a printer attached to a airport express, or you have a printer attached and shared on a mac book. and still you can NOT use it for air print? why not? because apple wants to force you to buy a new printer???

sorry folks, but this is ridiculous! besides that: why is it so important to be able to print? we are living in a paperless age, everything goes virtual and still people get crazy over an air print feature. are you guys getting excited about EVERYTHING that is a new feature, or are you REALLY needing to print things on your iphone?

ps: what do you actually print with airprint? if it is a photo, then use iphoto on your mac! if it is an email then: why printing an email???

Apple doesn't want to force you to buy a printer, get real. Why would they ? Apple doesn't make printers, so what have they got to gain.

A really good, valid use for Airprint is to keep a hard copy of a web page order confirmation screen when you buy something. In fact, using Printopia you can create a PDF and have it automatically put on Dropbox, so no need to physically print anything.
 

wizard

macrumors 68040
May 29, 2003
3,854
571
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Ctwise covered most of what I wanted to cover but I have to ask, how is it that you guys imagine that Apple is just waiting for more printers to come? Do you really think they spend all this time to work on this software, which is 99.9% done just to abandon it? Seriously?

Frankly I'm not doing any iOS development right now with beta software so I'm not up on all the details of AirPrint. What I do know is that iOS uses PDF internally so it would only take a little effort to pipe the PDF over to a supporting printer. Thus the concept of driverless printing. Instead of working through a print driver you are instead sending a PDF over the network. From the stand point of the iOS device there is no driver.

While I'm not concerned currently about printing I continue to be amazed by the SDK for iOS and the obvious idea that this is just the begining. Apple/Jobs certainly have a vision here. I may not agree with every bit of that vision but they are going someplace new and interesting with iOS.
 

wizard

macrumors 68040
May 29, 2003
3,854
571
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slb said:
Why do so many people who email Steve Jobs come off like whiners?

In many cases they are!

Lets face it some of the complaints are justified others are not.
 

RMo

macrumors 65816
Aug 7, 2007
1,254
281
Iowa, USA
Since when did Steve write in Times, and when did his e-mails become so long?

Must have been a different assistant who wrote this one. :)
 

shartypants

macrumors 6502a
Jul 27, 2010
922
60
I don't happen to have one of those printers, so I'm looking forward to when they support shared printers.
 

Thunderhawks

Suspended
Feb 17, 2009
4,057
2,118
So in the meantime, AirPrint is useless unless you just happen to have one of the 'approved' printers...

Thanks Steve...

Always amazing how ungrateful people are and their feeling of entitlement.

You have lived all your life without this and having it or not will not make you die!

Apple keeps developing new features, optimization, better software etc. etc. for FREE!!!!!! and giving them to you for FREE!!!!!

Did I mention for FREE!!!!!

Why are you complaining?

Can't wait? I see, that is Steve's fault!
 

syavno

macrumors member
Apr 13, 2008
51
0
The fact that they email him at all shows a propensity for whining. And it's downhill from there.

No, I am not a whiner. There is nothing wrong with asking a legitimate question. Instead of judging others, why don't you try it yourself sometime.
 

BC2009

macrumors 68020
Jul 1, 2009
2,237
1,393
All this tells me is that there's more AirPrint capable printers coming soon, like the current HP ones.

The way the question and answer are worded doesn't address the shared printing, in my opinion.

The only thing worse than Steve Jobs' vague answers are the vague questions he just happens to choose to respond to. He always chooses the question he wants to answer -- none that get down the real thing we want to know.

For example, he responded to that guy who said something to the effect of "I heard AirPrint was cancelled, what gives?" And Steve Jobs replied "Don't believe everything you read." I'm sure dozens of people asked "Why is it that AirPrint will no longer let me print to a Bonjour-shared printer?" Do you think its a coincidence that he did not respond to those kind of questions? I don't.

Personal emails from the CEO are a poor channel for communication from a company. Either answer nothing or issue a press release. The in-between stuff is just annoying.
 

IlluminatedSage

macrumors 68000
Aug 1, 2000
1,563
339
its a bit of a buzz kill when the functionality isn't live now and the only printer that use it are from HP, who have the highest priced inks.

why can't Kodak or Lexmark have airprint models. now, which are available for Thanksgiving specials.
 

3runjosh

macrumors member
Dec 7, 2008
88
0
Not true.

Airprint is done by having the app format a document in a single format and then this is sent to the Mac/PC and converted into a PDF on the fly.

The pdf is then printed using the printer-specific driver that is installed on the computer.

The direct to printer solution involves a similar process - single format that all those printers understand.

There are no drivers installed on the iPad or iPhone.

You just reversed his final statement on himself hahaha he is the idiot now :p
 

franswa za

macrumors 6502a
Mar 24, 2010
582
26
south africa
Always amazing how ungrateful people are and their feeling of entitlement.

You have lived all your life without this and having it or not will not make you die!

Apple keeps developing new features, optimization, better software etc. etc. for FREE!!!!!! and giving them to you for FREE!!!!!

Did I mention for FREE!!!!!

Why are you complaining?

Can't wait? I see, that is Steve's fault!

some of us need to understand, although frustrating as it is at present, that the "new" airprint and for that matter airplay have opened doors for others to follow... a small step for steve, a giant step for mankind? the features are not perfect at present but...

other printer manufacturers will follow....... no need to buy buggy new HP printers right now.........
 

ipadguy9223

macrumors newbie
Sep 23, 2010
2
0
Disappointing of Apple

:(

From my perspective, printing is printing..not printing to the just a small list of printers.

It understandable that iPad would be a wireless connecting to a printer, but forcing people to either get a printer from the current list..go to bottom to see list: http://www.apple.com/ipad/features/airprint.html or wait to for the next generation of printers from the manufacturers and buy one of those...sounds devious... and poor business practice.

To me it is just wrong. I am huge fan of Apple, but based on this experience so far I do understand better now the folks who side with Flash..and Apple's attitude that they are forcing them to subscribe to Apple's technology direction...

Apple lost a little credibility with me...and I wonder how Android's printing functions work on their future device?
 

MrMoore

macrumors 6502
Nov 2, 2006
395
23
Arlington Heights,IL
No worries. You can print to 100% of all printers on the market now, by simply installing this excellent $10 utility on your Mac:

Printopia

I love Ecamm, the company that makes Printopia... I think I own every one of their software products.

I installed the demo program from Printopia, last night. So far it has work flawlessly. I probably plop down the $10 for the program. The save to a Dropbox is a great option.
 

petvas

macrumors 603
Jul 20, 2006
5,479
1,808
Munich, Germany
some of us need to understand, although frustrating as it is at present, that the "new" airprint and for that matter airplay have opened doors for others to follow... a small step for steve, a giant step for mankind? the features are not perfect at present but...

other printer manufacturers will follow....... no need to buy buggy new HP printers right now.........

Why do you say that the new HP printers are buggy? I got a brand new B110a and I love it. The printer is always connected to the Internet, ePrint works great and the Mac software works really well..
 

res1233

macrumors 65816
Dec 8, 2008
1,127
0
Brooklyn, NY
Too bad my University's wireless network doesn't work with AirPrint, AirPlay, or Remote. But for some reason, I can SSH my iPhone :(

Well, ssh is a popular Linux/unix protocol, so I'd assume the IT people would have a reason to keep those ports unblocked. That way they can manage the server from any computer.
 

canyonblue737

macrumors 68020
Jan 10, 2005
2,148
2,621
All the people ranking this story as a positive are misreading Steve's answer.

"Lot's more coming soon" doesn't imply that an iOS update will happen to let you use your printer as had been promised but rather that he feels ePrint will come to more and more printers, NEW PRINTERS YOU HAVE TO BUY TO REPLACE YOUR PRINTER. 2 weeks ago there were builds of iOS 4.2 that worked with ANY printer attached to your Mac via networking, now the answer from Steve is "buy a new printer."

:(
 

ghostface147

macrumors 601
May 28, 2008
4,169
5,142
AirPrint works great on my Mac. I use an HP inkjet 5650 (10 years old) at home connected via my Airport Extreme Base Station. At work I have a simple HP 4100TN that works excellent as well.

One thing is that I wish it could print at home via the Airport without having the Mac on.
 

Xtremehkr

macrumors 68000
Jul 4, 2004
1,897
0
People don't really understand the mechanics of computing as well as they used to. Now they just expect ideas to become reality in a very short period of time.

It's similar to what happened to vehicles. Decades ago vehicle mechanics were simple, almost anyone could take a part out and replace it with a new one when they needed to.

These days most modern engines are far too complicated for most people to figure out. There are still lots of things you can do by yourself but most people don't concern themselves with the actual mechanics anymore, they just expect the engine to work when they want it to work.

I like how Apple strives to make science fiction fairy tale stuff into reality though. I'm also glad to see that they are getting rewarded for it.

The Microsoft approach of delivering just enough to capture maximum market share is lazy and unimaginative.

Still, I think people would be surprised by how much work has to go into making a seemingly 'simple' idea like this one work properly.
 

BC2009

macrumors 68020
Jul 1, 2009
2,237
1,393
The longer-term goal is a world where you don't have to install 2GB of printer drivers (or download-on-demand printer drivers) on every computer you ship. We *should* be to the point where you can just send a PDF file to a printer over the network and expect it to accurately print it.

Assuming Apple did a good job of designing Airprint, 5 years from now the driverless goal will have been achieved, as most printers seem to have a useful lifespan of about 5 years (10 years for higher end printers.)

Not going to happen. While this will allow you to print a PDF, you would still have all those printer-specific differentiating features that the printer manufacturers market to you. And all those specific features will still need specialized software running on your computer to access them. So while watered-down access to your printer without a driver will become a reality, if you went out and bought a full-featured all-in-one printer you are going to want to do things like:

- Adjust color and page border settings
- Adjust print quality settings
- Adjust paper types to use
- Adjust paper sizes to use
- Choose duplex mode
- Transfer files to an attached SD card (or provide network mounting of it)
- Scan a document to the printer's built-in scanner
- Fax a document to the printer's built-in fax
- Indicate # of document pages to print per physical page
- etc.... etc.... etc....

I'm sure some of you have printers that have features I have not even touched upon. The point is.... unless HP, Canon, Brother, and Lexmark are ready for their products to become commodities (which I doubt), then the driverless printer is a long way away.

If you remember, years ago we got a standardized SQL programming language and we got ODBC; however, every relational database manufacturer still has vendor-specific features and a vendor-specific driver that you need to access those features.

You only get the watered-down version in the standardized interface to anything and hence the proprietary interface will always exist and reside and be managed on your computer.
 

patent10021

macrumors 68040
Apr 23, 2004
3,504
792
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skeep5 said:
It's not driverless printing. The drivers are simply loaded into the device already. Love the shell game that Steve attempts to play. Perhaps he fools idiots with it, not sure.

I like shells, you can hear the ocean with them. :D

Is that you Shelly? :D
 
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