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Apple Announces 'AirPrint' Wireless Printing for iOS Devices Coming in November

DTphonehome said:
I wonder if I should sell my Canon Pixma MX860 all-in-one while it's still in the box, and get a new AirPrint-enabled printer when they come out...
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I would return the MX860 BUT NOT for the reason you stated. If you dig into it online you'll find that the 860 had a slew of problems, especially with Macs. So, Canon quickly released the MX870 which fixed all of the bugs and issues. That's why you'll find the 860 so cheap in many outlets. The 870 is a great printer. Wi-Fi function works flawlessly.

As to your question... I don't think you'll have any problems using it with Air-Print. Air-Print will not need any additional drivers. etc. I imagine that just about any Wi-Fi/Bonjour enabled printer will work with it. "Air Print-Enabled" will just be a marketing and advertising term. No way Apple is not going to release something that doesn't work with the millions of current Wi-Fi printers.
 
I voted this negative, and I'll explain why (since people always like to post "why on earth would someone vote negative on this?").

Printing is such a basic function, limiting it only to devices capable of running iOS 4.2 is just plain silly. I can understand why my first-generation iPod Touch can't run certain games well, and I can understand why Apple might limit new whiz-bang technology (e.g. multitasking) to newer devices - but this is printing! I had old 8086-based computers that were able to print just fine with 640k of RAM - there's no reason my old iPod Touch shouldn't be able to handle printing.
 
number9 said:
Ok, well then you'll have to buy an ePrint printer or see if a printer connected to an Airport Express works.

but, for a lot of people, their computers don't get turned off often, if ever, so this shouldnt be an issue.
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I don't think there is any way an Airport Express will work. The printer drivers aren't on it, nor are they on iOS.
 
Digitalclips said:
I guess you are neither well travelled nor knowledgeable of the use of English other than the US variant.

Just for your edification:

The colloquial expression to cotton on to which means to catch on or to grasp a line of thought:

They didn't know much English and it was surprising how quickly they cottoned on / caught on to what I was saying.
He still hasn't cottoned on to the fact that I'm not in the least bit interested in him.
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The Mac OS X Dictionary has this meaning as well. "Cotton on" is an intransative verb that means "begin to understand."
 
sirozha said:
Many people prefer having a network printer and not a printer attached to a computer because the computer would have to be on all the time. AirPrint will not work with pure network printers - the ones that use their own Wi-Fi or network cable connection - unless these network printers are compatible with AirPrint. Hence, most network printers will not support printing directly from an iOS device. This will cause a lot of grief for a lot of users who will have to change the way they use network printing unless they want to go and buy an AirPrint compatible printer.
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I hope you are wrong! And that Airport connected printers work fine. But you might be right. Can the iOS developer community enlighten us?
 
tbrinkma said:
No need to get upset. The 'ePrint' printers just have extra functionality that lets you print to them even if they aren't otherwise on a network. Normal printers will work the same way they work on the network now. That's why this functionality on iOS also requires the new functionality in the new SL beta. (Likewise, I'm sure there will be a Bonjour for Windows update once this is out of beta.)
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What I'm upset about is the likelihood that I will have to buy a new (& magical & revolutionary) printer -- IF I want to print wirelessly from my iPad.... UNLESS I am willing to have my Macbook turned on as well, solely for the purpose of creating communication between the iPad and printer on my AirPort network. As was said above, this is just silly... (I think was also astutely commented on above by another poster, who observed they were unaware that Apple had a "Department of Redundancy Department") :(

Macwheels
 
redscull said:
If this doesn't automatically work for any printer connected to a Time Capsule / AirPort Extreme, this feature is worthless to me and I suspect just about everyone that was excited by the first rumors surrounding it.

I do not want to buy a special printer when I already have one that works just fine. That's a waste of money and landfill space.

And I do not want to have to turn on a real computer first to accept the print request; there already exist 3rd party App solutions that accomplish that. Besides, if I had a real computer on, I'd use that to send the print request in the first place.

The whole buzz behind printing from iOS is that you can have a setup that includes nothing but wifi, a printer on that network, and an iOS device.. and you can print. That's the novelty. That's useful. As soon as it requires a real computer in the mix, this feature is neither new nor particularly useful.

I understand that printers need drivers, but why can't a Time Capsule have drivers on it? It has plenty of hard drive space. It runs some kind of operating system. And what about iOS devices themselves? Every iOS device I own has far more disk space and probably more computing power than any computer I had when I first bought the printer I'm still using to this day. Why can't iTunes sync printer drivers to my iOS device if I tell it I want it to be able to print?
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Because Steve Jobs said so.
 
sirozha said:
Because Steve Jobs said so.
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Sirozha -

I have been meaning to thank you previously for your other, very educated & helpful comments in this thread :) This last one I think sums the whole issue up pretty well, unfortunately. :eek:

Macwheels
 
I don't know about anyone else but I'm gonna look into 1233 Willis Av. I LIKE that house, and at $384K it's a steal.:D
 
Well said, sirozha.

There are many WiFi printers on the market today and that also support Bonjour. You can print to these using a generic Internet Printing Protocol (IPP).

So my real question is, how is AirPrint different than WiFi printers that support IPP and Bonjour?!? Maybe AirPrint is simply IPP and Bonjour mixed with a little "apple magic" to make it different and incompatible. :)


sirozha said:
All Bonjour does is advertise an existing service: printer, network share, Time Machine volume, Web GUI Page, SMB/CIFS share, etc. Bonjour is a discovery protocol, not a printing protocol. The print jobs are handled by a locally installed printer driver. You don't have to have Bonjour running to be able to print to a network printer. You can use direct TCP/IP printing, for instance, but you won't be able to discover the printer on the network; hence, you would need to know the printer's IP address.

Also, Bonjour uses multicasts, which means you have to be on the same network segment as the printer. This only works in home office/small office environments. In bigger companies, printers can be several network segments away from the user's computer, and Bonjour will not help in discovering any services, including the printer.
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OutPastPluto said:
Apple doesn't need to include AirPrint in MacOS. It already has CUPS. Why they didn't decide to just port the CUPS to PhoneOS is a bit of a mystery.
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AirPrint will have to be included in Mac OS X to be able to proxy a print job sent by an iOS device to a printer locally attached to and shared by a Mac.
 
My printer now obsolete, is yours?

Hooray so my less than six month old HP F4580 is now obsolete as it doesn't seem to support HP's ePrint system and no way of upgrading the firmware. At least I know not to buy any more cartridges to start thinking of ebaying it.

I wonder how much HP will charge to host the email address required for ePrinting and how do I stop spammers emailing my printer and using all the paper/ink
 
Looks like AirPrint is a no go for me. The only Macs that we have are two MacBooks, so leaving them on all the time just in case someone needs to print isn't really a good idea, and if I have to turn it on for an iOS device to print, I might as well pull up the information on the MacBook and print from there to begin with. And AirPort Express would be a waste of money considering the fact that I already have a nice network setup. Oh well.
 
macintel4me said:
Well said, sirozha.

There are many WiFi printers on the market today and that also support Bonjour. You can print to these using a generic Internet Printing Protocol (IPP).

So my real question is, how is AirPrint different than WiFi printers that support IPP and Bonjour?!? Maybe AirPrint is simply IPP and Bonjour mixed with a little "apple magic" to make it different and incompatible. :)
Click to expand...

I don't know what AirPrint is, but I can infer that it is probably a combination of a printing-service network-discovery protocol (similar to Bonjour) and a standardized printer language. The difference between a regular network printer driver + Bonjour on one hand, and AirPrint on the other hand, is that you have to use a different printer driver to print to a different printer in traditional printing, whereas with AirPrint, all AirPrint-compatible printers will be using the same printer language, and hence, you can use the same driver to print to any compatible printer.
 
Gosh people are so negative. So many people: "Would have been better if I could just plug my printer into it!"

Jesus, it would have been better if it pumped out free gold too.

What happened to the days when people could simply be excited about new **** and not criticize every defect available.

I hope anyone complaining doesn't use the ability to print anything ever. iPhones should be like the Sword of Truth (my favorite....) if you have any negative thoughts you shouldn't be able to use it. Period (.).
 
a quick test: I have an HP 3380 hooked up via AirPort Extreme. I clicked Print from Safari (iPad) and the printer is not found. I unplugged from the AirPort Extreme and plugged into my Macbook Pro and enabled printer sharing. Still no go, no printer found.

It would make sense that for a printer to work with AirPrint, it needs to be compatible with the AirPrint specification. Or, plug the printer into a desktop system with the printer drivers for the printer, along with AirPrint, to act as a proxy.

[edit] Already mentioned in another blog, Snow Leopard 10.6.5b has the AirPrint support.
 
You can already print from ios device to hp printers using their app(when it works)
 
That's lame... what about the Share Printer function in System Preferences... what's it for if not that ? Computers can do it, why not iOS devices ?
Shame, really...
 
Cougarcat said:
I don't think there is any way an Airport Express will work. The printer drivers aren't on it, nor are they on iOS.
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Exactly. It's pretty clear that, in order to avoid having to write thousands of printer drivers for iOS, Apple is is simply having the iOS device convert whatever is to be printed into a standard file format (almost certainly .pdf) and sending it wirelessly to a computer that has both a printer installed and the new software required to automatically receive the file and print it. That's why a standard network printer won't work, though installing the new server software on any computer capable of printing to it will have the same effect... the computer just will have to be on in order to print. And the new HP ePrint printers work because they already have the ability to directly print pdf files from the printer.

Hopefully, Apple will make Windows and OS X Client "print drivers" as well that do the same thing and will allow you to print from your notebook/netbook to any printer on the current network that's either ePrint-enabled or connected to an AirPrint server. If that catches on it would be fantastic. Being able to print just about anywhere without having to deal with installing one-time-use printer drivers would be awesome.
 
NebulaClash said:
No special printer needed, they will just work directly with the iPad. From the press release:



So any old printer will work as long as it's recognized on your network.
Click to expand...

I'd be careful about making this assumption. Many printers that show up on the network require drivers. So if AirPrint is driver-free, that would imply that to print to a particular printer, it must either

a) Support the new AirPrint protocol directly (e.g. those new HP printers mentioned)

or

b) Be hooked to a computer (wired or wirelessly) that supports the AirPrint protocol, and has appropriate drivers (on the computer that acts as proxy).
 
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