Monterey and iOS 16 Break Brother Printers and AirPrint?

I have a Brother HL-3170CDW, which is an Airprint compatible printer, which I have been using with Airprint for three years. Since updating to Monterey 12.6, the printer no longer works. At all. I cannot add the printer nor print to it from either Mac or iOS devices. What happened? I am really tired of Apple breaking mroe things than they fix. Can we stop with the yearly OS updates and just make an OS that works for once? Please? So frustrating.

Posted on Oct 11, 2022 12:51 PM

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Posted on Oct 11, 2022 02:03 PM

Remove the Brother printer from the Printers & Scanners panel, and re-add it as an AirPrint device. My Samsung ML-2955ND did not work after an upgrade from an earlier version of Monterey to 12.6 and after I did the first sentence, it worked perfectly.

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5 replies

Oct 11, 2022 02:40 PM in response to VikingOSX

Yeah, that was the first thing I tried but for some reason, even when I choose AirPrint, the Mac asks me to choose a driver. Which I do, which then, after a brief period of attempted setup, throws the "Unable to communicate with the printer at this time." error. Airprint is enabled, I re-checked all my printer settings, even though they haven't changed in years. Everything was fine, then Monterey 12.6 happened. I appreciate your help. Thank you!

Oct 12, 2022 09:37 AM in response to mjunkroski

In my case, when I removed the printer, a new panel appeared showing the Bonjour detection of the printer. I selected that printer entry and then the Use: selector automatically changed to Default, or AirPrint depending on the version of macOS. You should not need to manually select anything as it is done for you. Then you just add the printer back and it should be using AirPrint.

Oct 12, 2022 10:39 AM in response to VikingOSX

In the case of the Brother printer, the panel with Bonjour appeared, but in the Use: section there wasn't even an Airprint option. It rather forced me to choose a Brother driver, which I did, to no avail. I finally started from scratch: I reset the printer, got it back on the network, deleted the Brother drivers (which are requried), resinstalled them, restarted, and everything worked as expected. I don't know what caused the problem, but he Brother HL-3170CDW is touchy in the best of times.


Thanks so much for your help! You definitely led me the right direction.

Oct 12, 2022 02:59 PM in response to mjunkroski

Hello,


Also, macOS 10.15 Catalina appears to be the latest supported system for a printer driver from Brother for this model.

https://support.brother.com/g/b/downloadlist.aspx?c=us_ot&lang=en&prod=hl3170cdw_all&os=10060

Even if a Catalina driver possibly would work with one or two newer macOS versions, a normal recommendation from the printer manufacturer (for other models) would be to use AirPrint for Monterey.


>I cannot add the printer nor print to it from either Mac or iOS devices


If the problem returns, device discovery difficulties with AirPrint could be the reason. In such a case, you may want to try the following procedure (in this order, with these waiting times):

Power off the Wi-Fi router, the printer, the Mac, and all other devices/computers. Wait two to three minutes. Power on the router. Wait two to three minutes. Power on the printer. Wait a minute or two. Power on the Mac. Finally, power on all other devices/computers.


How is your HL-3170CDW connected to the Wi-Fi router? If wirelessly, you could perhaps try to wire the printer by Ethernet to one of the LAN ports instead. AirPrint works with wireless (Wi-Fi) or wired (Ethernet) network connections.

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Monterey and iOS 16 Break Brother Printers and AirPrint?

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