Yeah, my last two printers have just logged into my home network, which is handy, because we can access them through any of the 7 computers we regularly use. (And also the cell phones, although the cellphone client is mediocre, compared to that of the MacOS, Windows, and Linux devices.) I wouldn’t be surprised if my printer has a place to physically connect it. I neither know not care what connector that is, though.
My Xerox color laser has USB, Network (RJ45) and Wireless. It is very handy. I haven’t used the USB in a long time, but I did have someone hook up to it with their laptop about 6 years ago.
Mostly we do network printing.
What prompted this question was my GF buying a new printer. It is wireless but her WiFi password is 13 characters longs (set by the internet provider and she never changed it so it is a random mess of 13 characters).
She lives alone, has one computer and the printer is on her desk about two feet away from the computer.
A cable connection would have been infinitely more simple for her to use. And more reliable. But despite her having a box-o-cables like most of us have she didn’t have that one oddball USB-B cable. So, fart around slowly using the panel on the printer to put in a 13-character password.
It works now but the cable would have been so much easier and better.
YMMV of course (as it seems it does for you…seven…really?..used at the same time or one or another?).
ETA: I too live alone and only have one PC. While I have WiFi in my place I absolutely use a wired connection to my router and printer. That said my PC is connected to my phone and tablet via Bluetooth/WiFi. I am not opposed to wireless. Far from it.
I will never, ever opt for WiFi over wired internet if I can do so though (which is really just my PC…everything else is wireless but they have to be).
I’ve used USB to print in certain situations. Network printing can be flaky, but with a cable connected and the printer driver installed you’ll get your printout. I leave the cable plugged into the printer for “printing emergencies”.
We had a Brother printer that supported ethernet and wifi, but it took me several years to realize that you couldn’t “wake up” the printer across subnets without having the software suite installed. There were no error messages so to my family it just appeared to work intermittently. I broke out the USB cable around midnight when one of my kids couldn’t print out their paper for school the next day.
Our current printer when installed out-of-the-box required 100’s of MBs of software bloat, a Microsoft store account, and then an HP account to print. Fortunately you can still download the software direct from their website.
Printer software has been terrible for 5 decades, but it was made worse when it became an ink / toner business instead of a printer business.
Same here. I just had the cable punt and am seeking to replace it. I can use the one that came with my digital camera but what if that one goes belly up?
How would a printer with a USB-A be an improvement? It’d mean that the user would need a two-ended USB-A cord to connect it, which is very rare, instead of the A-to-B cord that they probably already have lying around.
Mostly two at a time (one by me, one by my husband.) We each have a work laptop and a travel laptop (which sometimes get used at home). I have a primary laptop, and he has a primary desktop. I also have a laptop i use for gaming.
And despite the toxic behaviors of printer manufacturers, printer software keeps getting better. I used to need to download an app from the company. Now they just work through the default printing apps (on all three of MacOS, Windows, and our Linuxes) as well as my employer’s laptop. The scanning function “just works”, too, although i did have to Google to learn that on the Mac i need to use “Preview” to access it.
Yes you do, unfortunately, at least in the past*. They’re colloquially called “suicide cables” because they’re super dangerous. But you can find them in various places, the stereotypical use case is someone puts up Christmas lights and then afterwards realizes they put them up backwards. Cue terrible purchase. Or they’re for generator-powering a home as a lazy (and again, dangerous) solution.
*Surprisingly, Amazon, who doesn’t seem to give much a crap about consumer safety, seems to keep them off as of now.