You know, as much fun as it is to beat up on Microsoft for all its buggy software while applauding Apple for its great user experience, one has to question if this is excuse enough to turn a blind eye at the trendy cool Cupertino-based company for its wrongs. Like Snow Leopard issues, specifically, printing. How does a company have an operating system in beta for over a year release a final product that completely breaks hundreds of printers from working? This makes little sense to me and blows me away that both Apple and HP were surprised by this development.

I was personally effected by the lack of responsiveness to print jobs on my HP LaserJet 3600n. There I was, printing just dandy in Leopard the Thursday night before I purchased Snow Leopard. Friday afternoon comes and the fairly fast completed upgraded puts me in front of a printer queue that states “Connected…” and not much more. After canceling my print job, deleting the printer, rebooting, and re-installing, the same issue occurred. This time I had patience and low and behold, three minutes later, the printer started printing! I printed another test. Again, it took 3 minutes. Every job took 3 minutes from the time it left my Mac (or did it really leave it?) After much investigation, I discovered I wasn’t alone as IT World well documented. Apple’s web site had nothing to offer other than others with the same issue posting pleas of help.

Then, HP and Apple admitted there was an issue and released an updated drive raising many “dead” and once unsupported printers back to print heaven. My 3600n, however, was not one of them. Several minutes still passed between my mouse click on the Print button and the actual print happening. More searching on the web for an answer was fruitless, forgive the pun, for my Apple. In desperation, I contacted Apple Care and even the Level 2 tech had no clue what was wrong.

Well, I went back to an old friend. Back in my OS X 10.3 days, I was forced to use open source drivers for my older HP DeskJet and once again, on a hunch, I went back to the world of better code. Guess what? Because of macosx/hpijs, I can once again print in a heartbeat.

So what’s it all mean? HP has crappy drivers and Apple did a poor job of beta testing. Dude, I’m not the only one with an HP 3600n out there. Maybe Apple needs to be less concerned about secrets and surprise and make a more general beta like Microsoft did for Windows 7. If you’re wondering, ya, my HP 3600n works fine with Microsoft’s just released OS update.

3 Responses to “What Gives With Apple and HPs Broken Snow Leopard Printer Support and How You Can Fix Your Issues?”

1. Russ Says:
   October 28th, 2009 at 18:52

   Why should Apple get the blame for a faulty HP driver. How are the drivers for all other printer manufacturers working? If they all work well, I think the faulty driver is HP’s responsibility. If Apple would not supply HP with the beta software I would agree that this is Apple’s issue. Otherwise, put the responsibility where it lies – HP.

2. Sven Rafferty Says:
   October 28th, 2009 at 19:05

   True, in most cases, but this is Apple we’re talking about. You know, the ultra-control company that makes people sign NDAs when they meet Steve Jobs for a coffee and won’t let products like Firefox on their phones because of “duplicated” applications. No, you can’t have it both ways. Either Apple loosens its grip and lets more beta testing happen, so you know, people like you and I can catch issues, or take the blame as all good leaders do.

3. Chris Maxcer Says:
   November 17th, 2009 at 6:50

   Hey Sven!
   I too had printer problems with my upgrade to Snow Leopard. For a while there, almost made me wish I had installed all the printer drivers Apple had rather than saving the disk space. For my HP 5510 all-in-one, I had to reinstall the latest software package for it. Found it easily enough from hp.com. Still, kind of irritating. For another older HP inkjet printer on a different MacBook, I also used non-HP print drivers to get it working.

   All told, for both MacBooks, I lost 45 minutes or so. For me, I was just surprised it at the issues, because, like you said, we are talking about Apple here.