I’m late to this topic and most of the technical discussion about circuit breakers and USP issues are way over my knowledge set, but I did want to weigh in on Brother printers and Apple devices, as I’ve been using both together for a long time. My Brother B&W laser printer is an HL-L6200DW and my Brother color printer-(11"x17") scanner-fax(!) combo is a MFC-J6920DW.
My take on Brother printers is that if you get a good one (not always a slam-dunk), they last for years and deliver high quality crisp printing. If you want to gauge the age of my Brother involvement, I was first blown away by a Brother printer demonstration at a MacExpo in San Francisco, back when those were still a thing, perhaps back in the '90s? That sucker lasted forever and is still my favorite laser printer of all time.
However, I eventually had to replace it, as it finally began to wear out, perhaps in the printer assembly. By the time I went to buy a new laser printer, the new Brother I ordered – the aforesaid HL-L6200DW – clearly was of lower quality. The nexus of problems seemed to be the rubber rollers which grabbed and ran the paper through the printing assembly. I had way too many printed pages come out with paper creases, making me have to re-print new pages, which was just not acceptable.
Brother’s first response to this issue was to refer me to a local company that supposedly fixed Brother printers. But it soon became clear that they were not up to the task, and I finally had to ship my “old” (new) HL-L6200DW back to Brother, to have them send me a new replacement. The replacement was much better, but not perfect, and to this day, I still have to assume that the first page of a multi-page document will come out with a crease on the page.
As for the multi-function MFC-J6920DW printer, which I wanted mainly for the capacity to scan tabloid-sized pages and over-size art, the scanning was good enough, but the cost of the color ink cartridges was sky-high. My use of the color printing was very occasional, but the printer’s method for keeping its inkjets unclogged was to do an inkjet cleaning daily, which dependably used up four ink cartridges a year, just in cleaning. I wasn’t unusual for me to print a few photos and a couple dozen color Christmas letters in the course of a year and watch the rest of the $150 worth of ink drain away in daily ink-jet cleaning.
I don’t think this sleazy scheme of using up ink is unique to Brother. It has been many years since it became clear that the profit in printers (laser or ink-jet) was not from the printers themselves but from the ink. The final insult was that Brother’s color inks were not true, crisp, four-color inks (traditionally cyan-magenta-yellow-black) but muddy colors that gave sub-par results when mixed together.
My final conclusion? No more Brother printers for me, after the ones I own wear out. I’ve given up on the MFC-J6920DW as a printer, and rely on Apple’s OS built-in printer drivers to continue to squeeze scans out of its over-sized capacity. Color Xmas cards? Meh. Color photo prints? Sending a digital jpeg suffices. Welcome to the future.