I have a different printing problem! On my fancy new McBook Pro 2023, from any program (Word, Excel, mail, text edit) when I give the print command, the ready light on my printer blinks a few times and then quits. I have down loaded the latest printer file from Brother, but no deal. So I take my document to my 2012 McBook pro and print from there! It is a real pain in the behind!
I took it to the genius bar at the local Apple store but they either did not know or did not care.
What Brother printer?
Brother HL-L2320D series; but, as I said, from my 2012 McBookPro it prints just fine.
Brother doesn’t list that printer as compatible with macOS Sonoma. They are the ones that are going to provide a driver for macOS - which is why the rep at the Genius Bar may have limited knowledge about it.
The printer doesn’t appear to support AirPrint. They don’t even list a driver for installation for anything above Catalina. It’s going to be iffy to see if the Brother driver you download for Catalina will work on an Apple Silicon Mac running Sonoma.
One thought, though. The driver is almost certainly Intel code. Do you have Rosetta 2 installed on your Mac?
Are you sure? When I went to the Brother downloads page, macOS 14 is on the list of OS’s.
When you select it, the subsequent page doesn’t list a drive, but does reference their iPrint&Scan app from the App Store. (This is the case for all versions of macOS 11 through 14
I didn’t see any driver download links, but after a bit of browsing Brother’s site and comparing it against my own experience (with a Brother HL-L3270CDW), it appears that either a driver is being auto-installed by macOS or it is an AirPrint printer (even if it’s connected via Ethernet).
That having been said, if macOS doesn’t have a built-in driver, the spec sheet says it support PCL6. So if nothing else works, you should be able to use a generic PCL6 driver.
Perhaps, but it may also be a platform-independent PPD file or a PCL equivalent.
Given the fact that most printers these days are either PostScript or PCL, it makes sense that Apple may be supplying a small number of generic drivers, along with a file describing the printer’s unique features (e.g. number of paper trays, sizes, color capability, duplexer, etc.) And it may even be possible to query this data directly from the printer (I think that’s one of the key pieces of the AirPrint tech).
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I have no trouble printing on my Brother HL-L2320D printer from my M1 MacMini and from my MacBook Air (2020) Intel.
Your printer has AirPrint/IPP driverless printing support. That would explain why a “driver” was auto-installed. The HL-L2320 doesn’t - according to Brother it has WiFI support, but no IPP/AirPrint support. Which I’ve found means it needs a driver - and Apple’s no longer providing drivers for macOS, instead depending on the printer manufacturer.
Even though the compatibility list says that there’s Sonoma support, there’s no driver listed - only the Brother iPrint & Scan app, which is really a warmed-over iDevice app and not a Mac printer driver.
Agreed that for the most part the AirPrint/IPP printing technology relies on the device being able to provide a PPD file or some other printer driver thingy. But back to my original point, that particular printer has no IPP or AirPrint support built-in.
I’m still thinking that some CUPS filter that printer needs isn’t in the stock macOS CUPS system, and Apple is no longer providing traditional drivers for macOS. If the printer is going to work, the driver probably needs to be provided by a Brother. But the last version of the driver package Brother has is for Catalina. It’s possible that the components in that driver might work under Apple Silicon Macs if Rosetta is installed.
That’s interesting. How is that printer configured and what driver is it using? In particular, on the M1 Mac mini, where was the driver installed from?