Printer compatibility used to mean hunting for a macOS driver and hoping the manufacturer had updated it for the version you were on. It does not any more, and the thing that replaced it is a single line on the specification sheet.
How we picked
The test was whether AirPrint is named on the manufacturer’s own product page for that specific model. Not the brand, not a retailer listing, not an inference from another model in the range. Where a page named Mopria and the vendor app but not AirPrint, we have said exactly that rather than rounding it up.
After that, the ordinary filters: the bottle family, because that decides the cost per page, then auto duplex, a document feeder and a wired port.
What AirPrint means on a Mac
Apple describes AirPrint as producing full-quality printed output from an iPhone, iPad, Mac or Apple Vision Pro without needing to download or install drivers, and states that to use an AirPrint-enabled printer you do not need to install additional drivers or other software. The published requirement is that your device is connected to the same Wi-Fi network as the printer. Apple Support.
In practice that turns buying a printer for a Mac into one question: is AirPrint on this model. If it is, you add the printer in System Settings and print. If it is not, you are relying on the manufacturer’s software, and that is a different kind of purchase.
Tank or laser, for a Mac?
The platform does not change the economics, only the compatibility question. A refillable tank printer costs about 0.4 of a cent a black page and 1.1 cents a color page; a mono laser is about 3.3 cents and does no color at all.
Buy the tank printer if you print color, or more than about forty pages a month of anything. Buy a laser if the machine will sit untouched for weeks between jobs, because toner cannot dry out and ink can. The laser printers for a Mac, where Brother states plainly that Mac printer drivers are not provided and macOS printing goes through AirPrint.
The part that actually goes wrong
Nearly every “my Mac cannot see the printer” problem is a network problem wearing a printer costume. Apple’s stated requirement is the same Wi-Fi network, and modern routers are unusually good at quietly breaking that.
- A guest network is a different network as far as discovery is concerned. Check which one the Mac is on.
- If your router publishes 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz under separate names, put the Mac and the printer on the same one.
- Client isolation, sometimes called AP isolation, stops devices seeing each other. It stops printing too.
Where a printer offers Ethernet — the ET-4950 among these — using it removes all three possibilities at once.
What these cost to run
Nothing about a Mac changes the supply cost, which is the only figure that compounds. At 100 pages a month, three years of black ink is about $14 on 522 and $12 on 502. Those are the numbers worth comparing between these machines; the AirPrint line simply decides whether the printer is a candidate at all.