Big chink in the Snow Leopard armor: network printing is more or less gone. Apple finally killed off AppleTalk, which is what a lot of network printers depend on. Despite Apple’s claims that printing is now “easier” (USB printing was already dead simple, couldn’t get any easier), network printing is now pretty much decimated, requiring workarounds until the printer manufacturers get around to updating the Mac OS software and firmware–which usually means it’ll be a few years before it all gets back to being accessible again.

Before Snow Leopard, my Mac could easily detect the network printers even without any drivers, and the Add Printer software could easily pick up the drivers to allow detailed use of the advance printer features. Now? The printers simply don’t show up at all, and having the drivers installed won’t help even a bit (the drivers only make it possible to finely control the printer, and have nothing to do with detecting them in the first place).

Apple tech support was singularly un-useful, claiming no knowledge of how to cope with the issue (BIG oversight–they should have known that banishing AppleTalk would cause lots of problems with network printing), and the best they could do was (a) tell me to transfer files to a computer that could print, and (b) suggest that it was a problem for the printer manufacturers and that Apple didn’t have anything to do with it. That’s unacceptable: the printer makers did not change anything, Apple did. At the very least they could arrange an easily accessible suggestion for a workaround.

What worked for me: I happened to have my old Powerbook handy, and it could still see the printer. So I set that up and activated Printer Sharing. My Macbook Pro was then able to print by doing it through the older computer. A kludge (the printing is much slower than before), but it works for now. I’ll have to see if I can get shared printing from any office Windows boxes, but the downside is that the sharing computer has to always be turned on.