I think it depends on the brand of printers you buy. I bought a Brother and had trouble getting AirPrint to work. Only to find out after a year that there was an update of the firmware I had not installed, which had been available all along, that fixed the AirPrint issue immediately.
Just last week there was a news story about brother making a firmware update to "improve print quality" which of course meant refusing to print without "authentic" brother ink
I like Rossmann and watch his YouTube stuff regularly, he's a great advocate for Right-to-Repair, etc. It'll be interesting to see if he's correct on this one as it seems he got the info secondhand. Nothing wrong with that so long as the source is reliable (one can't do everything).
What's good about this story is that it's now got traction, Brother is on the record denying the claim and with a heap of Brother printers in the field we'll soon know one way or other.
From my experience Brother is definitely the best of a bad lot. Also, I've had no problems with 3rd party cartridges.
I agree, whilst HP leads the disreputable pack and second is Canon I've just had major poblems with Epson—cartridges not† being empty and the printer refusing to print, or refusing to print in B&W when a color cartridge is empty. I even had to exchange a printer and upgrade it for a more expensive one because it jammed paper—and even then the replacement had to be exchanged because of a fault (a thin black line running vertically down the page that couldn't be eliminated).
I've now a collection of partly-used and new cartridges from the first printer that I cannot use as they don't fit the replacement model. This whole system of forever changing cartridges from one model to the next is a fucking scam.
Does anyone know of say a source of firmware hacks that can override this crap?
† I now weigh cartilages and mark their weight in grams before using them, I then do the same when 'empty' which doesn't necessarily mean they're actually empty—which I determine by opening them. Doing this is also a sure way of determining the cost of the ink which where I am works out to be over $2,000/litre.
Please just stop buying HP and Canon printers!