Commercial Printer Brand That Works Best for Mac

Any printer mentioned in this Apple document will work with Macs and the current systems: About AirPrint - Apple Support

I'm not sure this is the source for the answers you seek, but I don't know where to go to get those answers, either.

I don't know that anybody here can tell you which is best short of their own anecdotes. Unless they've painstakingly gathered all of the reports here and created some data table to analyze, it is just their opinion of one or two products. Even armed with that data, you'd have to know the customer base for that product since people that don't have any problems don't post here. The volume of posts may only be indicative of market share.

Based solely on brand, you can have myriad differences in performance, too. HP, over its lifetime, has made products that only worked in certain environments. With a large array of models, you could have different results all across the brand. So, people that report they have had good success with company X may be of little value because the model they bought did work great, but you can't buy that model anymore. And, whatever great support they had may not exist anymore.

Based on what I can remember of things posted here, Brother seems to get a good review, and I don't see a lot of reports of problems with them. I don't own one, though. Might be my next purchase after my Epson Stylus NX530 dies or they stop making ink. It's been running flawlessly since at least OS X 10.6, and you can still download drivers for it. They do have business-class printers, but they are all inkjet, I believe.

I don't think I have seen many reports on Konica or Sharp, here. But, unless it was a generic printer post, I wouldn't have looked at it as I don't own either of those products. Also, the market for those is likely not as big as the other consumer products, so you're not going to see as many reports about them just based on the user base. I've seen lots of posts on Canon, but I don't know if those skewed towards printer issues or scanner issues--most likely scanners.

I can't imagine any company providing a warranty that covered "accidents." You can probably buy a rider from your insurance company to cover such a thing, but the manufacturer is not going to take that risk.

Hard to say until you define what is "better" or "best" for you. Any brand name printer will work. You need to define what is "best" for you. Do you need the printer to be color, handle card stock, be laser, inkjet, photo, two sided printing, paper handling, paper size, etc. We have no idea what will work best for you.

Our organization used HP LaserJets almost exclusively for many years as they were a really good printer, but once HP started making the printers in China about 10 or 15 years ago their quality dropped drastically. HP is also notorious for releasing printer firmware updates that suddenly prevent the printer from working with third party ink cartridges which is a really dirty trick. Plus HP LaserJets even back in the day tended to have a lot of firmware & driver issues with macOS when printing some PDF files or using some fonts usually resulting in the printer crashing & requiring a hard power cycle. Good luck getting HP to help you if you have an Apple only printing issue (they have at most one guy in the back room supporting Macs).

I've tried a couple Brother B&W Laser printers which have worked well. Plus Brother printers tend to use the same toner cartridge among multiple model printers unlike HP which now tends to have a unique cartridge for each new model.

I have a LaserJet P2035Pn that works with 3rd party toner cartridges just fine.

HWTech wrote:

HP is also notorious for releasing printer firmware updates that suddenly prevent the printer from working with third party ink cartridges which is a really dirty trick.

We've had excellent service with the P2035Pn B/W laser printer and all, except for the cartridge that came with it, with 3rd party cartridges.

Contrary to what others have said, our enterprise is all HP printers and our Macs work just fine with them with zero issues. I use an HP laserjet/scanner at home and it too has never given me problems.

Old Toad wrote:

I have a LaserJet P2035Pn that works with 3rd party toner cartridges just fine.

HWTech wrote:

HP is also notorious for releasing printer firmware updates that suddenly prevent the printer from working with third party ink cartridges which is a really dirty trick.

We've had excellent service with the P2035Pn B/W laser printer and all, except for the cartridge that came with it, with 3rd party cartridges.

They haven't done it to all their printers, nor do they do it all the time. Every once in a while I see a news report where another new firmware update has blocked the use of third party cartridges. If you don't update the printer's firmware you would not see the issue.

I was trying to find references to the issue from a tech site, but most of the articles mainly mention inkjets, but I do know that HP has blocked third party toner cartridges after updating printer firmware. I did find this reference to a class action lawsuit for this problem regarding inkjets and laserjets:

https://www.classaction.org/news/class-action-claims-hp-printer-firmware-update-blocked-use-of-third-party-ink-toner-cartridges

There are many printers because there are many differing requirements, budgets, printer duty cycles, etc:

Which Printer Should I Buy? - Apple Community

Bearing in mind that things may change if you upgrade to Monterey this article looks at compatibility with Big Sur.

https://www.printerbase.co.uk/news/big-sur-compatible-printers/

Monterey also supports AirPrint so there's little danger there.

That's good to know. Now that my wife has retired from teaching we don't use the HP as much so, hopefully, it'll last longer than we will.