Quote:
Originally Posted by nikkie
ALL the drivers (for every printer) are 3GB. Because they don't know what sort of printer you have, OSX ships all of them rather than have people download their own and install them themselves.
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yeah. apple bundles in all those drivers for printers that are available at the time that version of OS X is released. they rarely issue updates for them in the meantime. every printer out there comes with a driver CD or tells you where to download it.
there's also quite a bit to printing besides a driver. there's a whole printer imaging system that needs to be built into the OS. i'm guessing none of that is in place right now. the driver is just for the imaging system to talk to the printer. apple did purchase CUPS a few years back, and it's the foundation for the printing system in OS X, but they'd have to port it over to the iPhone OS as well. and, this printing system is going to take up space too.
so we have a few issues here.
1. port over CUPS to the iPhone OS, or write something new from scratch
2. get printer manufactuers to support yet another platform (when they don't even support popular ones like linux) and code up drivers for that platform
3. build some sort of driver management system into the iPhone OS (for installing new drivers, removing old ones and updating out of date drivers)
4. a whole set of APIs for app developers to use for printing
5. printer drivers are going to eat up yet more space in the iPhone/iPad. do you really want to give up 3G out of your 16 for printer drivers?
very few other phones support direct printing by the way.
apple ignoring printing on the device itself and making you print from the desktop, not a bad policy for them.. saves money, development costs, device resources (memory, cpu). for how infrequently people would print anyway, and besides, this is meant to be a mobile OS, not a desktop OS.
i wouldn't hold my breath for printing on the ipad any time soon. if it were to be built into 4.x jobs would have announced it last week.