In the end it somewhat boils down to pure greed. Instead of stabilizing production costs and/or reusing generic components to ease up manufacturing and repair - HP, Epson, Canon, Dell, Samsung, Kyocera and others try to hype their products with whatever tech stack is currently in trend. "growth hacking" is literally their job description.
There eventually will be a ChatGPT printer on the market. It's inevitable due to what kind of people manage a printer business: It's not the type of people that know how to build printers anymore.
I unfortunately discovered that my brand new Brother printer can only communicate over 2.4 GHz wifi, which conflicts with the 5 GHz my phone requires (my router can only do one at a time, and there's no way I'm switching as needed). So USB it is.
It's one of their cheapest inkjets (MFC-1010DW), but I selected it for features more than price. Wish I had read the documentation. I would have purchased the next model up.
Nicely compact compared to the ~10 year old Canon that died recently.
That's abysmal! Every 5GHz Wifi AP I've ever come across lets you run both PHYs at the same time.
Please, on my behalf, sternly talk down to your router.
Even ignoring the massive issue of device compatibility: 5GHz and its protocols do not have anywhere the range and penetrating power of 2.4GHz. When I walk outside my house I can keep watching videos, but my laptop does this by transitioning to the 2GHz radio link modes.