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.
There’s some standalone dual-band access points on sale this weekend for <$40 right now which would solve your problem.
Don't be. A comprehensive list of our WiFi-capable devices are two smartphone models, the printer, and two laptops that are plugged in to wired connections.
Edit: Forgot about the two wireless work laptops.
For our purposes the 10 foot USB cable solves the problem fine.
Since Wifi on the printer was not in use at this point, it was then possible to simultaneously connect an additional wireless PC when needed, directly to the printer using the printer's Wifi-Direct alternative.
Interestingly, the printer was connected to the USB socket of a Windows XP client, but I had also ended up adding some Windows 8, 10, & 11 PC's to the network through time.
IT was not optimistic since the new printers have no drivers for Windows XP, plus this was a discontinued model havng no drivers newer than Windows 8 either.
Windows 7 drivers worked fine for XP, Windows 8 drivers worked for Windows 10, so everything was good.
When Windows 11 came out, there was a notice on the Brother website advising that you would need to wait over 30 days before they would be posting compatible drivers.
When they did post the W11 drivers, they were the exact same files that had already been released for W10 years earlier. Apparently the factory only needed to confirm there were no show-stoppers when installed in W11, with no modification of the drivers needed.