This is the third and final part of my odyssey in getting two HP LaserJet printers — one old, and one very old — to print from a modern Mac over the network.
In the first part, a ten-year old printer, belonging to “Bill,” had a bizarre “Encryption credentials expired” message when trying to print; resolving it required much more in the way of tech skills than either HP or Apple has a right to reasonably expect from their users. (But, I guess that’s why I’ve got a business.)
In the second part, a twenty-six year old model, belonging to “Diane,” which had been chugging along, became inaccessible on the network, which turned out to be due to a tricky network situation, in which it was using the same network address as another device — challenging Verizon router configuration changes were required to resolve that one.
Well, that wasn’t the end of the story for Diane; she still couldn’t print from her new Mac. This is really the second (and last) chapter of the saga of her twenty-six year old HP LaserJet 4000N, a real tank of a printer. And it has a pretty hilarious conclusion.
I’d gotten the printer back on the network — hooray — and if it were a current model, that would be the end of that, because Apple’s AirPrint technology replaces the need for printer drivers. But, old printers don’t have AirPrint. So I figured it was just a question of installing the printer drivers, and off we’d go. Bill’s computer was running a recent version of macOS, and it was able to print to this ancient beast, so how hard could it be?
The answer: pretty hard! Of course it wasn’t easy. When is it ever?
The issue was: HP didn’t have the driver software on its website, not because the printer was too old, but because this printer was of an era in which Apple provided the drivers themselves, presumably in an effort to offer a seamless experience in which your Mac would just go fetch the printer drivers it needed the first time it needed to print to a particular model. And it was probably beneficial to printer vendors as well, who were, especially in the late 90’s and early 2000’s, not terribly interested in providing support to Mac users.
Apple still makes the drivers available for download on its website. The link is here. (If Apple ever takes down that page, try this link.) Included are drivers for quite a lot of HP printer models from the 90s and 2000s, and maybe even early 2010s.
However: that download page says, “Not compatible with macOS v12 [Monterey] and newer.” Oh, really? Well, Bill’s running macOS 12 Monterey, and he’s got the printer drivers running fine, and this is the only place they could have come from.
I didn’t buy it. It made no sense; there are almost no compatibility issues running something on macOS 12 which runs fine on macOS 11 Big Sur (unlike times in the past, like when upgrading from macOS 10.14 Mojave to macOS 10.15 Catalina broke a ton of older software).
And I was right, as it turned out. The drivers install fine on anything up to the highest version of macOS Sonoma 14. I confirmed this out by poking around in the installer and finding where it checks for the operating system version. The info download page is wrong! (I submitted a correction; I wonder if anyone will read it.)
But Diane was on macOS 15 Sequoia. And when I tried to run the installer, I got this:
Oh, joy. The irony is that this is poorly coded. Diane was running 15.0.1. But, if Diane had been running the very first version of Sequoia, 15.0…these drivers actually would have installed, and I never would have discovered this. And then she could have just updated macOS. But I was not going to roll her back to 15.0.0 just for a printer driver. I wanted to just tweak the installer to increase the macOS version number it allows. There ain’t nothing in macOS 15 Sequoia that should prevent this old crud from running if it ran in macOS 14 Sonoma.
Fortunately, the internet is full of helpful people, and I found this post, which appears to be derived from, or at least similar to, this one.
The post had a script that does exactly what I wanted — it increases the allowed macOS version within the HP printer drivers installer. I had to modify the script to get it to work. (I later found an up-to-date version here, which requires no modification for Sequoia.)
If you’re uncomfortable with using Terminal, this page at iFixit has a good step by step. The download link in its very first step no longer works — just use the first link in this post — but otherwise, it’s accurate.
It installed! I was able to see Diane’s printer on the network (as I described in my previous post about this), and then I was able to get the drivers installed, and it printed. Eff yeah.
Hilarious epilogue/coda: A mechanical piece of the printer broke off the very next day, and it no longer works, after a stalwart 26 years. Bill and Diane already had their other, newer, laser printer, so they’re just gonna use that, and toss the old beast. Irony abounds!
Image: From the movie Office Space