I have a Brother laser printer/scanner combo that I bought 8 years ago, I actually wish it broke down so I could replace it with something that supports AirPrint without feeling bad about throwing out perfectly good hardware

Then don't! Plug it to a Pi or something like that and turn it into an AirPrint server, which is (an extension of) IPP plus Bonjour for discovery.

Just get a raspberry pi, the cheapest will do, and you now have Airprint.

Same here.

The android brother plug in sucks and I wish google cloud print was still around. I tried mobility print but it didn't quite work as expected and decided to just stick to printing from my laptop.

I thought that too, but once I had access to AirPrint I realized I have never needed to print from my phone, or even barely ever from my laptop.

Hook it up to a Raspberry Pi and expose the printer over network

There you go, DIY AirPrint

I tried this with a Brother HL-L23200 printer and an old raspberry pi, and couldn't get it to work. Seemed like something in the stack was OOM'ing - it worked fine for just a page or two, but when I tried to print a longer document it would crap out. I gave up and now on the rare occasion when I need to print something I carry my laptop over and physically plug in the USB cord like a neanderthal.

This! inkjets printers are a horrible industry, but office printers need to be stable and work. I got a brother black and white laser printer designed for an office on 'Prime Day" years ago and it's never failed me.

I’ve stayed away from inkjets since the mid 90s. I bought a then “affordable” $1000 LaserWriter LS/300.

I had a Samsung CLP-315W that didn't work with original replacement toners that I kept in a cupboard for a couple of years, since I bought them during a sale.

I'm guessing that either one of their firmware updates broke their chip DRM recognition, or the chips that were in my original toners somehow corroded due to age.

Even for laser printers, it looks like it will be compatibles and refills for me moving forward.

Bought mine twenty years ago, that's when the price drop happened, when consumer-priced laser printers started to become a thing. Never looked back. Some years ago the paper drive started having trouble getting traction on the next page (probably some plastic springs losing their springyness?), but that's perfectly acceptable for a dozen pages a year.

My HP color laser died before the first set of toner cartridges ran out. The fake paper jam error