My Mac Pro cannot find my HP Printer but my iphone can. And so can my wife's Mac Pro! So what have I got wrong on my Mac?

Many printer makers seem to think its is a really "cute trick" to allow your phone to print directly to the Printer. To that end, their default is to turn the Printer into its own Base Station. In a crowded area, this mucks up the Wi-Fi for everyone, and does not work well, and does not allow printing from your Home Network.

So the biggest thing you have to overcome is the maker's zeal for this "cute trick" and set your printer up "the right way" so that it can be used by all devices on your Network.

The correct way is to set it up as a device on your Wi-Fi network, not to start a new network.

To do this the Printer needs to know three things:

1) what network-name is it supposed to join

2) what is the password to get on that network

3) how is it supposed to get an IP address (DHCP or manual at a specified address)

without all three of these, it can't join your home network, so it can't be 'discovered'.

There are basically two ways to get these into the Printer:

a) fat-finger it in through the printer's "front panel"

b) connect using a USB cable first, tell it the stuff, then disconnect the cable

There is one more way, but it is unbearably inconvenient. Leave the USB cable connected and the computer powered on at all times, and print over the network to a queue on the connected computer.

Hello,

Please verify that your HP printer and Mac Pro are connected to the same WiFi network. If you are unable to use the Mac Pro on the same WiFi network then try using the included USB lead to connect the Mac Pro directly to the printer.