What the fuck is wrong with people? It's been common knowledge that hp is trash for decades now. The whole idea of capitalism is that the bad products fail when customers go to the competitors who do a better job, but hp is not a monopoly and there are better competitors that exist, but people keep in buying HP because frankly, they are too fucking stupid. Capitalism is a lie because consumers are too stupid to pick the best products.
The average person is not invested into printers and just needs a printer to occasionally print something. It's not something they know a lot about and in the store they see a cheap printer from a well known brand that gave them good experiences with other products. It makes total sense for them to buy it. I'm sure they will know what products/brands to avoid in other areas that are unknown to you.
To add to yours, when the person who isn’t up on printers goes to a store like walmart that has 4 different HP models on the shelf ranging from $40 to $90, one cannon for $80, and one brother for $120, they will be much more apt to get the HP because they just don’t know.
I don't have any experience with their laptops, but they pissed me off so much with their printers that I've written off their entire brand. Even if their other stuff is really good, I'm fine with writing them off entirely just out of spite.
Honestly the laptops are pretty good in my opinion. My HP pavillion laptop had space to upgrade RAM, install new hard drives and plenty of ports. But I still agree with you that the printers are complete rubbish.
The simplest proof that the Homo Economicus human model used in the mathematical models that justify Free Market Theory is complete total bollocks is that the Marketing that has no mention of the qualities of the product whatsoever, actually works (perfumes and cars are prime examples but there are tons of examples for consumer tech also).
That and some people from Behavioural Economics (the only part of that domain which is actually scientific) have shown with various experiments that there are lots of ways in which people are not rational in their economic decisions, hence not at all the "pure personal upside maximizer" which is the Homo Economicus model.
People sticking to a well-known name such as HP is probably down to the effect of familiarity (at times known as "name recognition") - maybe one of the biggest irrationalities in human economic behaviour and one of the pathways most commonly exploited by marketing.
And for example, the products that sell the most on amazon are not the best products, they're the ones that give amazon the biggest advertising budget.
Most people just buy a printer, they're not doing research on the subject. And if they're not using computers day to day, or for work, they're even less likely to know what shit hp is up to.
If you only print something once every couple of months I only need a cheap printer and dont care if the ink is a bit more expensice since I never use it. Though I admit my blood pressure always rises trying to get the thing to work
Ink jets burn ink even if you dont print anything, with their periodic "cleaning cycles". That or their nozzles jam if you dont print often enough. They can make really high quality prints, but I'd never buy one again. Lasers can sit for months and they still pop out perfect prints every time.
I bought a brother laser printer and have had no issues with it, and I'm still using the original toner years and hundreds of pages later. They're more expensive up front but they're not that much more expensive. The entry level brother laser printer is only ~$100, and compared to HP, by the time you buy 2 ink cartridges you'll have lost any savings you made on the printer itself. It is absolutely not cheaper to buy HP. If I'd have done that I'd have spent more on HP ink alone by now than the entire brother printer which I haven't had to replace the toner for even though the one it's sold with isn't totally full.