'Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription' says HP CEO gunning for 2024's Worst Person of the Year award | Not satisfied with merely bricking printers, HP now wants to own them al...
Not satisfied with merely bricking printers, HP now wants to own them all forever!
'Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription' says HP CEO gunning for 2024's Worst Person of the Year award | Not satisfied with merely bricking printers, HP now wants to own them al...::It was only the other day we reported how HP has been slapped with a lawsuit in response to measures that disable its printers when fitted with a third-party ink cartridge. Now the company's CEO,
I have a Brother laserjet I got on Amazon for $70 10 years ago. I print on it occasionally, and it always works. That thing has never needed new toner. It never jams. It just keeps going. Highly recommend finding a basic laserjet model from that brand.
Companies can change. I have a HP LaserJet 6P that I use with a LPT-to-USB adapter. That thing still works fine. From that anecdote I could also highly recommend HP. But that printer is now 25 years old or so and the company changed a lot since then.
Brother could have changed in those 10 years. Or it could change in 10 more years.
Employee asks for toner for an aging HP Laserjet printer since it’s out. I look it up and it’s $198 for black (it’s not a color laser). I immediately looked up a Brother laser with an ADF scanner/copier and it was $199. High Yield Toner is $15 without a chip from a reputable 3rd party. Office is getting a new Brother printer delivered tomorrow and it’ll work 100x better.
HP, this is how you kill your printer division. Short sighted idiots.
Legit question like I bought an Epson tank printer. I don't use cartridges. I don't use anything with HP on it right? So if they decide that they want to screw you over but they're not a monopoly, wouldn't we just go elsewhere? How is this a win for them? I just feel like they're digging a hole for themselves
Epson is only marginally better with the Ecotank, the components are dated to fail within 2 years after the warranty. That being said, they're second best to Brother because they actually price ink fairly.
I’m guessing he’s leaning on brand power and the exec thinks he can convince the shareholders because subscription is guaranteed income. He’s probably assuming the other big printer companies will follow suit and offer the same kind of service. In the end it won’t last and it will kill their printer business once everyone wises up to the fact that there is, at least, one better alternative. My office staff now won’t buy anything else they’ve been so impressed with the reliability and ease of use of the Brother I got a month ago to start replacing their old equipment. Word of mouth and shared experiences are still very much alive, and that’s his misstep.
Of course, he probably doesn’t care since he has a golden parachute and this will keep making him money in the short term.
High Yield Toner is $15 without a chip from a reputable 3rd party.
What are some reputable toner companies? I just ordered some E-Z Ink brand toner for my Brother printer, and I'd like to know if I should cancel it and go with a different brand instead.
You can do even better buying plain old used instead of refurbished.
I got a pair of MFC-9340CDWs -- with duplex and color -- off Craigslist for like $50 each a couple of years ago (one to use, and one as a spare). Even if I have to buy a new fuser relatively soon because the ones in both of them are almost worn out, it's still an incredible deal.
Why would anyone buy such a printer? You could just go to a print shop at that point. Though honestly that’s already what I do so maybe it’s for the hikikomori or something. I don’t know why the home printer still exists in this day and age.
If I'm expected to pay a subscription that means every single aspect of the experience has to be outsourced to HP. And I'm including set up, cleaning and maintenance, consumables, and sending a man out to clear my paper jams for me, too. That's how it works at the print shop -- I put in money, they hand me prints completed to my specifications. Whatever happens in between those two events is not my problem.
But of course that won't be the case, so they can fuck off.
This is relatively common in the office world. Lease the copier/printer and it comes with free maintenance or replacement. Complete overkill for home printers though.
I have a few edge cases where a printer is nice to have and I don't need the quality of a print shop, I find proofreading documents to be a lot easier on a physical paper easier than a screen and I can mark changes, and when I'm playing TTRPGs I like to have a printout of my map with enemy locations and notes so that I can place everything on my battle mat the way I intended to without messing with tablets, phones or laptops.
Even with the time it takes for me to drive to the nearest Staples and have them print it (all in all probably an hour long trip), having a cheap printer on hand saves the time and money spent getting a printout after like 2 printouts.
At the end lf the day it's not about the usefulness or obsolescence of the printer. It's about the bullshit subscription services have unnecessarily wormed their way into every aspect of our lives. If I buy something, it's mine, I own it, nobody else should be able to tell me what to do with it, beyond things that are already illegal.
I still wouldn't take it on a subscription basis. My last home Laser lasted me ~15 years till the drivers just weren't there anymore and I was mostly using it as a stand to hold other crap on top of it.
Well, crafts is why I just bought my first 2 inkjets in probably 20 years. Epson Ecotanks - actually make inkjet reasonable. I use it to do prints for heat transfer and for dye sublimation.
Then there's the patterns for people who crochet or knit.
And occasionally forms - like passport renewal forms you have to mail in still for some reason, and you live a 30 minute drive from a printshop so having a B&W laser helps.
That said, I haven't recommended an HP since the 1990s. There's nothing I'm aware of they do better than brother in laser or epson in inkjet for home use (or Xerox in the business market).
"don’t know why the home printer still exists in this day and age"
Really? You are having a tough time imagining why people may want to print things on paper in their homes?
I guess you are not alone because the printzone has a page dedicated to education on this topic.
Because I need to print at home, that's why it exists.
What an ignorant take. There are people who's life functions differently than yours.
I just replaced my 1996 Lexmark laser. I don't recall ever replacing the toner, perhaps once. It just worked, for 27 years, and I can probably fix it.
I now have a newer wifi b/w laser. Why should I go somewhere to print something? It would take a minimum of 30 minutes to do so, and cost $2-$3. My time is worth more than wasting it on getting something printed.
If he hasn't been scared by Xerox, Brother, and Epson, he won't be scared by a FLOSS printer. At this point, the only people who buy HP printers are those who don't even google it and remember hearing the laserjets were good circa 1995.
Keep waiting on open source printers. They are not easy. Even 300dpi monochrome takes a lot of precision, and that's not particularly impressive. Get even smaller and add color mixing? No.
Open source plotter, OTOH, could happen. I think there are some projects out there already.
OkiData makes good business class printers too. The upfront cost is high, but the cost per page is low, so if you're printing high volume then it's cheaper overall.
I wouldn't ever count a Bernie bill out, no matter how unlikely it seems. He has a reputation for getting things passed. His nickname in the Senate is "the amendment king"
Greedy rent-seeking garbage humans would make breathing a subscription if they could. And the sad and scary part is that for some reason there are people ready and willing to pay for the Premium Oxygen Subscription Plus with unlimited breaths per day and the Gold Blinking Packaage added for free for the first month ($99.95 after that)...
It's simple actually. Don't buy HP products. Even their laptops have huge quality issues and flawed motherboard designs. Their firmware updates are known to brick motherboards. Even if you are under warranty, they won't give you a new board, instead they'll give you a refurbished board. FUCK YOU HP.
My printing has become so incredibly rare that even paying $0.50 per page st a ups/fed ex store is a better deal than having a printer. I'm not even sure the printer my wife insists on keeping is compatible with windows 11, which is basically all our PCs now.
Because of basically ALL printer manufacturers. I know people like Brother printers, generally, but why pay something like $60-100 for a printer when you only need to use one a few times a year?
what a literal fucking psychopath. i mean literally imagine waking up and thinking these things. imagine trying to actively make the world worse like this.
oh yeah i'm trying to make bathrooms a subscription
Unfortunately clothes by subscription is also a thing. I'm not sure what the company is, but I heard they'll send you a new outfit every month... It's one of the most wasteful things I've heard of in a while. We have literal mountains of unused clothes and other textile waste sitting in landfills.
This really doesn't seem like a very good long-term investment. Over time people are printing less, not more.
If you make it difficult to print they'll make the active effort to move away from your product, which is especially bad given the people are moving away from printing in general anyway.
Which is why they have to extract a much as possible from their dimishing customer base that are essentially forced to still use them and this have no real choice.
I don't own a printer because the cost to constantly refill cartrages feels like a subscription already. I just go to the UPS store for the 3 times a year I actually need to print something, on a for-realsies printer that someone else maintains. usually costs less than a dollar every time I go.
And companies that need to print more frequently probably already have some kind of subscription, because there are already printing companies that fill that niche.
Most people shouldn't buy a home printer at all anymore. Unless you're a crafter or work in a field that still uses lots of paper (i.e. law) they're not worth it.
It's a rapidly shrinking market and HP knows there's no saving it so I guess they're following the cable company playbook.
Squeeze your remaining customers as hard as possible before the music stops
Your local library can print documents for you for an insignificant sum. So can every Office Supply store - though they're worse in every way. Also so can your local shipping supply store (UPS, etc..)
There's no reason not to buy a brother or canon if you need a good laser printer to make hard copies of stuff. Not everybody wants to back everything up to the cloud and like hard copies or need it for their business.
Hey another article about the shit-on-fire that is HP printers.
Welcome new wtf-is-this-HP consumers! Be assured that HP has trafficked in bullshit around their printers for many, many years! Today is no fucking different and tomorrow won’t be either.
Feel free to launch your HP printer into the sun, as that's the most enjoyment you’ll ever get out of it. And be sure to watch for the next “Woah, HP printers are fascist garbage” article, due out soon!
Whyyyyy would you actually say this out loud? We all know it’s a dick move but I’m curious what would possess them to actually broadcast it? Like you’re not supposed say the quiet parts out loud. Right?
because they are mask off, they feel they are owed the money the subs would generate. They feel like they are untouchable because the system protects them
Legit question like I bought an Epson tank printer. I don't use cartridges. I don't use anything with HP on it right? So if they decide that they want to screw you over but they're not a monopoly, wouldn't we just go elsewhere? How is this a win for them? I just feel like they're digging a hole for themselves
I can’t believe there aren’t any start-ups out there trying to “disrupt” the printer market
Because in reality, printing is really not needed in most homes given the advent of paperless billing. I was still sneaking my essential documents to the work printer for many years, and even at the height of the pandemic, I was free printing at the library.
HP clearly wants to milk any small businesses for what they have with this, larger companies are already leasing the printers from the OG nickel and dimer: Xerox.
As far as I know, there aren't even any Chinese companies trying to enter into this market. Xiaomi has a few high-priced inkjet printers and that's it.
It would be so easy for all of us to come together and "disrupt the market", but we don't. If we collectively get together, like a crowd-funded FOSS alternative, and build this shit ourselves and sell it, that would wreak havoc with the game these leeches play, but we don't.
You can probably rig an old dot matrix printer to work on modern machines. Convert the serial plug to usb by crimping some cables, and I would bet dollars to donuts that there are drivers out there.
As an IT worker who is regularly subjected to dealing with printers, HP is by far the worst I have to deal with. They are shit from the build quality to the bloated borderline spyware software they push to the awful web interface. If you are considering an HP printer just don’t. It’s a better investment to go buy anything else.
Their cheap. HP lowest end printers were always cheaper then the ink. Customers buy the wireless ink with a subscription and think it's a convenience. It's a scam but it's a scam that works.
Basically now that everyone is poor this is how tech companies will address customer needs: low barrier for every and a subscription.
It's well known that printers are routinely sold at a loss, with the real revenues made from selling replacement ink cartridges.
I don't think that's a sustainable business anymore.
We've been using laser for 16 years now, because ink is expensive, and it doesn't even help much to use it only sparingly, because then the cartridges dry out.
We bought a color laser 10 years ago, and it's still going strong on only the 2nd set of cartridges (original + 1 set purchased). We have very little use for prints now, as all mail is electronic here now, and yes I mean all, even papers that needs to be signed are done electronically now.
So we print maybe 2 sheets average per month, last prints was my wife printing music scores to practice. The ones before that I can't even remember.
People in school basically all levels are turning papers in electronically too. I don't see where a lot of printing is still needed?
Mostly crafts - making custom t-shirts, or bags, and patterns for stuff like crocheting and knitting. But Ink is cheap if you get one of the Ecotanks from Epson - no way to prevent 3rd party ink, and it's a big tank so doesn't seem to dry out anywhere near like tiny cartridges. And 70-100ml of ink per color lasts a while IMO.
I have printer in my house, that has about 3 years of dust on it. It is not hooked up to my home wifi and I don't even know if it can work. Last Year I only need to print some thing twice. So I just drove down to the fedex kinkos and printed there.
If HP’s competitors are listening to his utterances, they should be all over this with ads saying “no subscriptions or other nonsense in our printers, and never will be”. They could grab much more of the market.
The sad thing is that I bet all the competitors have a room full of suits and ties who are hoping this works out for HP so they too can do it. I can almost guarantee this will turn into a "follow the leader" game.
I haven't purchased a new HP product since my Pavilion in 1998. I own an HP mini PC, but that was second hand. I'll never ever ever buy any of their products ever again.
There are a LOT of such products. I don't touch Sony anything because of the root kit scandal, and their consecutive legal mishaps, and I don't touch ASUS after their lead designers left the company to be taken over by Wall Street, and et cetera. There's becoming fewer honest alternatives to choose from all around. Is this an effect of capitalism, do you think? Could they be correlated somehow?
Part of it is an effect of capitalism. What we're seeing across the tech space is exactly what has happened to retail, airlines, automotive, and even utilities... a company is doing well enough, but the investors want more return for basically doing nothing. Then there's a hostile takeover or shareholder revolt, they install a board that is more compliant with value extraction at any cost to customers and/or their own workers, and presto! You've enshitifacated a company!
Shareholders (at least the big ones) don't care about worker safety or customer satisfaction... this is what happened to Sears. The CEO gutted the company and then took a golden parachute away from the dumpster fire he created.
It is unfortunate that they keep trying to make a subscription out of something that does not have an ongoing infrastructure need at the company’s side.
On the other hand, I wonder how this could affect open source firmware to avoid e-waste. I read a thread about open source firmware for robot vacuums and there will surely be open source (if there is not already) for printers.
It is unfortunate that they keep trying to make a subscription out of something that does not have an ongoing infrastructure need at the company’s side.
It's not just "unfortunate;" it's unethical and abusive and the FTC ought to outlaw it.
I've been holding off on buying a new robot vacuum, hoping that the open source ecosystem around it continues to grow. I really want one that can run valetudo which can allow for network controls that are entirely local with no cloud requirement. The downside being that sometimes getting root on the device to install custom firmware requires intruding pretty deep into the hardware or isn't possible at all.
They're selling you the printers at a pretty substantial loss and are making their money back on the consumables.
In a market where people aren't printing very much this turns out to be a lousy business plan.
School's going full digital and businesses going work from home has pushed everyone to stop using paper for everything.
To compete with the current printer manufacturers you'd need to be able to make a printer for about the same price, which means they too would have to make their money back on consumables but the money just isn't there.
I honestly think this is probably the beginning of the end for HP's line of consumer printers. It could also possibly be the end of their line of commercial multifunction printers. They're going to have to give up and walk away from those sectors. If it turns out you don't need to print for school and you don't need to put for work and you don't need to print passes for events, what are we printing for at this point to sign a document and send it back? The market's drying up and honestly no one new wants in
I'm really surprised that someone didn't jump into this space to basically make "the final printer you'll ever want to buy for home/office use".
Sell the printer to make a small profit, support refillable ink, and you'll basically capture 90% of the market. It's not a billion dollar idea, but for a small company it could make millions, even as a Kickstarter type thing between some hardware and device software folks.
Apparently it took so much time and effort to make high DPI print nozzles that it's much more attractive for a company to go and make a 3d printer rather than battle it out in a dying market that's remained a stable distribution of HP, Brother and Epson (and partially Canon).
I got a cold call from a VAR that deals with HP servers. And I'm like no thank you, I won't work with HP. They asked why and I told them straight up their anti consumer practices.
That's double the cost per page versus a good laser printer even when it works right, but inkjet cartridges will dry out and clog if you don't use them for a few days so they rarely work right.
I mean I get that they are established but what exactly is keeping their customers coming back to them? They make printers, there is no magic sauce, I’m sure they’re nice printers, but there are other companies, or someone could start a new printer company. I just can’t fathom why they think they can get away with treating their customers this way and not expect to lose them. Unless there is something I’m missing?
Well it's the long term objective of everyone else to put HP out of business.
If possible we should take the signs off their buildings and turn them into works of modern art. We'll let IT departments the world over do the project.
Nowadays, the only thing I find myself printing occasionally are return labels for Amazon RMA on my trusty old Samsung CLP laser printer (which sometime has a mind of its own and starts adding a single grayish streak on the second page onward at random location).
I have a second monochrome laser printer from Brother I purchased 2-3 years ago for a bargain lightning price of $70 thinking of replacing my old "dying" printer, however I exclusively use it to do occasional photocopies and I already have a bunch of TN660 toner for it.
Just waiting for the Samsung to run its course and finally die but it lives on challenging any thoughts I may have to send it to the eco-centre (recycling center in Québec). It is at least maybe 20 years old and the darn thing is stubbornly holding on 😆. At this point I feel like it may last another 20 years. It has indeed been well worth the $300 at the time.
Early on, I experienced so many issues with Lexmark, Epson and HP that I crossed off the companies forever.
Fortunately, I think I lucked out on my current 2 printers that will, hopefully, last me a few more decades.
I used to only recommend that any Brother printer would be better to friends and family, but I came accross information that newer brother printers started to have a chip in their ink/toner cartridges. I am unaware if it is for some nefarious purpose. Hopefully, they understand alienating customers will quickly dissolve all the good will they have accumulated.
I haven't bought an HP printer in at least 25 years. They used to repeatedly just print jibberish on a few lines and move on to the next page and wouldn't stop until I killed the print job. Canon laser printers are great and you dont need to worry about magenta drying up and preventing you from printing in black and white.