‘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,
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.
Why would that be overkill? I lease my car and it comes with a reactive and planned service contract included. If HP wants to make people rent their printers, they’ll have to make it attractive to do so or lose a huge percentage of their home printer business.
I use my printer roughly twice a year. What exactly would I be getting out of this situation that warrants a monthly fee? Especially on a laser printer I could replace for like $150. It would economically make more sense to just replace the printer than deal with a service visit or shipping it out for repair.
