‘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 will thank him for his honesty and straight forward communication. I now know never to buy an HP printer.
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.
I, too, love my old Brother laser printer. Their website is absolute garbage though. I don’t know what they did to it, but it is just slow as hell.
Definitely spend the extra $10 for duplex printing or regret it for the rest of your life.
(Seriously, why even make non-diplex printers?)
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.
Just happened today:
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.
Too many disagreements about whether it worked or not in the reviews to spend a minimum of $99 on it.
Ah, that makes sense. I’ve only used the really old ones but I imagine that they’ve made it harder to do this on more recent models.
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
No?
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.
My inkjet hp started to throw error codes at me last month.
I bought a refurbished brother laser printer and that thing is awesome
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.
Yeah, their refurbs are great if you can get one before they sell out. That’s how I scored my first Brother for $99. Thing is a champ at home.
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.
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.
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.
Or go-to your local library, ours charges an exorbitant fee of a penny/page and gives $2 for printing for free for new library card holders lmao
Libraries are fuckin rad. Everyone should go to their local library if they exist locally. Just going in and out the door helps their counts.
I don’t know why the home printer still exists in this day and age.
Legal shit.
And financial shit, and tickets, and coupons, and recipes, and templates, and manuals, and …
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 work from home and print a lot of UPS labels. For personal use I print targets and lots of misc. stuff. Nice to have sort of thing.
Also, it’s a B&W laser, and that’s a world of difference from inkjet.
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.
“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.
Please visit the printzone https://www.printzone.com.au/help-centre/7-reasons-why-we-still-need-printers/
It’s been close to 5 years since I needed to print something at work. At home, more like 20 years.
I haven’t ironed my clothes in 25 years but with the power of imagination I can manage to grasp why other people might want to have an iron in their home.
Most of those reasons are why a print company is needed, there’s very little about why I need a printer at home.
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).
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.
And wtf is hikki-whatever?
How much I would love if EU pulled a USB-C on printer ink/toner.
“All printers must be compatible with one of these X possible formats of ink/toner. Lockdown is forbidden too”
Sure the printers would be more expensive but I am sure we would see an incredible improvement in quality and decrease in ink/toner cost
Sure the printers would be more expensive but I am sure we would see an incredible improvement in quality and decrease in ink/toner cost
Probably because everyone but Brother would step out of the market.
“This is the ink we use. Everyone use the same ink. Cheaper, easier, better for everyone.”
“But sir, that sounds a lot like something Communists would do!”
fuck these goddamn late stage capitalist monsters, they’re fucking living caricatures.
Shame this won’t pass: https://www.sanders.senate.gov/press-releases/news-sanders-and-colleagues-introduce-legislation-to-combat-corporate-greed-and-end-outrageous-ceo-pay-2/
The “late stage” part is unnecessary. This is just capitalism working as intended.
