HP executive boasts that its controversial ink subscription model is "locking" in customers

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 352 points – HP executive boasts that its controversial ink subscription model is "locking" in customers
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HP executive boasts that its controversial ink subscription model is "locking" in customers::undefined

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Yeah, locked me right into "brother laser is the only way to go, fuck inkjet and fuck HP."

100%. Bought a Brother laser printer about six years ago, only replaced the toner twice and the drums just this week.

Prints so much better than ink jet, lasts forever, no subscription to anything.

Can vouch for Brother. Amazing product all around. In a few centuries it will be a myth like Excalibur.

I have to add, the app is pretty decent. Not that it's fancy or anything, but it prints whatever you want. Open an image in a new window and share to the app. Bang. It almost always works without hassle.

The time for regulating these evil business practices out of existence is now. It’s clear they won’t do the right thing out of moral obligation, so they need to be made an example.

At the very least, no product (printer ink) should be legal to sell at a 2000% markup. Or design cartridges where you can't use up all the ink.

No, that time was about a century ago when the Great Depression hit and USSR was trying their hand at an alternative.

Our oligarchs, instead, thought the Austrian fellow had it going on.

While I don't disagree, there is also something to be said for being a savvy consumer. Stop buying their shit. Do your research. If people spent as much time researching their decisions as lamenting them, they'd be happier with their purchases overall.

I haven't paid for printer ink in over 10 years. I'm still on my starter cartridge for the laser printer I purchased that far back.

I’m in the same boat with my laser printer that I bought in 2014, but I still think we need new laws prohibiting predatory practices. Similarly, I’m savvy enough to successfully avoid scam calls, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think we need more regulation and harsher punishments for those people making scam phone calls.

Modern civilized society shouldn’t require everyone to be aware of all the new technological advancements that can hurt them. Our govt should be responsible enough to effectively legislate and punish the offenders, and we should not resort to victim blaming in the absence of such legislation.

Absolutely. But that involves being politically engaged. We have a government that doesn't serve the people because people aren't engaged. People spend time arguing politics but can't be bothered to vote twice a year. We have abysmal voter turnout rates in every metric.

Our presidential elections are the highest turnout, and even that is laughable, and that's arguably the LEAST important election. Mid terms are worse turnout than that. Off years worse still. And primaries, which I'd argue are the MOST important election because they let you change the core spirit of the two parties, have the worst turnout of all.

We need to vote.

Agreed 100%, but this would be under the FTC’s purview, and we don’t directly vote for them, so it’s a bit more complicated than simply “vote.”

Everything is ground up. Local elections first, and so on and so forth. By the time you get to federal, the spirit of the entire government will have already shifted more towards the will of the people.

Or, and bear with me here, consumers could wake up and not purchase garbage?

It's been plain for a solid decade+ that consumer inkjets are garbage and money pits. If people keep buying, why should HP stop selling?

Comes down to a basic question, "Does the government owe it to you to not hurt yourself?" Meh, sometimes yes, sometimes no. Crazy complex for a simple question, ain't it?

But if one can't be assed to take 5-minutes of research before purchasing a printer, seeing how fucked up HP and inkjets are, I can't help them, and it ain't the government's business to stop them.

Consumer protection from predatory practices is literally "government business".

What a horribly naive and flawed perspective.

“If people aren’t smart enough to avoid murderers and not get murdered, I can’t help them, and it ain’t the government’s business to stop murders.”

  • You probably

Yeah, gambling, then lootboxes demonstrated citizens need to be protected from dark patterns. And their use by government officials (say by the George W. Bush administration) should be felonious.

Laughs in Brother laser printer ownership

I bought a Brother LH-23200 monochrome laser printer in 2016. The only times it has failed to print it's either been out of paper or the toner ran out. The toner lasts forever. And a box of four toner cartridges costs $26. It's the Toyota Hilux of printers.

I just switched to an old Dell LaserJet printer. Threw away my HP Inkjet MFP after they pushed a software update to lock out third party ink. I refuse to pay this stupid game.

Ignoring the disgusting mentality of leadership for the moment:

These are actually probably what the vast majority of home printer users (and a lot of small office printers) would want. The main drawback of ink based printers is that they dry out (and the rollers get dirty). But if you are printing even a few sheets a month, you get around that. And buying small amounts of ink makes sense for anything short of a medium/large office that is printing large numbers of documents per day. Get a new 100 pages worth of ink every other month and recycle the cartridges. Carbon footprint largely becomes noise since the postal trucks are going anyway.

Which is where toner comes into play. Laser/toner printers are awesome. They "never" dry out, tend to be enclosed enough that the rollers are protected, and are fairly cheap to restock if you buy large enough cartridges (and have a printer from the past decade or so). But laser printers are actually HORRIBLE for home use (and the environment) since they are basically aerosolized microplastics. And the cost argument starts getting messy for home users, but that is a huge rabbit hole.

The reality is that people need to realize that their local library have printers and they just need to bring a thumb drive and a buck. But... I am also the kind of person who has a laser printer next to his 3d printer (that room is fucked anyway).

We have a printer that appears to be setting a new trend? They are like inkjet in that they use liquid ink but they are tank based. The ink tanks are built into the printer and you buy ink in a glorified squirt bottle that you can dump into the tank via a fancy mechanism. We bought one 3 years ago and it still works today. It's still using the ink it came with (it comes with a lot of ink). If I don't print anything for a long time (maybe 4 months+) I do need to run a maintenance job but it starts working again after that. Seems pretty good to me so far.

The ink refills also appear to be reasonable cheap even if you buy first party.

i switched from a subscription HP inkjet to a nice brother color laser. the photos are i guess a bit worse quality, as they say, but it's so worth the tradeoff. it's built like a tank, is less bad at randomly not connecting to the computer, and i can just print what i want and it does it. i'm not sitting in the print menu thinking 'hmm if i print this as color, that's only 4 color pages left on the month, then they'll charge me $1 for the next allotment'

and it's just so fucking tiresome, and you just get bogged down in this pure banality and it's so insane. like, the printer and ink are sitting right there in my house! why am i thinking like this??

If your photos are worse on a laser printer than an ink jet, you've got something set up incorrectly. Hope I don't sound off putting, but laser is far superior to ink jet. Hell, pretty anything is superior to ink jet.

For printing photos? Is a laser really a viable option to a pigment printer?

That's a bit of different question. For photos, yes, but most people look to pigment for labels or other because of the UV durability. I suggest going to the gold standard of this: Wilhelm Research

Definitely a misguided view. Inkjet technology is insanely important for modern manufacturing, and has applications that are far greater than their use in printers. And even with regard to printers, inkjet delivers better photos

I haven't owned an inkjet in 20 years. I will never own one again.

It's worth the extra money for laser. I just replaced my 1996 laser printer. I don't remember ever replacing the toner.

Oh, and it was smaller than most printers you can buy today.

Took an old HP laser from my last job. It's tiny and can't seem to break. Using it now for WFH where I have to print plenty of shipping labels.

Spent $60 of company money on 4x toner cartridges. Seems like cheating. I'm shocked when one actually runs out, can never remember where I stashed the spares. 1,500+ pages from one cartridge? Like I care.

(The wifi is a pain, interferes with (more noise) other shit and seemingly can't be killed. "Hey Google, turn on/off the printer." Small annoyance.)

I have an 8 year old wide format photo inkjet and it has yet to dry out or have issues with the rollers.

Pixma something something 1000 by Canon?

Is that a good printer? Sounds vaguely like what I bought from a thrift store a while back.

It's got something stuck somewhere that I haven't been able to find by dismantling and cleaning. Didn't know if it was worth fixing?

I fucked up once and bought a HP printer. It won’t happen again.

Just remember this simple saying: “HP printers, no thank you”

Boasting about being evil. Nice.

Locking in customers is a sane, normal business practice. Sell razors cheap, get 'em on razor blades. One would hope said business provides a solid product, but what if they don't?

If consumers, after a decade or two, can't recognize how stupid inkjet tech is, what a money-hole it is, and what a clusterfuck HP is, why should HP act differently? 5-minutes of Googling would solve this issue for consumers.

"Buy a Brother laser." And we're done here.

Anyone who has one of these should be buying a Brother laserjet.

I have a subscription because my parents bought me an HP printer, as soon as it breaks I'm getting a Brother

You could say it’s already broken 🤣

I know everybody is enjoying their brother laser printer but I want to shout out an honorable mention to my homie Dell 3330DN who still works without any hiccups or repairs since 2012 and got me through all of uni. Never had to change the drum.

This sounds like a guy who deserves acid splashed all over his body. Or maybe he'd love to go to my Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 sandbox world and be the test rider for all the rides that could never be built in the real world over safety concerns.

I actually like my printing subscription. I pay like 5€ a month (I don’t quite remember) and don’t have to think about buying new ink, Monitoring the status of my ink level, or facing the issue that I suddenly ran out of ink and can’t print.

That’s what I pay for. I probably pay more than before, but 5€ a month is really negligible. It’s less then one Starbucks coffee.

I hope this is sarcastic or a bot.

It's not. I've met plenty of people like him/her. You pay for convenience and "it just works" because the only alternative they know is the likes of cannon or worse.

Why would they pay 5x the price for brother, it still needs ink! It's hard to convince someone where their entire life they never had a good printer.

This printer was paid for by my employer in 2017. I would have never spent 250€ on a printer. And I often did not use it because it had run out of ink and I was too lazy or occupied to take the 5 minutes to order it. So now this is taken care of.

It is also the best printer I have ever had and the longest living. But it is also the first one that cost more than 50€ so the reason might lie there.

I had printers with 5 milion prints. It was old hp 506 (50X series for sure). We bought 60 of them. 5 years on and i think 3 or 4 broke down? We weren't even using genuine ink either.

They costed £230 +£30 for 5 year warranty.

Gosh. I'm sorry your situation and needs run counter to the zeitgeist, but that kinda thing ain't welcome here.

(You got my upvote for speaking your opinion. Thanks.)

Isn’t paying for subscriptions exactly the zeitgeist? People pay for Netflix, instead of just recording stuff for free and sharing copies among friends and family. It’s convenience you pay for (if we keep Netflix originals out of scope)

But Netflix is convenient (or was). HP is abusive, and you have to wonder about Stockholm Syndrome

Meanwhile I paid like $50 for a box of 100 third party ink cartridges. They’ve lasted years. I never have to think about buying ink, monitor the status of ink level, or face the issue of running out ….. and I paid only once. It’s really negligible compared to a 5€/mon subscription