'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...

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'll go one step further and never buy another HP product of any kind!

Was that HP Laserjet unable to use 3rd party toner?

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?

My inkjet hp started to throw error codes at me last month.

I bought a refurbished brother laser printer and that thing is awesome

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.

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.

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

I don’t know why the home printer still exists in this day and age.

Legal shit.

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.

"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/

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?

My immediate thought. And no worries about ink drying up and whatever else might break suddenly. Just pay a shop if you want printing as a service.

Long time Brother Laser Gang member here, and toner cost is not an issue. Averaged over the last decade it’s cost me like a couple bucks per year.

"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!"

How much I would love for America to stop letting it's corporations get away with these things so we won't have to wait for the EU

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"

The "late stage" part is unnecessary. This is just capitalism working as intended.

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.

i am desperately praying for a pineprinter

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.

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.

The irony is that even that satire didn't envision something so cartoonishly evil as a subscription business model.

Just so long as they don't have to think about it, subscriptions are just fine with such people. 🤦‍♂️

Very happy with my Brother laser printer so far. It just works. Hasn't held my prints hostage for any online ink subscription renewals... yet...

They also just have famously shoddy build quality, with everything they make.

My company is an HP partner. I use a Lenovo.

I bought a refurbished laser printer at a garage sale for $30 8 years ago. Still printing off the original toner

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 a single printer manufacturer?

i'm trying to make food a subscription

Hello Fresh, Blue Apron, and a few others have entered the chat.

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 print whole books from the printer at work.

I work at a Starbucks.

Staples by my house has my printing business. Maybe 20 pages a year?

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.

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.

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

PC load letter!? What the fuck does that mean?

I can't believe there aren't any start-ups out there trying to "disrupt" the printer market.

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.

WHY don't we.

Ive been thinking about this recently. We have essentially done that for 3D printers from the start. We should absolutely do this for 2D printers

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.

Obligatory "no step brother, that is not where letter sized papers are supposed to go"

I looked into these the other day as my canon inkjet is on its last legs, but it seems any brother laser printer with a comparable featureset now has its own subscription model, and I could be wrong but this is how it seems to work based on my research:

• You automatically get a trial subscription with the toner you get in these printer models (not sure, I hope it’s opt-in)

• If you don’t continue the subscription after the trial, the toner cartridges lock and there’s no way to continue using them, even if you renew your subscription later. You have to pay for new toner cartridges.

And Canon laser brinter!

HP, yet another example of how to go from the best to the worst in a decade

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.

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.

But laser makes a lot of sense for documents.

Check out your local library as well. Mine lets you print 2 pages for free each time you go in, and it's super cheap to print more.

Me too, so nothing in my life has changed.

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.

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?

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.

Open source everything. Can't we just straight up crowdfund our own FOSS hardware and sell it at self-cost price? Like a syndicate?

I was going to ask, does anyone know how to put open source software on an HP printer?

Epson?

The problem is profit.

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

Canon, Epson, Xerox?

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.

Canon? I have one and it was supposedly the cheapest per page in the long run.

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).

What are you guys printing?

I just got a brother laser printer.

I like the concept, but every time I needed to print, I got to do clean print heads like three times before I could print normally.

A printer not so much, but I've seen multiple plotter projects. Basically same tech as a 3d printer with a pen instead of print head.

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.

I gotta disagree on the expense, at least for B&W. I have an old HP and the cartridges are $20 and print 1,000 pages.

I propose setting fire to barricades of trash and car tires at strategic positions around every major city. I have some other ideas too, PM me.

Corporate deals. Entire companies are tied to HP for their services.

There's pkenty of room in the ocean to drown them all, and we can reuse the plank.