Technology

The subscription, like HP’s recent ad campaign promoting its printers as “made to be less hated,” trades on the idea that printers are frustrating commodities. The company’s configurator page mentions bonuses like “continuous printer coverage” and “next-business-day printer replacement,”

Our printers are unreliable pieces of absolute shit guys. But if you do the subscription we'll replace your shitty broken rental printer next day. Never worry that you can't print when you need to print. Mindblowing.

Just make reliable printers that work, dumbasses.

HP is so desperate for money that this is what they need to do to survive.

What does HP (hardware) actually do these days? Where do they compete (and I mean compete, not have products in)?

They ruined Compaq.

They killed their golden goose printing business with bullshit like this.

They killed their server hardware business with bullshit like locking software, drivers and firmware behind support contracts.

As somebody who always bought HP and advocated for their hardware (many years ago), I would never buy anything they make today.

I think it's time for an open source 2d printer project, we have open source 3d printers and the technology is much more complex than 2d. Time to put HP to sleep

I have a brother laser printer that I love. I just fill up a tub with generic toner and it keeps printing for almost a decade now. I'm old and like to print things. I think it's much easier to read on paper and I'm happier to print out a 150 page book than read it on a Kindle lol. I've also broken multiple ereaders commuting on trains but still have all the papers I saved in binders I printed and really enjoyed reading and will last nearly forever.

the amount of engineering and programming hours spent to make their products worse is just a symptom of how stupid, wasteful decisions are made when there is not enough competition in these industries.

There are relatively recent refurbished Brother laser printers on NewEgg for under $200.

You can get a used older model on eBay for under $200.

And the chances that used older model will work just fine for you for years to come is high.

My Brother is between 15 and 20 years old, only on its second toner cartridge, and still working like a charm.

There are a lot of options to do color printing for cheap if you only need it very occasionally like most people. The local public library may even offer free color printing.

When HP requires HP Smart account to print, the brand was already dead to me

Also any recommendation for printers?

EDIT: damn, I think I am going to get a Brother Laser Printer in the future

HP is in the extortion business now....

I can see it being an option for some people. If you print low volume but regularly every month. And you need a printer that always just works. The problem is the monthly limits! The base package is 20 pages per month, just printing out a pdf manual or something would eat that up in a minute. I would want unused prints to be added to next month.

Otherwise it is very similar to how it works for businesses having larger office printers.

The subscription, like HP’s recent ad campaign promoting its printers as “made to be less hated,”

Literally "cause a problem, sell them the solution" 🤣

I bought a Canon laser printer 10 years ago. The only thing I've needed since then was a single new set of toner. (And a bunch of paper, obviously.)

Even back then it was pretty obvious that ink jets are waste of money and everyone that I knew who had ink jets were just constantly complaining about them.

FWIW we have dumb business owners to thank for that.

They've been doing this with the Indigo's for 8+ years that I'm aware of, so probably much longer. And ofc businesses fell for it because just like most cloud shit, nobody can be bothered to calculate actual costs, just fudge stuff and get your bonus/pay rise for pretending to have done something beneficial.

I guess hp won't care but, while I have bought hp computers for years, this last time I went looking at other brands because of this printer nonsense.

Has always been meme

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The company debuted a subscription service today — just like CEO Enrique Lores said it would last month — called the HP All-In Plan.

So if you decide HP All-In isn’t for you after all, you’ll have to return the printer and go back to rubbing elbows with everyone else at FedEx whenever the need to print arises.

That way, if a firmware upgrade blue-screens your printer, at least you have some recourse that doesn’t involve driving to a store to buy a whole new one.

And receiving ink before you run out is great if you are, like me, the kind of person who ignores the “low ink” warning all the way until I’m fully out and am actually printing something critical, rather than coloring pages for your kid, for once.

But those are mostly functions of the fact that I don’t really print that often and rarely encounter the annoyances of printer ownership.

One is HP’s plan, which appeals to the frustration of user-hostile experiences like scanners that don’t work because you bought third-party ink and printers that become unusable without some serious effort because you moved overseas.

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