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Do yourself a favor and buy a Brother laser jet.
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HP is intentionally getting this twisted in the hopes that we won’t notice. But too bad; we noticed.
The only possible way for a “virus” to be embedded in an ink cartridge is because there is software (or firmware, I guess) in that cartridge. The only reason there is software in an ink cartridge in the first place is because HP needs it to be there for their own nefarious purposes, to wit attempting to prevent you from using third party cartridges, and also to lock you out of using cartridges that may still be full of ink under their stupid “instant ink” scam.
Without that, the cartridge would just be a box of ink which is all it actually needs to be. HP could have avoided this entire fiasco by… not putting dumbshit DRM firmware in their cartridges in the first place.
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People say that, but…
I had a Canon Pixma ip5000 back in the day that had ink cartridges with no electronics in them. For ink level sensing there was an LED and photodiode built into the carriage that the cartridges went into, in the printer itself. Not in the cartridges. They were transparent plastic, so the machine could just shine through and determine when ink was running low. For its usage gauge, it just calculated it based on print output vs. the volume of a new cartridge, assuming you put a full cartridge into it when you told it so. Yes, this meant you could also fool it by telling it you’d installed a new cartridge when you hadn’t, but it would still figure it out right away if you put a truly empty one in.
And this worked just fine. No problems at all with that system. I used and abused that printer for years, doing volume printing for work with it (it could do 8.5x11 borderless!) until it just plain wore out. Probably after hundreds of thousands of pages.
So no, I really don’t think having chips running arbitrary code in a goddamn ink cartridge is actually necessary in any way.
Crazy idea here: How about not monitoring the ink at all?
Why does the printer need to know? It’s not like it’s going to explode from not having fresh ink anyway. Just put the ink in a visible container where the user can look and see if it being empty is the cause of a shitty print.
I’d buy any printer that doesn’t attempt to monitor the ink.
If it is visible to the user, that means light is hitting it and helping degrade it. Given how rarely people prove these days, you are more likely to end up with a gunked up cartridge.
Actually with some print heads they will be damaged if there is no ink
Maybe so people know to buy a cartridge so it’s on hand before the one runs out, so you’re not having to run to the office supply store in the middle of an important print job? But that’s more of a convenience thing, not necessary.
Yeah, just make it work like a car’s fuel tank. It has a gauge to say how much is in it. It has a hole so you can add more. Some cars will guess how far you can drive, give or take, based on how much fuel is in the tank. If the fuel gets very low, a more obvious warning will pop up in case you weren’t watching your gauge. But otherwise it just keeps driving in the meantime and if your car needs high octane and you give it low, it will try to run it anyways and if it fucks up the engine, then that’s on the user.
They could avoid the possibility of a virus by not having chips in them. Pretty simple fix.
Excuse me - if I bought your product and paid for it, in what universe am I not investing into you, and instead you are investing into me??
HP is a steaming pile of shit.
Because they sell the printers at loss, expecting you to buy their overpriced ink, continually earning them money for years.
Sounds like a subscription to be honest.
They want to make it a subscription that starts automatically when you buy the printer. No payment or the linked credit card expires, no more printing. Keep on paying for that subscription each month even if you don’t print a single page.
HP literally has that already. They call their dystopian product “Instant ink.”
And they’re fuming because they can’t force this down the throat of every “bad investments”. Not yet anyway.
But they’re really trying with HP+ printers that come with a 3 month trial of Instant Ink. And it’s not like you lose the ability to use 3rd party cartridges, because those HP+ printers already come locked down from factory. Those HP+ printers also have extra REQUIREMENTS: HP Account and internet connection.
Imagine if you needed internet connection and some account to control your lights. Oh, Philips Hue changed their ToS, so now you do.
Why internet of things is a bad idea for 500, Alex.
Here was I, thinking printers couldn’t get worse
I know we assume they’re following the “razor blade” model but I actually find it hard to believe the printers are sold at a loss given how cheap it is to produce at this point.
Unless by “loss” we’re saying “less than HP thought it could extract.”
They’re absolutely not producing them at a loss. The loss is only in their projections and expectations to price gouge their customers.
I just looked. You can get an HP Deskjet on Amazon for $40. They are producing those at a loss and expecting people to pay for their bullshit ink subscriptions.
Right. There isn’t a printer under $150 that anyone should even consider. If you can’t afford the upfront cost, then you won’t be able to afford the ink of the “cheap” end of the market.
More people should consider not owning a printer at all and using a FedEx print shop or some such. I get the convenience argument for having one, but consider it.
I invested $150-200 on a Brother laser printer a very long time ago. Like we’re talking USB 1.0 era long time ago. It still works just fine. I’ve had to replace the toner cartridge once. Those things are workhorses. They will last until the sun goes out. Get one of those if you need a printer. It will still be compatible with your OS, the quality will be all you’ll likely ever need, and you don’t even have to worry about getting a new one because you can get an ancient one on eBay for a very low price and it will still be fine. All you’re missing is color and even if you print a lot, like you said, go to FedEx if you need color because it will probably be cheaper than ink anyway.
The real question here is where are the Chinese printers?! I mean, it’s a big market, why aren’t they getting into it?
Xiaomi makes a couple of expensive standard inkjets, but mostly they make photo printers. That’s the only one I can think of.
It’s really hard to break into it. Being accurate enough to print at 300dpi is very difficult, and that’s not particularly impressive. If it’s color, then the problems are multiplied. You have to precisely align four different print heads (minimum), and the ink needs to be mixed just right for accurate colors.
This is also why you don’t see open source 2d printers like you do for 3d printers. On the surface, adding a third dimension seems like it’d make things more complicated, but 3d printers don’t need the level of accuracy that 2d printers do.
But I would think TVs and microchips are more complicated than printers. And those two have been cracked by the Chinese.
Don’t buy HP printers. Buy Brothers instead. They’re a better product anyways.
They’re about as bad. But a new set of ink cartridges and they immediately go “empty” within two months even if you’re not using them. Switch to a laser jet.
Brother is just a little less greed than HP, nothing more
For now anyway. Enshittification strikes too many products eventually.
Which is making me sad. 3d printing is so open atm, but I wouldn’t be surprised if enshittification will take place in this space in my lifetime.
That’s mostly going to be in the hands of Bambu I think, they only recently just allowed users to flash custom firmware onto the X1.
If Prusa doesn’t come back with a strong challenger we will be in trouble IMO. They have that amazing corexy that rivals the Bambu in performance (but not price!) but for a lot of people it’s too big anyway sadly
There’s a huge world of clone printers, aftermarket mainboards, hotends, extruders etc. that doesn’t look like it’s going away.
Some manufacturers may go closed but it’s way too easy to build your own printer for it to be a big concern in the FDM world.
Resin on the other hand already has lots of custom slicers, firmware etc. probably because there’s a lot less mechanics and a lot more screen. But I’m not sure of the future of consumer resin anyways, a lot of people are realizing how toxic that unlabelled Chinese product really is.
I had someone a while back arguing that FDM printers were hopelessly toxic and resin printers would be the only ones on the market within a year. Naturally, this was well over a year ago.
Resin printers have their uses, but man, they are a mess to use.
It sorta did, but pulled back. DaVinci tried selling printers that had chips in the filament spools and used the same razer blade business model as low end inkjets. Anet also sold printers that cut too many corners and they often caught fire.
Then Creality made the Ender 3. I unironically think it’s a brilliant design. It cuts corners just enough to be cheap, but not so much that it’s useless garbage. They had two issues early on: lack of thermal runaway protection in the firmware, and a bad connector to the power supply. Both were fixable by end users, and both have long been fixed in shipping models.
At the same time, companies like Prusa refused to join in that race to the bottom. Good for them. If you’re an established player like that and already have a reputation for quality, never get involved in a race to the bottom. That’s how you become what HP is now.
I aspire to be a bad investment for every company
I do not want to be measured as an investment but as a customer.
I dont want to be measured as a customer either. I want to fall under the ‘T’ part of their SWOT analysis.
That’s interesting! TIL, thanks!
I’m not really on Reddit much anymore but every time an article would get posted about how Redditors were the least valuable social media users for advertising purposes I was always like “Fuck yeah.”
Ah. The only good kind of investment!
“Every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.”
They literally can’t help themselves. They’ve gone from treating their employees like an investment vehicle, where if it doesn’t perform well enough, they stop investing in it, and they’re fully onto doing that to their customers as well. (They aren’t exactly actually investing in their employees either. They consider an employees low pay an “investment,” in the employee. Nevermind the employee can’t afford an apartment on their own on their pay.)
You know how little your boss thinks of you and how disposable they think you are?
Yeah, well, they think that about the customers now, too.
“You can easily be replaced with another customer who prints more,” is what they are saying to themselves.
The company I work for has a contract with HP to provide and service the printers. My department uses a printer everyday. In addition to internal use we print receipts and documents for clients who sometimes only have a few minutes to wait. We have been told that our printers are going to be removed because we don’t print enough. Our page count isn’t high enough to justify the cost from HP, despite the fact that we literally can’t do our jobs without them. The result of this is that we’ll have to walk the floor until we find an available cloud printer, no matter how far away or inconvenient it is. For corporations it’s all about the numbers. Metrics, budget, etc. How it affects their employees doesn’t matter to them.
We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network
Hey dipshits, this is possible because you built firmware into your printer cartridges to prevent 3rd party cartridges in the first place
Headline should have been “HP CEO admits company’s products are platform for malware attacks.”
Every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment.
Brother, for the love of anything holy, please do not follow HP’s path.
I wonder if I can 3D print parts for and make a reliable 2D printer
In other words: “Our business model is bad and I feel smug about it.”
Buying HP products is bad investment.
I only had the chance to two of their inkjet printers and one of their office laser printers, plus an elitebook laptop. In short, all of them suck.
Much better (to me, the best) alternatives, that I can safely say are good investments: Canon for inkjet printers, ThinkPad T and P series for laptops. Those are quality products. Unfortunately I don’t have any experience with other office laser printers, so I cannot recommend one.
Edit: specified which series of ThankPads are still good.
Inkjet printers as a whole are a bad investment.
Well, I guess it depends on the use case. For me, mine was a damn good investment for sure.
Can’t you use the drug store for photos and the library for documents?
Well if you print lots of photos then maybe but that’s about it.
If you print lots of photos in the USA, printing to the nearest drugstore (Walgreens, rite aid) is certainly cheaper.
If you print a lot of documents in the USA, printing at the library is often free, sometimes a small fee.
Not sure on other countries, but here in the USA, I’ve found a printer completely unnecessary.
I kinda agree about the photos, but when printing documents, it’s almost always something I need immediately. Going to the library is quite inconvenient.
I bought a used brother laser printer for 15€ and got two 1000 page toner Cartridges for it for 20€. That’s quite a lot of printing for 35€ total and that will be enough for years with my needs. Definitely worth the convenience imo.
I agree. I have a brother laser printer. However, I’m currently traveling and have it packed away in a trailer. I’ve found the library more convenient than unpacking it. For now. Haha
For those who don’t want a Canon, a Brother is also great.
ThinkPad is now Lenovo just FYI. They were acquired some years ago and now Lenovo makes and sells the ThinkPad line of hardware
They were acquired some years ago
Almost 20.
Yeah, Lenovo has owned ThinkPad for ≈ 6 more years than IBM ever did.
I know. Still, that’s the best hardware out there for laptops. I have to add though, only the T and P series are worth buying, the rest are trash.
Not anymore. Even those are garbage in the last 5ish years.
Shit build quality and barely repairable
Stay away from modern thinkpads
Check again.
At least the T580 I worked on was the best quality laptop I’ve laid my hands on. My current M1 MacBook Pro is close, to some extent. It’s a great machine too, and obviously better in performance as it’s newer, but in laptop keyboards, ThinkPad’s is still no.1, not to talk about the track point that, to this day, no other manufacturer could properly reproduce. I worked with a Dell Latitude (a couple of years ago they were great), but the track point is shit on it.
Regarding maintenance, Lenovo provides detailed disassembly and repair guides, plus you can get replacement parts anytime.
Of course there are shit decisions on the ThinkPad line as well, but I still only can recommend them.
nope. had a T580 which reproducably crashed when you picked it up by the right side. Likely from mainboard flex. And checking online, it’s not a unique case.
And two months after the waranty, the ssd control chip or something broke which basically shredded any data on the ssd. Repair would have been almost as expensive as getting a new one.
Now I’ve switched to framework for work and personal use and don’t regret it
Hmm that’s unfortunate. Wherever I worked so far, ThinkPads didn’t break, even after the warranty expired.
Well, I wish you better luck with your Framework laptop(s) then.
That’s not how investments work. If I put my money into purchasing a printer, I invested in that purchase. Not the other way around. Ffs
Why do these dumb ass CEO’s keep admitting this type of stuff in interviews? Don’t tell us your evil plans. No one is going to hear this and be more eager to buy your products. They’re so proud of coming up with ways to screw customers that they just can’t help themselves. They have to let everyone know. I don’t get it.
Because that interview is for investors. He’s looking out for the shares price, not his customers. We can always buy other products, like Canon or Epson. It’s too bad because HP printers are the best, but not enough to let us be robbed like other brands.
HP printers and the software with them sucks ass. Never again. Bought a brother laser printer and shit just works without any bullshit.
HP printers are the best
No. Not by any metric.
Holy fuck, customers are not an investment!
Not crazy at all. Not sure why there’s a surprise. Advertising is everywhere. Design goes into making buying goods user friendly. The whole point of brands is to build loyalty to it. All of that has cost to acquire customers. So obviously customers are an investment because acquiring them has cost and labor involved.
It’s like selling an iPhone knowing you will eventually make money on app store sales percentage margins.
Imagine working high up in this company and not wanting to jump off a bridge every time you get off of work. Psychos.
In grad school I picked up a free used HP LaserJet. It had Ethernet, and could use generic/off brand cartridges. Yeah it was big and noisy but it was an awesome workhorse and it Just Worked (with out-of-the-box CUPS/Linux support too, IIRC).
How the mighty have fallen.
Yeah, my first color inkjet was an HP and it was an absolute workhorse. I had a graphic design business and I remember printing 1500 4-page newsletters for a client who couldn’t wait for a regular printing press due to a deadline. I stayed up all night feeding paper into that thing and had to change the black ink cartridge twice, for about $50 each, during the whole ordeal. I loved that printer. When it finally died after 15 years or so, I tried to find another HP that could do the job. What a mistake. Current models are hot garbage.
So now I have an Epson Ecotank which I bought three years ago and literally have not yet had to purchase additional ink past the first set of bottles that came with it. Sadly, the photo printing quality is not as good as the old HP, but for my purposes it is perfect.
I’m not an investment, I’m a single purchase customer. I buy a thing from you and then I get on with my life.
21st century business innovation seems to be make everything a perpetual subscription model, rather than providing better value with new products. It doesn’t make you brilliant as a CEO, may as well just replace you with AI, right? That’s what all the cool investors care about now, right?
