‘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?)
My guess would be someone who doesn’t know React well made it. I don’t know React well and I’ve made some atrocities. You forget to wrap one statement in useEffect and it’s all over.
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.
I’ll go one step further and never buy another HP product of any kind!
No where in there was anything about what the consumer wants or needs. Just theirs
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.
Eat shit HP. I will eat bag of dicks before I even think of touching their shitty printers
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.
I use my printer roughly twice a year. What exactly would I be getting out of this situation that warrants a monthly fee? Especially on a laser printer I could replace for like $150. It would economically make more sense to just replace the printer than deal with a service visit or shipping it out for repair.
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.
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
Shit I forgot libraries offer this service. Even better.
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.
My local library has a maker space with a few 3d printers and a laser cutter you can book time on. It’s pretty sweet (if you can find a time slot).
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 …
For when I need to run off a new character sheet right now.
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.
Oh no. Hell no not on a subscription.
Lol, sounds familiar.
My 1996 Lexmark laser just died this year.
I haven’t owned an inkjets in 20 years, and won’t ever own one again.
“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/
Most of those reasons are why a print company is needed, there’s very little about why I need a printer at home.
It’s not all about you
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.
Oh absolutely. There definitely are valid use cases for printers just like there are valid ways to use an ice pick. If you need to use huge blocks of ice for something, you really want to own your very own ice pick. Other people might not need one as much as you do.
I don’t need one
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?
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).
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.
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Buy Brother, better printers without all this subscription garbage.
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How long before an ‘open source’ printer hots the market and terrifies this idiot CEO?
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.
Maybe so, but there are people who aren’t scared of bears and get mauled to death. If he really is that dumb he won’t hear the impending doom.
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.
i am desperately praying for a pineprinter
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.
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If HP’s competitors are listening to his utterances, they should be all over this with ads saying “no subscriptions or other nonsense in our printers, and never will be”. They could grab much more of the market.
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.
It’s well known that printers are routinely sold at a loss, with the real revenues made from selling replacement ink cartridges.
I don’t think that’s a sustainable business anymore.
We’ve been using laser for 16 years now, because ink is expensive, and it doesn’t even help much to use it only sparingly, because then the cartridges dry out.
We bought a color laser 10 years ago, and it’s still going strong on only the 2nd set of cartridges (original + 1 set purchased). We have very little use for prints now, as all mail is electronic here now, and yes I mean all, even papers that needs to be signed are done electronically now.
So we print maybe 2 sheets average per month, last prints was my wife printing music scores to practice. The ones before that I can’t even remember.People in school basically all levels are turning papers in electronically too. I don’t see where a lot of printing is still needed?
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.
Hey another article about the shit-on-fire that is HP printers.
Welcome new wtf-is-this-HP consumers! Be assured that HP has trafficked in bullshit around their printers for many, many years! Today is no fucking different and tomorrow won’t be either.
Feel free to launch your HP printer into the sun, as that’s the most enjoyment you’ll ever get out of it. And be sure to watch for the next “Woah, HP printers are fascist garbage” article, due out soon!
Greedy rent-seeking garbage humans would make breathing a subscription if they could. And the sad and scary part is that for some reason there are people ready and willing to pay for the Premium Oxygen Subscription Plus with unlimited breaths per day and the Gold Blinking Packaage added for free for the first month ($99.95 after that)…
The irony is that even that satire didn’t envision something so cartoonishly evil as a subscription business model.
What’s that picture from? It seems familiar.
Spaceballs
Thanks
Just so long as they don’t have to think about it, subscriptions are just fine with such people. 🤦♂️
This is why for the one or two times I need to print something a year I just go to the library and pay them $0.10 a page to print something out.
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?
Because of basically ALL printer manufacturers. I know people like Brother printers, generally, but why pay something like $60-100 for a printer when you only need to use one a few times a year?
For me the cost savings are pretty huge.
The big difference is convenience. I’ve got an inexpensive Brother laser printer. It is probably 12 years old now and is as good as the day I bought it. I’ve only replaced the toner cartridge once or twice. I set it up on my home server so it’s available on all of our family devices (well, not the phones). When the kids wake up in the morning and suddenly realize they have to print off their homework for school, it’s no problem at all.
At least in the Netherlands, there’s a bunch of places you can print including your own school for free.
As little as I print, it would be worth it to me to adapt my 3d printer to function as a plotter.
I go out of my way to eliminate paper wherever possible, so I would rather spend $100 to be able to do something digitally than $50 for a printer.
This guy is unbelievable. Who the hell would pay a subscription to print? I print maybe once every two months and I have my own company.
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.
With each new HP news article I grow more pleased with last year’s decision to ditch HP once and for all and get a Brother.
The Brother just works. Even surprises me in some scenarios where I anticipate lack of support and it comes through anyway. Great printer!
what a literal fucking psychopath. i mean literally imagine waking up and thinking these things. imagine trying to actively make the world worse like this.
oh yeah i’m trying to make bathrooms a subscription
i’m trying to make food a subscription
i’m trying to make tv a subscription
i’m trying to make clothes a subscription
i cannot wait to live in paradise
i’m trying to make food a subscription
Hello Fresh, Blue Apron, and a few others have entered the chat.
Unfortunately clothes by subscription is also a thing. I’m not sure what the company is, but I heard they’ll send you a new outfit every month… It’s one of the most wasteful things I’ve heard of in a while. We have literal mountains of unused clothes and other textile waste sitting in landfills.
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It’s simple actually. Don’t buy HP products. Even their laptops have huge quality issues and flawed motherboard designs. Their firmware updates are known to brick motherboards. Even if you are under warranty, they won’t give you a new board, instead they’ll give you a refurbished board. FUCK YOU HP.
My company is an HP partner. I use a Lenovo.
That is quite funny, my objective since 20 years ago is to not buy anything with the HP logo.
