What an absurd time to be alive: "Here's a device that you have supposedly bought, in full working order, with the supplies needed for it to work present... and yet, you cannot use it, unless you remain subscribed to the corporation that makes it."
What's next? Scanners only working under a subscription? Your Wi-Fi router or switches only working when a license is active (even your LAN)? Your chargers, PSUs or UPSes only being allowed to work for 6 months, before you're forced to buy a newer model? Needing a monthly subscription to use your OS or browser? I don't even know anymore...
The printer example feels like it shouldn't be legal. The whole printer ink situation feels a lot like that. The companies are probably going to get away with this, because they're the ones setting the rules, you're free to not use their services and instead turn to the non-existent companies that will put the users over maximizing profits.
Edit: Louis suggests Brother as a brand that doesn't do this. However, what guarantees are there that they won't?
Wires. The next thing is wires. As a media tech guy I already know active optical HDMI cables (50m) that come with an USB-to-HDMI adaptor so you can update the cables firmware(!).
With electrical equipment like oscilloscopes it is quite common to sell the physically identical unit with different softwarelocks for different prices (Want 350 MHz bandwidth instead of 80? Pay some extra).
Want that HDMI cable to run 8k? Here os a simple subscription. As resolutions go up there comes a point where cable will have to have some active components in them anyways.
This isn’t new, though. My first job was for Xerox in 1996 and they sold variations on photocopiers that were purely software. (Or even a physical DIP switch.)
The basic model XX40 gives you 40 pages a minute. Want the XX80? An engineer comes out and flips the DIP. Exact same hardware.
You used to be able to buy budget version of Casio scientific calculator and use pencil to draw a wire on PCB to turn it into fx-991EX. The only thing missing button labels.
Not the same time frame, but it reminded me of the hack to make consumer GeForce Nvidia cards appear to be their overpriced, professional, Quadro counterparts:
It's at least plausible that running them faster means servicing is more expensive (assuming these were supplied under service contracts / leases which seems to be the usual case for office copiers).
I am 100% okay with hardware that has been leased having artificial limitations. I don't own a leased device. I am paying for my usage of it. Running something at half capacity for service reliability reasons is a valid strategy.
I'm 100% okay with artificial limitations on hardware I buy, too, so long as they're upfront about capabilities - Running something at half capacity for service reliability reasons is still a valid strategy when dealing with warranties. I have no problem buying an AMD Ryzen 7900 which is literally the same silicon on the same fab as the 7950, but binned differently. They are clear about what they're providing, what the specs are, and it's possible that it could perform better, but I know what they're guaranteeing. Sometimes I don't like it - If yields are good, they could bin many more cards at the higher tier and drop the price, but they're under no obligation to provide me a better product out of charity; They should have competition that forces their hand.
It's where it's unclear or deceptive that it's a problem, and HP's scheme is a shakedown. We should invest in competitors.
I'd see them as a monopoly business. The cost to start a competitor is ridiculously high. The hardware sellers instead need to be broken up for competitiveness
My favorite is cable TV. First you paid extra if you wanted digital/HD, even though both analog and digital were on the wire. But after analog broadcasts were turned off, the cable companies were effectively downgrading HD signals and charging more if you wanted them NOT to do that!
haha. no. cable TV started because people didn't want to see commercials.
100% fact, at least where I grew up. we had no reception problems (flat farmland) and we were one of the first houses in one of the first towns in the area to get cable service. cable company promised no commercials ever, and that's why he subscribed, after a trial period. there were zero commercials.
I remember my father on the phone with the cable company, the company that owned the cable company, our state representative, and our governor, all within a month after the first commercials started airing. obviously it did no good.
Jeez, tone down the snark? Especially if you’re going to not provide any sources. Either way, you are incorrect. Cable TV indeed started as a way for folks to get TV when reception was otherwise impossible at the home (e.g. a mountain sits between them and the broadcast antenna). Fwiw, my great-grandfather started a small (small!) cable company in rural east coast-ish mountains back in the late 50s or early 60s because they otherwise had no reception.
Per Wikipedia [0]:
“The abbreviation "CATV" is used in the US for cable television and originally stood for community antenna television, from cable television's origins in 1948; in areas where over-the-air TV reception was limited by distance from transmitters or mountainous terrain, large community antennas were constructed, and cable was run from them to individual homes.
[…]
The early systems simply received weak (broadcast) channels, amplified them, and sent them over unshielded wires to the subscribers, limited to a community or to adjacent communities. The receiving antenna would be taller than any individual subscriber could afford, thus bringing in stronger signals; in hilly or mountainous terrain it would be placed at a high elevation.”
Sure, that’s after cable evolved into something with enough bandwidth to the house to deliver dozens/hundreds of channels to a subscriber, not to mention the necessary distribution infrastructure on the back-end (e.g. satellite). That wasn’t the case at first. Heck, Sputnik hadn’t even launched when cable started.
AT&T already did this. You were paying not only for the service but all of the equipment as well. You didn't actually own anything from the phone company.
>It is quite common to sell the physically identical unit with different softwarelocks for different prices (Want 350 MHz bandwidth instead of 80? Pay some extra).
Literally every "scan tool" for troubleshooting machinery is like this.
I worked for a company that made customers send units in for an ‘upgrade’.
The upgrade consisted of popping open the case to pull an SD card out and update a text file with a list of enabled features. Could be a few grand in new features after the ‘upgrade’.
I can only imagine a few technicians figured this trick out on their own.
Sorry, you were on the family plan. If you want access to adult content you will have to add the .xxx package (and also scan your government issued ID and/or install the adult verification app on your phone if you live in France, UK or in the states of Texas or Louisiana).
Your home router has always been on the "subscription plan". Once your vendor abandons the hardware and ceases updates, do you really want an opaque, un-inspectable black box with access to your whole network, while the CVEs pile up and you have no patch or upgrade options left?
Your IOTs are all on subscription plan. All it takes is a defunct company, yank from the App Store, or unpatched CVEs and you'll need to physically uninstall that puppy, whether it's your dishwasher, fridge, thermostat, or lawn sprinklers. Have fun.
> Your home router has always been on the "subscription plan". Once your vendor abandons the hardware and ceases updates, do you really want an opaque, un-inspectable black box with access to your whole network, while the CVEs pile up and you have no patch or upgrade options left?
> Internet of things has been considered a misnomer because devices do not need to be connected to the public internet, they only need to be connected to a network, and be individually addressable.
IF that is correct, and I've had my suspicions about some network connected devices, then its sold under false pretences because its buying a product that you think you own but actually dont and it makes this deceitful. Saying that I know of a car manufacturer that will brick your engine a short while after a dealer service in a bid to give it an upgrade, I've had that done to me, by a certain German company, unless some other spooky entity has more oversight and access to things than they care to let on to.
I'm not sure why you have "IF". Different software has long been a different cost option on enterprise network kit.
If you are buying an enterprise switch you know exactly what you're getting
(In reality it features you don't buy on Juniper seem to still work, just print nags to the log file. Arista from what I can see are fully featured anyway. I'm talking basic routing features like BGP rather than some cloud based librenms the sales guy keeps trying to flog)
We have been explicitly told that a DNA Advantage 3 Year License will continue to work after the 3 year license though. All companies are moving to a per-year charge though, as it keeps the money rolling in.
Which is ironic given one of the original motivations behind Richard Stallman getting involved in open source and part of the foundational history of the whole GNU FOSS organisations and ecosystem… is that he got frustrated with a printer and wanted to write his own software to run it (basically wanting to write his own firmware) for it.
Given we have open source 3D printers… why are there no good open source regular printers? Does no one really care that much? Is it too much of a niche desire given the ubiquitous nature of shitty printers round the world being sold for less than they cost in a parasitical effort to trap owners into a sunk cost fallacy of paying for overpriced ink?
The argument I've been hearing when this comes up is that the mechanical side of ordinary 2d printers is too high-precision for hobbyist work.
This sounds plausible, the actual nozzle holes in an inkjet printer are around .003 inches (76 µm for the rest of us) according to Wikipedia [1]. That sounds like some pretty high-order manufacturing is needed, I'm not drilling that out in the shed.
Perhaps the best bet would be to find a commercially available printer (laser or inkjet) and reverse engineer it, perhaps replacing the control board with a Raspberry Pi or something more suitable (ESP32?) to drive the existing electro-mechanical components with an open firmare.
The most realistic approach is probably to build an open-source printer which can drive proprietary cartridges (which would be refillable because the printer won't complain). People could even design different cartridge holders for a few different models.
It wouldn't be easy, but 3d printers also made immense progress despite technical challenges. I first heard about them in the reprap days and now we can buy well-engineered 3d printers with fancy features like resonance compensation ("input shaping").
People who are hacking in the free time often go towards hacking on things that are fun and interesting. When 3D printing appeared, it was (still is) immensely fun and interesting; "printing your own physical objects?!".
On the other hand you have 2D printing on paper, which is nowhere near as fun and interesting, so you have less people gravitating towards hacking on 2D printing software and hardware. Granted, a few FOSS giants are obviously maintaining the stack, which is amazing.
Same with programming languages for example. You give a developer unlimited free time to learn whatever language they want, they'll probably either go for a language that was newly released and hyped (like Rust) or something obscenely old (like COBOL), probably won't spend time learning PHP or Perl which are too old to be new but too new to be old.
That’s the argument I usually hear as well. But a lot of the fidelity of such a high precision system is basically “wasted” reproducing the kinds of analog effects that exist at the edges of the ink meets paper part of writing/illustrating with a physical implement. Plotters with pens are still a commercial niche because the need for precise clean vector graphics to be mass produced in small batches of specific content (think custom topography maps with survey and drilling markers, or mission maps for a specific regional campaign, or other commercial line art work)
It’s sort of surprising there isn’t a well established reprap of plotting given it’s simplicity. The biggest missing piece is arguably the paper feed.
And as for an inkjet… why does a reliable printer need to be that good, I’d be pretty happy with a “higher dpi” pseudo dot matrix printer using a lift retract style mechanism and a hacked up refillable ink pen. Tapping out the art one dot at a time.
It’s not a bad argument for a lot of consumer printing use cases, but the “they need too much precision” never felt compelling to me given the breadth of printer technology both past and present.
The "high precision" is required for the very basic use case of printing a page of black on white text that does not look horrible, and being able to reliably print a 30 page document without jamming. Making the paper feed and printing head positioning hardware to do that is 90% of the way of the expense of building a decent printer.
Even 20 years ago most of that plotting work had been taken over by large-format inkjets - I used to be involved with a few print shops around that time.
> Given we have open source 3D printers… why are there no good open source regular printers?
Most engineers can get an adequate printer - such as a small office laser printer - for 1-2 days wages. And can print things at work, their boss doesn't mind a few pages here and there. And can get photos printed at the supermarket for 10 seconds wages. So there's not much motivation to scratch an itch.
Existing printing technology can also produce photo-quality prints, and is heavily cost-optimised (albeit with very expensive ink). So there's not much motivation to improve on the state of the art in regards to print quality, or upfront purchase price.
Beyond the basic accuracy needs being vastly higher as others have said there's more going on in a paper printer than a 3D printer. Principally the actual paper feeding and movement is pretty complex and well beyond anything needed for a 3D printer.
I think the tolerances are much finer in regular printers, leading to the fact that not anyone can create and tune their homebrew printer. Building and tuning a 3D printer requires much less precision, making it more suitable for open source (for everyone) usage.
In my youth I found RMS to be excessively dogmatic, inflexible, and obsessed with ideological purity even in situations where it didn't appear to be relevant or matter.
I now see that he was probably right about everything, and every year, users lose more and more ground in the war.
RMS has some issues, but ultimately even deeply flawed people can still have great ideas. He's a good example of why a good message shouldn't be ignored because of the messenger. No one is right 100% of the time about everything, but he was absolutely right about the importance of freedom and technology. He's got some great views on copyright too.
I'm not sure it's the same at all. With most Saas, there's no upfront cost, there is nothing you "buy" that you can reasonably consider to be "yours" and use in isolation. Say, a managed database, you pay per resource unit whatever it is, time, space, whatever. If you use a managed service you pay per user or whatever.
Eh... I think SaaS is just a more polished version of basically the same idea.
There absolutely is an upfront cost - a company has paid to create the software that enables that SaaS.
They are simply hiding that from view of the customer, and only offering a rental option.
You used to be able to actually buy stand-alone software, which you installed, and managed on hardware you'd bought, and which upgraded only when you decided to buy again.
But... it turns out it's less profitable to sell standalone software - so the vast majority of vendors are just quietly dropping that option and moving to subscription only licenses: SaaS.
Basically
> there is nothing you "buy" that you can reasonably consider to be "yours" and use in isolation.
Is entirely intentional, and exactly what the printer manufacturer wishes they could do - except they have the pesky problem of having to provide hardware that actually prints at some point. But it's DEFINITELY not the only way to sell software.
All these examples are missing the nefarious bait-and-switchy property to them like the printer example does. When you start using a managed SQL DB from GCP for instance there is no expectation whatsoever that you can use that offline. But you can still spin up a PostgreSQL and use that offline, no problem. No one can turn that off. Sure there are things like licensing but those have existed forever.
> You used to be able to actually buy stand-alone software, which you installed, and managed on hardware you'd bought, and which upgraded only when you decided to buy again.
That's not what Saas is usually considered though, at least in my experience. A note taking app needing a subscription to work isn't what I imagine this thread means when we talk about SaaS.
When they try to make their lives easier at the gross expense of their customers?
It's like those terrible runaway train memes where one track has 100 people and the other track has 1 rich man. Guess which side they always choose to run over?
I am referring to the desire. I presume almost everyone would like to be paid a salary, regardless of working or not working, just like "businesspeople" want subscription revenues.
Everyone has the desire for fist-sized rubies and emeralds too, but having a desire for something doesn't make it reasonable. Exploiting customers so that 'businesspeople' can get what they want isn't justified by "But everyone wants things"
Sure, we should expect them to be greedy, but when they get too greedy we should hold them accountable. It's too late for me though, I stopped buying HP printers ages ago and while all inkjet printers are scams, and I would advise anyone to avoid them in general, HP currently tops the list of printer companies I'd recommend people avoid.
Coming from a "I deal in hardware and professional services around implementing that hardware" background SaaS always struck me a bit different than this kind of thing. SaaS is basically a rental whereas you've bought these things and then need to still pay rent to use them anyways.
I think about this often. I feel justified by working on a product that is strictly B2B, enterprise software. No predatory practices towards end users. Is that any better or am I deluding myself?
>> I think about this often. I feel justified by working on a product that is strictly B2B, enterprise software. No predatory practices towards end users. Is that any better or am I deluding myself?
I think the question is whether you're providing an actual service that has value, or just charging rent for the software and calling it SaaS. Software has a marginal cost of ZERO, so SaaS is often simple rent-seeking. A company might actually use the money to develop a better version of the software, but that's actually optional on their part.
So does Acura/Honda. Used to be on the key fob, but now it’s through a phone app with a subscription. I thought it was ridiculous until I learned how it worked. Instead of being RF based, it works using Sirius XM satellite data pushes.
I’m not sure how to feel about it now. I think the satellite version is more secure, but does have a different cost structure.
(I only found this out when our account wouldn’t work for months. Then a few months ago there was a security issue with that system that reset our account.)
Tl;dr: They didn't actually bother to put security into the app
> We could execute commands on vehicles and fetch user information from the accounts by only knowing the victim's VIN number, something that was on the windshield.
Conceptually I have less of an issue with it for cars. I think encouraging car-sharing, at least in urban environments, would be a good thing. Most cars spend the vast majority of the day either parked at home, or at work.
This is already being done by moet major brands these days. They can only withhold luxury features like heated seating for now, but who knows when they take away basic features such as radio, replace it with a Spotify app, and demand a special subscription to listen tk music in your car.
I was trying to look up a Tesla special case (where upgrading the infotainment unit removes the radio unless an additional $500 upgrade is purchased) and learned that several EV manufacturers have already removed AM radio because electric motors interfere with that frequency range.
I used to always jailbreak my iphone (mostly because I was one of the first owners and had been doing that since it was possible). The last time I did it, the apps were just too sketchy and wanted too much permissions. I didn't really see the value in it. Maybe things are better these days, but I haven't checked in the last 6-7 years.
I'm not an expert at legalese or have access to LexisNexis, but after a quick Google search, I think this is it:
> a warrantor cannot, as a matter of law, avoid liability under a written warranty where a defect is unrelated to the use by a consumer of “unauthorized” articles or service.
There is oddly little ECU/BSI/onboard computer hacking (beyond flashing a tune, mostly to change engine specific settings). Or maybe there is, but I never managed to find an active community that goes beyond ecu tunes. I guess it's due to how fragmented the hardware is (even if most auto manufacturers usually source the components and systems from the same vendors).
Unless it has an AI, “you have violated the integrity of this vehicle, starting protocols have been disabled. Please contact your local representative.”
You're telling me that I can go to the U.S. and purchase a car, perform unauthorised modifications to its systems and the manufacturer still has to honour the warranty? That sounds excellent!
As long as what you do doesn't cause the damage that you want them to repair under the warranty. They still have to honor the warranty for the unaffected systems.
The upper middle class will cheer is because they can afford it and they would rather see the poors on the bus than in a used car. Maybe the ones with a little bit more self awareness than average will feel dirty about it.
As someone who is upper middle class, I dispute this. It doesn't matter how much I make, I feel like I'm drowning in monthly subscription fees already. Nobody wants to pay a recurring fee for what should be a one-time payment.
People vote with their wallets. If they buy stuff that's cloud and subscription based, that's the world we're going to live in tomorrow. Big corporations are of course very happy to proceed - it gives them a lot of power, control and higher profits (e.g. Adobe has drastically increased their sales since moving their programms to a subscirption model).
And IMHO it's a done deal. Almost no one nowadays listens to MP3s, rather than Spitify or Apple Music. Few people buy or download movies, rathen than subscribing to Netflix and other streaming services. Most people are accepting the requirement that they need an online account to use an iPhone, Chromebook or a Windows PC.
I think we vote when we vote. The relative prices of true ownership and subscriptions aren’t random: they’re set by companies trying to shape a market where they can extract recurring revenue. Normal cash-constrained people are going to do what’s individually rational; it’s not reasonable to expect most people to pay a premium in the hope that it might actualize the market we’d prefer.
If we want a different slate of choices we should use the collective power we have to make it happen. ‘People vote with their wallets’ is just a way for self-interested companies to shift the blame.
> it’s not reasonable to expect most people to pay a premium in the hope that it might actualize the market we’d prefer
Nobody is saying that, though. Time is money, and if your printer is bricking itself because you forgot to update your credit card information, that will be wasted time, and you'll remember that when it comes time to pick a printer vendor in the future.
US is world's biggest market and home to most big tech companies. It has a two party system. Do you suggest that the majority of people will select which of the two parties to vote for, based on their stance on subsriptions? Or that it's possible to force one of the two parties to take a strong position against subscriptions?
Of course not, but that's a pretty naive view of how politics works. (Naive and cynical at the same time is a nice trick.)
On second- and third-tier issues, politicians take their cues from friendly activists and interest groups, for whatever "friendly" means to that particular elected. Think about how many politicians' reelection messages are basically bullet-points of small-bore asks delivered. Each individual item may not win many votes, exactly, but they create a general sense that the candidate is engaged and effective. And perhaps more importantly, it's hard for potential opponents to build support when the incumbent is delivering for the most engaged voters in the district. Anyways a politician needs to do something while in office; it might as well be the stuff that people they respect want.
So: you frame this issue, and how it's confluent with the broader [Democratic/Republican] outlook. You clarify the desired legislative outcome. You show some public support, which takes many fewer people than you might think, and set up some meetings. Hopefully you find a sponsor. Then repeat as necessary to get the bill introduced, voted on, and maybe even passed.
None of this is easy; it's a ton of work, and by no means guaranteed of success. It's especially difficult in today's US where so much gets bottled up behind partisan showboating. But it also happens all the time. See the traction the right-to-repair movement is getting.
As this point, you're no longer voting, but engaging in activist effort to make a change.
Really it's the same for "voting with your wallet" - to actually vote with your wallet, you need to start a competing company that offers the service that you want.
If we’re just doing literary criticism, sure, fair enough.
In actual practice, as here, ‘vote with your wallet’ stands in for “people are choosing this, nothing to be done.” And ‘voting’ stands for collective action to change the choices on offer.
But sure, starting a company’s great too. Though with concentrated markets and high barriers to entry, that won’t always be feasible: I wouldn’t want to start a printer company, and that’s probably not the worst case.
The problem with these services is that they're not portable and you don't realize it until it is too late. For example, there is this service called "Vudu" in the US that lets you purchase movies that get added to your 'library' or if you have the physical disc, keep a copy in your 'library.' Then you take a job out of the US and find you can't even access the service. So, buried deep in the ToS, you discover that you agreed to lose access if you leave the US. Meanwhile, you thought you were saving a few boxes worth of shipping by leaving the physical disks in the US.
Same with Apple. At the time we moved, we had a few movies in our library that wouldn't transfer to the new region. We had to go "buy" them again (at which point it would realize you already owned it and charge zero currency). FWIW, Apple has since fixed this and when you change regions, your purchases come over (mostly) without any issues.
If we could fix the region shenanigans, all of this would be fine IMHO. At least when it comes to digital content.
People just don't want to vote with their wallets. Voting with your wallet isn't sustainable when the options you have to pick from are what's on the market. What's on the market will never be what you want to vote for; you want to vote for change.
Of course they do. They can buy a Blu-Ray disk of a movie they want to watch (and potentially store a copy on a home NAS) or buy a Netflix subscription. Can buy a digital recording of a song, or a Spotify subsription.
> They can buy a Blu-Ray disk of a movie they want to watch
No, they can't. A lot of new releases never leave streaming services.
You still need a Netflix subscription to obtain some of the DVDs for their "netflix originals". They do still ship DVDs, but they aren't available to buy separately, you need the streaming subscription to access them.
Some "netflix originals" have DVDs sold outside of Netflix (i.e. on Amazon), but not all; you need to order DVDs directly from Netflix as part of their DVD service, I believe. (If they are even available at all.)
> Can buy a digital recording of a song, or a Spotify subsription
No, they still can't. A lot of indie artists release on Spotify but never make physical media of any kind. You can't buy songs DRM-free from Spotify.
The answer is "well don't listen to that song then" but this kind of voting is really dumb and people do not like to do this. They'll suck it up and throw money even if they hate it with their entire being. Because society as a whole has been conditioned to do this, unfortunately, and no matter how hard you try to start a revolution, this is a fact of life and you cannot avoid it.
Tell me: when what you want is no longer on the market at all, how do you vote for it? With your wallet? Do you just not buy its replacement? Nobody will care. Unless you manage to start a revolution all at once, you not buying something will be statistically insignificant.
>> Can buy a digital recording of a song, or a Spotify subsription
> No, they still can't. A lot of indie artists release on Spotify but never make physical media of any kind.
You're contrasting spotify with physical media, but responding to a remark that didn't say physical media. Are you aware that digital downloads of music have been DRM-free from iTunes and Amazon for many years now? Physical media is irrelevant.
I'm sure you might respond by saying that some artists are spotify-exclusives (I wouldn't listen to them on principle, but you do you). But the way you contrasted spotify with physical media specifically makes me think you might not be aware that DRM-free digital music downloads have been the norm since the late-00s (about the last time I ever bought a CD!)
Sorry, I was contrasting with physical media because their first example was indeed contrasting with physical media. My point still stands. It doesn't have to be physical media, Spotify does not offer DRM-free downloads and some artists are indeed Spotify-exclusive.
I am not blind to the existence of DRM-free music downloads, no.
I think a lot of enterprise networking gear requires licenses. Meraki APs don't work without a subscription, for example.
A long time ago, I once had a Netgear WGR614v10 (802.11g router). Imagine my surprise when I learned that it was possible to enable telnet access, alter the model number in the NVRAM, and flash WNR1000v3 firmware onto it, converting it to an 802.11n router. They were identical internally.
> Edit: Louis suggests Brother as a brand that doesn't do this. However, what guarantees are there that they won't?
Everybody I know buys Brother because they don't do that shit. And, of course, they produce decent printers that do their job properly and aren't that expensive to maintain.
You need to sign in to an Apple account to get it going for the first time or to buy apps through the app store, or to do software updates. But you don't need to stay signed in or use the cloud services. Granted, it will pop up annoying notifications, but (at least so far) you're not required to use their servers. I have a second iPhone which I bought unlocked and don't have any phone service set up for. I bought it specifically to use as a camera. I can use it on my WiFi, not signed in, record video, AirDrop the files to a different machine, and never connect to iCloud. The day Apple starts doing what Microsoft is trying to do with Windows and remove the possibility of access without using the cloud will be the day I stop using iPhones.
Well, I never actually said I really approved of their "walled garden" app store. I will say that I use Signal, and once I've installed it I can sign out and continue to use it. And there's no need to stay signed in to use the cell network for either voice or data.
I feel this is hyperbolic, because in my head, why would you ever buy a defective-by-design piece of junk? But I am aware that I'm an outlier here, with a ~20 year old printer, ~15 year old TV, 10 year old laptop running coreboot with no ME chaperone, 13 year old desktop running libreboot with no ME chaperone, very few Internet of Trash devices that are allowed to connect to the Internet, no streaming services, no software subscriptions, etc.
I do appreciate that many of these decisions have required effort and self actualization. Like I'm not particularly expecting a non-tech yuppie to seek out a libreboot machine. But if I were in the market to replace any of these things, I'd turn to the commercial and the used markets rather than walking into Best Buy (or worse searching Amazon) and narrowing my field of view to only shiny surveillance traps.
I do have to wonder what it will take to get the technologically sustainable choices into the general public consciousness, so they stop buying things designed to milk your wallet and spy on you for a few short years, before they're deliberately obsoleted.
> I feel this is hyperbolic, because in my head, why would you ever buy a defective-by-design piece of junk?
Because manufacturers will not mention their product is defective by design. Until I heard of the HP ink subscription scheme a year or two ago, I would not think twice if they advertised such a feature since the expectation is that I could still buy ink independently. I would not expect the printer to stop functioning if I did not subscribe.
That's not to say that I would have bought HP. I already knew that they were not upfront about a lot of things and I already had a company that I trusted. (Ironically, a company that people claimed produced cheap junk back in the 90's.) That said, there are a lot of people buying their first printer and who have little concept of what the pitfalls are. Certain types of pitfalls are rarely mentioned in reviews and, when they are, they may come off as hyperbolic. That said, even commercial products have their pitfalls. I had to deal with a Xerox printer a while back that refused to work with a toner purchased under a support contract since the printer was not covered by the support contract. (The printer was purchased separately since the Internet connection wasn't reliable at that site.)
Of course manufacturers will never mention that their product is defective by design. The change I'm referring to is when consumers will stop relying on nonsense advertising / placement to comparison shop, actually care about how something functions, and reject products that are built with backdoor control.
And yeah the same crapification is happening to commercial markets, at slower or faster paces. The point is that most of this gimmicky consumer shit is just advertising skins on functionality that was already solved 20 years ago, and buying a new old stock or refurbished products would meet the need while avoiding backdoors.
It just feels like so many of the headlines these days about Internet of Trash and subscription service rugpulls are like the old doctor joke - "Doc, it hurts when I do this" ... "Well, stop doing that".
These technologically sustainable choices would also have to be desirable on their own merits. Largely, they're not; they're often ugly, difficult to use, require specialized knowledge, or of uncertain quality (e.g. used cars). The technologically sustainable, not-designed-to-milk-your-wallet alternative to subscription music services is ... buying or pirating everything you want individually, which is inconvenient and potentially even more expensive than Spotify. That's an uphill battle.
What's the sustainable alternative to buying a new locked-down laptop? If it's a ten-year-old laptop running coreboot then almost nobody is ever going to go that route. You could explain your principles until you're blue in the face but it will never seem like a better alternative than a fast, warrantied new laptop that does almost everything they want to do fairly easily.
While I agree with the general dynamic of what you're saying, you're also referencing a lot of the advertising bullet points that are used to confuse consumers to sell crap. Like there's very little point to worrying about a 3 year warranty that you'll have to beg the company to send a service person out for, for an item that is expected to last 10-20 years (like say a TV or appliances).
Also the point of opting for media self-ownership (which may include piracy) isn't to save money on subscription services, but rather to avoid the inevitable rug pulls and other backstabbing down the line. All these articles about Netflix clamping down on account sharing are only relevant if you've bought into their zero sum world. I understand that's where pop culture is these days, but it's unfortunate that the tech community, who should know better, treats it as if it's anything more than a passing fad.
Use a print shop/library, hit up a friend/coworker, or figure out a different way of getting the immediate task done without printing. Basically anything that isn't walking into a store and dropping a few hundred dollars on a fully-fledged simulation of a capital asset, that will likely put you in the same exact urgent situation within a year or two.
I totally understand the impulse to spend a bit of money and feel that you're solving a problem now and for the future. But these companies have evolved their offerings to fully take advantage of this behavior, and the only way to protect yourself is to take a step back and act deliberately.
Even if you manage to postpone buying a printer, needing one can still be inevitable. You asked "why would you buy a defective-by-design piece of junk", the answer is buying anything else seems to be impossible. Holding on to whatever you bought 10-20 years ago does not solve the problem going forward.
Better consumer options have been mentioned in this thread. There is repair. There is used hardware. And there are new non-consumer-targeted products. And sure, sometimes you just have to compromise. But not nearly as much as people end up doing when they feel pressed to make quick decisions on the spot, and fall for advertising and placement.
This is simply wrong though. These printer companies will gladly sell you a printer that is entirely under your control. Nobody is forcing you to sign up for particular terms, but consumers are doing that for convenience and lower prices.
> you're free to not use their services and instead turn to the non-existent companies that will put the users over maximizing profits
This is just a strawman argument though. No company on earth is putting users over maximizing profits, but that doesn't lead logically to your conclusion that people don't have choices. People have plenty of choices, because the act of maximizing profits requires exploring and providing many ways of buying something. Some people want to pay per-page, some people want to buy a printer outright and handle maintenance themselves. Both options are available.
> Brother as a brand that doesn't do this. However, what guarantees are there that they won't?
The void in the market it would leave, and some company would (and as you can see, has) take advantage of it to provide consumers with this buying format.
> No company on earth is putting users over maximizing profits
That isn't even remotely true. Many companies are run by people who actually have morals and, even if only for selfish reasons, want customers to not hate them.
I've worked for companies that refused to do things like sell user data, knowing full well that they'd be making lots of money doing it, but knowing that it was wrong and would make customers hate them. They weren't worried that unhappy customers would flock to competitors either. One was a telecom who was the only game in town for many of their users.
It's not always and entirely a race to the bottom where companies do as little as possible for customers while charging customers as much as humanly possible and it shouldn't be, but that is how things often end up. It's why we have that cycle where good products/companies gain massive popularity by putting users over maximizing profits until someone steps in who is too greedy and suddenly users are forced to find alternatives when greed ruins yet another good thing.
There are good companies and great products that put users before maximizing profit every single day. The fact that exploitative assholes also exist doesn't mean that's how everyone behaves, or that it's how everyone should.
> No company on earth is putting users over maximizing profits
> That isn't even remotely true
> even if only for selfish reasons
So we're on the same page. You just repeated what I said. Companies don't put users before profits, but the act of seeking profits (the "selfish reasons" as you put it) require stopping short of some things.
Your mistake is assuming that those selfish reasons are all about profit. Other motivations may include things like having a vision of themselves or their company as actually caring for the customers they serve, refusing to compromise their products/services because they themselves (along with others they care about) are also users of them, or even purely ideological reasons (actually having some integrity). Exactly how selfish those kinds of motivations are is open to debate, but there's no need to get into philosophical arguments about whether or not mankind is capable of altruism because either way, money still isn't the motivation or goal behind it.
I promise you, there really are companies that put their users before maximizing profits. There genuinely are people who aren't obsessed with money over all else.
Nope, scanner one has already been the case IMO. I had a Cannon MFP, a set of ink cartridges costed around $80 which could yield no more than 80 pages. I realized that and decided to only use the scanner and dumped the empty cartridges. And you guess what, the scanner stopped working too.
There is something to be done in legislation, or such malicious behaviors will become more and more rampant.
These were banned in America decades ago because they were unfair to women (urinals were always free.) So this one at least probably won't be coming back.
The brush head on my Sonicare toothbrush recently "expired" and a yellow led started blinking. Later, it started making a particular vibration pattern when switched on. Now, I'm waiting for it to refuse to start up entirely.
The apparent wear on the head seems minor, so far. The $80 brush came with only one head.
Some people seem to be getting counterfeit brush heads from Amazon, so I'm going to have to visit my Walgreens for a spare, and then wait to see what happens.
I also find these "features" despicable, however in Sonicare's case this one is mostly benign.
I also have a Sonicare toothbrush, and other then the head it came with, I only use generic heads on it. The "feature" you are talking about is called the "BrushSync" and it enables the "Brush head replacement reminder". That feature doesn't activate with generic heads, and you can easily turn it for Sonicare heads. Here's a link to the manual for my brush. See page 11 for the feature description and 12 for the instructions to turn it off. Depending on your model you may need to do a different sequence.
Now, you might say that without reminders, I'm not getting the clean I deserve, but I buy heads with those fade away indicator bristles, so I just change it out when the blue turns white.
> What's next? Scanners only working under a subscription? Your Wi-Fi router or switches only working when a license is active (even your LAN)? Your chargers, PSUs or UPSes only being allowed to work for 6 months, before you're forced to buy a newer model? Needing a monthly subscription to use your OS or browser? I don't even know anymore...
I know. All of it, and worse, unless we fight back. And no, "voting with your wallet" is not fighting - it's retreat to not yet conquered ground, which is shrinking daily.
Ads. There could be a freemium model where, before every print job, a couple of pages of ads are printed if you don’t have the premium ink subscription.
Next is Netflix style "have to he connected to the registered adrdress to work". Or take our 0.01¢/minute subscription to be able to print 10 pages in one more location in additional to your registered address every month.
It's both very logical due to limited perspective in capitalism and probably self destructing. A lot of these will start to look either useless (the need to print is small these days) or better replaced by other ways (low res, organic cheap ink, nozzle bought as parts).
What do you expect to happen when you sign up for the subscription ink? If you don't pay for your subscription, the ink stops working. AFAIK, the printers compatible with subscription ink also work fine with regular ink. I will say, the UX is pretty poor when the subscription ends because the card can't be charged and the user doesn't read their email to know, and it's one of the printers that only has a non very obvious symbol to indicate the problem, and that symbol isn't shown in the manual, and someone (me) is helping them over the phone and only barely knew about the setup.
And inkjets are such a PITA for low volume printing. I wish dotmatrix printers would come back. The output quality is poor, they're loud, the paper is iffy, but ink ribbons last a pretty good amount of time for low volumes, and there's near zero warm up time; and you can print banners!
> With this service you are not paying for the ink.
As soon as somebody develops the technology they will make all the ink on your already printed documents turn invisible too.
It's only half a joke, if this becomes feasible I'm sure the business and marketing folks will have some urgent meetings to bring this along ASAP.
Our financials focused system is good at exerting pressure for people to do stuff, anything, but it fails miserably in promoting reason, instead creating narrow minds narrowly focused on The System itself rather than on the broad set of inputs our minds were originally evolution-made to handle. No wonder that than in turn those narrow minds are much more easily replaced by automated processes.
We keep calling people disregarding their humanity "bad people", but we never discuss the incredible pressures we put on people in the first place. If somebody doesn't focus on the financials we call them lazy and failures and many refuse to support them, we force people to think - and act - that way. Sure, in theory money could be made in better ways than, for example, "extracting value" from people who urgently need some drug, but fact is that this is not nearly as easy as it sounds, with much of the basic needs already in well-established hands and things people really need very complex to fulfill. Individuals and organizations with little capital can mostly only find some local niche, if even that. "You don't need to be an asshole" (to make money) is one of those "works for anyone" but it does not scale to "everyone". Even small local mini-entrepreneurs often have to rely on tricks and cheating and using the inexperience and lack of knowledge of their customers.
So, when we look at such developments, please, let's not stop at "those are horrible people". Just look back at the explanations for why Pizarro's was so brutal, if I read that correctly the conquerors themselves were put under huge pressure due to... debt. We can't expect people to act ethically, to their own big disadvantage, while having to live in a highly competitive system that forces them to make money.
The pattern, attributed to huge pressure, also shows itself under a somewhat low pressure of everyday life, and even under no pressure at all.
I wonder if it's at all possible for us to develop and install a system that prevents us from exhibiting behaviors learned the hard way by our ancestors (most of which were not even human).
Maybe our digital descendants are able to get it right, if we don't also ground them in survival!
> We can't expect people to act ethically, to their own big disadvantage, while having to live in a highly competitive system that forces them to make money.
Capitalism is a brutal system. It’s becoming more obvious the longer it runs. I don’t have answers, sadly. Only the ability to see and recognize the failure.
well, different times and standards etc. but there is a quite bit of difference between brutal genocide to get out of debt vs. not allowing your printer to work unless you keep your subscription with our company so our revenue keeps coming in.
No, same mechanism. Yes, different contexts lead to different outcomes, why would that even need to be mentioned? Did you read what I wrote? Sometimes I hate Internet discussions. Instead of working with one another, the goal seems to be trying to find an interpretation that make sit possible to attack a post/position. If only I can find one flaw in your argument - by using my own most uncharitable interpretation that you forgot to explicitly prevent with several pages of small print - I'm contributing!
How do the different outcomes due to different contexts, which obviously will turn out very different in almost every single different context, make my statement less valid?
> How do the different outcomes due to different contexts, which obviously will turn out very different in almost every single different context, make my statement less valid?
Because your statement is black and white. By your logic, if we don't provide literally 100% of everything needed to survive without requiring anything back at all for every person the system is evil.
Real life is shades of grey. Society requires some incentive for people in it to work in order to function. Of course, we can argue about the specifics, but you'll quickly release that if we provide everything for everybody that there is nobody left to do the providing (at least with today's technology).
perhaps you're going through something at the moment? I just found the example of Pisarro somewhat amusing.
But that said I do think they actually are a bit different, lots of people won't kill someone even if they will pick up a wallet on the street and take the money instead of giving it back to the people. Your example implies people who will do one bad thing for monetary incentives will do the worst thing. Which is why I found it funny and pointed it out, not to imply that people don't do bad things for monetary incentives, just genocide probably needs a little extra push than that.
Yes, you’re also not charged for running cleaning cycles etc
I personally abuse the hell out of HP subscription service as I’m on their legacy free plan. 30 pages a month, and run a full set of cleaning cycles each time because I print so infrequently.
I don't think that's an adequate comparison to what they are selling.
If I rent a car and stop paying for it, if I were to say "I expect them to leave me with the car I rented and just not provide a replacement when it needs to be replaced" people would look at me like I was trolling. The nature of renting a car, and the prices involved in renting vs buying are great enough that people understand the market.
With ink, they are doing something similar. You aren't paying $1/month (their lowest tier plan) to buy a cartridge of ink until it runs out. That pricing would be unreasonable compared to the current market price of ink (regardless of what that market price should be if we had better competition). Anyone thinking they found a hack to get HP to give them ink cartridges for $1 is like my example thinking I found a slightly used 2022 car for $500 because I can rent it and then stop paying and get to keep the car.
In this specific case, they aren't taking the ink back, not worth it, and instead creating waste by disabling it. We could say there market shouldn't exist and outlaw it to reduce waste, but that's a different argument than to argue they are selling you a cartridge of ink (technically 2+ for black and color) for $1.
Should people be allowed to sell their organs? How about selling themselves into slavery or indentured servitude? Unless your answer is "yes to both", you agree that there is a line somewhere for things that aren't okay just because you entered into a contract that said they were, and it's just a matter of defining where that line is.
I don't think this is a fair comparison. They are selling a service starting at $1 to give you ink cartridges with limits on their use. This isn't some technical gotcha or trick. Sure, there is likely some UI underhandedness that tricks people into signing up for this, and that should be called out, but the business model is not inherently abusive. People thinking they can pay $1, get an ink cartridge, and then cancel the subscription and keep the ink cartridge to use are having unrealistic expectations of a service.
> People thinking they can pay $1, get an ink cartridge, and then cancel the subscription and keep the ink cartridge to use are having unrealistic expectations of a service.
What if I pay $1, run the ink cartridge dry the first day, then immediately cancel?
People are not allowed to sell their organs because it would make illegal organ harvesting harder for law enforcement to catch. People are not allowed to sell themselves into indentured servitude because it would be impossible to prove that someone agreed to it. So yes, you're right, there are things you're not allowed to agree to, for the good of society. Are you seriously suggesting that not being allowed to rent ink is in some way comparable?
If it were legal to sell yourself into slavery (as it once was), we know what would happen: A lot of companies would try to push people into the position where people would feel they had no other choice to become slaves, and companies would position themselves to take advantage of this fact. We would then have a permanent class of slaves in the world, which would dehumanize them and gradually freeze the hearts of everybody who was made to interact with this system. We know this would happen because it did happen. And it was a long road for humanity as a whole to get rid of it (and we still haven’t completely).
And you would throw it all away because of some personal libertarian principle? This isn’t only about what you would like to be able to do in any given moment, it’s what this ability does to society as a whole. Your ability to someday be able to sell yourself into slavery has some value (for the principle of the thing, if nothing else), but it is certainly not worth the above-mentioned effects on society.
There is nothing wrong with selling selling some portion or all of your flesh for profit.
It's morally repugnant and unambiguously reprehensible to buy any of the flesh of another person.
A market with only sellers and no buyers is ineffective at best, and given the moral reprehensibility of any buyers that do appear, the entire market is tainted and wrong. Any and all of the infrastructure to support such a market is wrong. Anyone involved in buying, aiding, or abetting slavery or organ running is guilty of committing one of the most grievous and wretched offences known to humanity.
But yeah, it's absolutely your right to do with your body what you want. It's just a complete wrong for anyone else to do what they want with your body.
oh my child is going to die unless she gets expensive life saving treatment, but luckily I live in the world of sneak where I can sell myself to get tortured to death for the amusement of Bill Gates!
My body, my choice.
day after my death: huh, Bill Gates didn't pay, but luckily my wife can always sue for the money!
Given your premise of a world where a billionaire wants to torture you to death, I'm puzzled as to why you'd think that the legality of a contract he's going to break anyway would matter at all.
alright we want a society where it is possible for people to sell themselves into slavery which it is not possible to do today, but we will remove the most likely incentives (currently existing in our society) that would cause someone to do something so stupid?
No, no, no - companies should make the major aspects obvious up front. If anything said "buy" rather than "rent, with remote deactivation" then the company made it unclear on purpose.
>What do you expect to happen when you sign up for the subscription ink?
I would expect sufficient ink for the number of pages I signed up for to appear periodically until I have a large surplus, at which point I can either reduce my subscription, or cancel it.
I wouldn't expect that ink to retroactively be bricked.
Laser printers are far, far better in terms of consumables, as long as you avoid the very lowest cost units, and DRM hobbled units.
Well, the sales page says you can rollover pages, but only until you have 3x your monthly alotment.
The ink is only valid during your subscription period, like most other service subscriptions. When you cancel your phone, you don't to use the excess minutes. When you cancel your insurance, you don't get to make a claim for an event after the expiration date. It's 10 pages a month (or whatever plan you sign up for), so you didn't print and the month is done, so is your ink. You can put in a regular cartridge if you want regular rules, but $1/month to maybe print and they'll send more ink when it dries up seems like an ok deal to me? (Was better when it was free, but they got bills, I guess)
Frankly, I don't expect ink cartridges to work after a month or two if I haven't printed anything, either. I'm happy with the color laser I got from CDW Outlet, but while discounted, it was still probably the cost of 4 inkjets and I don't know if I'll really use it enough to justify. But other than some duplexing oddities sometimes, it just works and that's really nice.
I’m not sure I see the relevance. I’m paying for a printing service, when I stop paying, I stop getting a printing service.
The fact that there’s physical ink cartridges involved is neither here-nor-there. It’s a practical requirement, nothing else.
Rental cars these days will disable themselves if you don’t return at the of the rental. The SIM card in your phone stops working when the subscription ends etc etc. There are plenty of services involving physical assets that stop working when you stop paying.
Also how much printing do you do? I get an ink cartridge maybe once a year.
If I pay for a subscription for e.g. food delivery, I get something delivered every n days. If I stop paying, they don't come back and steal all the previously delivered but unused parts either.
What the average consumer expects from a service like instant ink is "a subscription for new ink cartridges when needed" and not "a subscription for individual pages".
With my SIM card, that's actually the case, too: It's prepaid, but with an automatic recharge of 8€/month. Money that's not used stays on the card, forever.
> What the average consumer expects from a service like instant ink is "a subscription for new ink cartridges when needed" and not "a subscription for individual pages".
Obviously not. You’ve paid for food delivery, you got what you paid for, why would they take it back? It’s not like you’re paying for cooked meals.
> What the average consumer expects from a service like instant ink is "a subscription for new ink cartridges when needed" and not "a subscription for individual pages".
Have you ever read or tried to signup for the service? Literally everything is priced per page. A no point do they say you’re getting a subscription ink service, it’s quite explicitly a per page printing service.
I’m sorry, but you bought a service that clearly sold and priced as “$X per month for Y printed pages”, and misinterpret that as “$X per month, for Y ink”, then that’s on you.
Personally, I'd recommend just nuking HP from orbit until it's gone.
Printers, and their manufacturers sucks, and HP is the worst of the bunch. No one should ever even try to defend them, there is nothing defensible about them.
Especially considering you can now buy printers that only ever work with instant ink and reject all other cartridges.
I'm all for that, but only if we can also nuke all HP Printers crowding the 5GHz spectrum with their "HP JetDirect" 5Ghz APs. My neighbor has one, and I swear that useless HP printer AP is louder than my wifi router in many parts of my house. I will never, ever buy an HP printer because of that.
> What the average consumer expects from a service like instant ink is "a subscription for new ink cartridges when needed" and not "a subscription for individual pages".
Where does that expectation come from, exactly? The name?
The pricing page is clearly and explicitly all about pages per month [1].
> It's prepaid, but with an automatic recharge of 8€/month. Money that's not used stays on the card, forever.
So you're comparing a different type of plan here.
Prepaid mobile plans like this are akin to Amazon's "subscribe and save" program: they'll charge and send you a cartridge on whatever frequency you like, regardless of usage. Choose too frequent and you'll amass as huge stockpile; too infrequent and you'll run out of ink.
Instant Ink is like 'regular' mobile plans: you get x GB per month for a certain price. If you cancel your plan, even though you only used 5% of your data for that month, you don't get to continue your plan.
HP's FAQ even say this [2]:
> If you decide to cancel your HP Instant Ink, you can go back to using HP original Standard or XL cartridges. HP Instant Ink cartridges will not work after the end of the current billing cycle in which you cancel. To continue printing after your billing cycle ends, make sure you have standard replacement ink cartridges ready to use in your printer.
The alternative to all this is to just buy regular cartridges as you need them.
They don't send you stuff every month. You pay a fixed monthly price for a certain number of pages of whatever color/quality you want along with some page count rollover benefits. You no longer buy cartridges. The printer phones home when the cartridge runs low (well before that based on their proprietary predictive algorithm) and a new one arrives soon thereafter automatically. It's not like you have more than 1-2 cartridges at a time. And you never pay for them in any case.
Incidentally you can still install standard (non-subscription tied - e.g. bought at Costco) cartridges and the subscription status is then irrelevant (but of course you pay for those cartridges so they're yours to do with as you please unlike the rented subscription ones), but that's not the point (for the most part).
I find it handy for super low volume printing needs at home.
Do you get a new delivery box every month, and a new trash can every month, and get to keep all of the old ones indefinitely, but then have to return them all at once if you cancel? Does your milk normally not expire at all, but suddenly all expire at once when you stop getting more?
You're paying $1 for 10 pages of printing a month. Stop paying, no printing. (They have larger plans, too, but if you're printing 50 pages a month, I'd bet the regular cartridges work well and don't dry up).
Don't want to pay for subscription ink? No problem, get the regular ink. Have some account problem and can't pay for subscription ink, you can still get regular ink and use that (subject to the usual inkjet printer woes that come with not printing much).
Seems like leasing a car and complaining you're expected to return it after the lease.
> Seems like leasing a car and complaining you're expected to return it after the lease.
If instead of giving the car back so they can resell it, you had to crush it or replace the engine oil with sodium silicate, then you'd be absolutely right to complain. Useful things should never intentionally be forced to become waste just to protect a business model.
HP provide a free ink return and recycling service. Nobody is forcing you waste the ink, you wanna see it reused, send it back!
HP also use much larger capacity cartridges for this services. So under normal circumstances there’s less ink and fewer wasted hunks of plastic floating around. Not sure how you provide this service if signing up for one month got a years worth of ink, and no obligation to pay anymore.
It's also wasteful to have to send a perfectly good cartridge back and then go pick up a new one. And if HP knows how to make better, larger capacity ink cartridges, what reason other than greed could there be to limit them to their predatory subscription program?
> I don't expect ink cartridges to work after a month or two if I haven't printed anything, either.
I have a Deskjet 4515 for a decade or so. I use regular ink cartridges with it, and even if I don't print anything for three months, it just prints fine. Sometimes a couple of nozzles get clogged, but printing or a quick clean restores them to perfect order. When you're printing in "Normal" quality, these clogs are tolerated somehow, so you don't see the degradation in the quality either.
Modern HP printers came a very long way since 500C/550C days. These are resilient machines now, even if they're made to home-duty level of robustness.
HP may have many quirks and unethical practices around ink, but ink quality and machine resilience are not two of them.
Well considering all the HP printers I gave away sans one were working perfectly, and it worked with any OS I ever used, I'll pay the difference in terms of reliability and experience.
The first one was given away because I got a Canon bubblejet for free, and that was really unreliable and expensive.
I got my second HP with my money, and gave it away for a HP scanner/printer combo which again I got free with a laptop purchase.
The one I broke was this combo, which was worn away in a decade. I probably used it beyond its designated life, and it was a bottom of the barrel machine.
Then, I got the 4515 I'm using now, with my own money, again.
I'd have said the same thing for Samsung lasers, but they have stopped making them. I'm hoarding some spares for mine. These things are also built like tanks. They were jointly built with Xerox, so they were something.
I'm not a person who replaces all IT equipment every year, and I'll accept a higher TCO if I can keep the machine for a longer time, and can buy its spares for a considerable amount of time. Also, as a person who mingled with inks and printers for a long time, I'd not buy off-brand ink for my devices. It just doesn't worth it.
P.S.: I don't like color lasers for printing out documents I plan to work on, because the triple-baking process makes the paper shiny, and the paper becomes less than ideal to take notes or markup. A B&W laser is perfect for papers and other stuff, and inkjet is perfect for color documents which I want to read and work-on. Plus it's a decent quality photo printer, too. I take photos and printing them and gifting them is great. People love it.
> I'd have said the same thing for Samsung lasers, but they have stopped making them.
I got fed up with overpriced HP ink cartridges that clog up; so I paid about £120 for a Samsung mono laser (I hardly ever need colour, and if I do I can walk to a local print-shop with a memory stick).
A couple of months later I discovered that Samsung's printer division had been borged by HP. Happily, toner is reasonably priced, and 5 years on the machine works fine. If it ever breaks I'll just chuck it in the skip - I'm not going to tangle with HP support.
Actually, Samsung sold the division since it is not their core business anymore. You may only need rollers and a new imaging unit down the line if yours has a replaceable drum.
Please don't override drum over-use protection, because it also holds the waste toner unit. If it explodes, your machine is done.
I have a spare drum unit and plan to buy three more large toners for mine, so I can use it for 7-8 years more at least. Then we'll see what happens.
The machine I bought takes toner cartridges with an integrated drum. The only consumable is cartridges.
The cartridge that came with it seems to have been less than a quarter full; it lasted a few months. Since then, the full replacement cartridge is still going strong.
Looks like it's like my first one. I have an MD series one (home-office class). Which has 3000 page cartridges and 9000 page drum.
The upside is, everything inside it can be changed, incl. rollers, so as long as I have spares for it, it'll live on. Mine also supports AirPrint, so anyone can print from anything (Android has an app/driver for it, too).
I have a 23 year old Brother 490CW Inkjet printer, and I love that damn thing.
I print maybe 20-30 pages a year, mostly return labels, around 4 years ago I had to print around 200 pages which it did without a hiccup.
Once a week it wakes up and does its maintenance and I truly love it when it does it.
During these 23 years I've bought 2 sets of 20 inks at less than 15€ per set (2010 and 2014, which reminds me that maybe it's time I buy another one). The printer itself did cost 160€ in 2010.
I think I'll never get as lucky again as I did with that printer.
> AFAIK, the printers compatible with subscription ink also work fine with regular ink.
This is actually not always true. When I was looking at a printer on Amazon I noticed in the small print of the description that it had to have the subscription ink and there was no alternative. It was a printer that was on massive sale and it looked like a great deal but I'm very glad that I passed up the opportunity.
HP Instant Ink is based on pages, not cartridges. Choose a plan based on the number of pages you would like to print monthly. Your monthly fee allows you to use our subscription cartridges to print your plan pages and includes ink or toner, delivery and recycling.
Can I still use my Subscription Cartridges if I cancel the service?
From the moment you insert the first service cartridges received with your Welcome Package, all following cartridges received will be Subscription Cartridges.
If you cancel the Service, even if the Subscription Cartridges provided with your subscription are not empty, they will stop working in your printer and you will have to replace all of them with standard cartridges.
So I don't get the big deal here? You get the printer, it still works, you can still use it and it's not bricked. I get the definition of the word has been stretched but this is not a bricked device by any definition (there's no lock, or reset or anything to be done).
Yes, it's not ideal to waste the remaining ink, but that's such a non issue as you can still use it by paying the subscription until it runs out (which is basically equivalent to paying for the ink they sent you).
Spotify does something somewhat similar as I've found recently. My card expired that was hooked into spotify. When I logged back in it let me know, but then I lost all of my saved content. Hundreds of albums that, as far as I can tell, I must now go through in my library and click individually to redownload. Downloads only happen when the spotify app is active and the display is not asleep. The chore seems so annoying that frankly I'm seriously considering being a pirate to never have to deal with this sort of thing again.
> Spotify does something somewhat similar
> then I lost all of my saved content
I mean, hardly the same here. Offline content is only available to subscribed users, so it makes sense that it's physically deleted from your computer, but you don't lose it: all your "favorites" are still attached to your account.
I do agree that it's a pain if you rely on offline music, but not re-downloading previously-downloaded content is more of a programming issue than a policy one, unless they specifically do it to save on egress fees.
With their generous freemium program, I don't really fault Spotify here and it's unfair to compare it to HP.
In my experience, Spotify regularly deletes saved content. I've had many flights where my "offline" library won't play, and after I get back on wifi Spotify starts re-downloading all my supposedly "offline" songs.
Yes, for airplanes, but also sometimes I don't have a great data connection for streaming while driving in a car or riding transit, or I'm approaching my data limit and would rather not burn LTE. I'd like to think battery life is improved too.
Note: Spotify is probably required to do this as a condition of their licensing agreements with ASPCA, etc.
Different terms apply to streamed music vs downloaded music, so offline-caching of music would have required negotiated exemptions from the licensing organizations. They probably had to limit the period of time that a downloaded song could be accessed offline.
If you listen to these songs so much, just buy them. If you're a programmer it should be pocket change for you.
Don't feel to bad, Spotify deleted all my saved content too, which I learned while on a trip out in the woods. My card didn't decline or expire, Spotifiy either updated and/or glitched and dumped everything along with any memory of what was downloaded.
Our HP OfficeJet Pro 8210 (2020) stopped printing in January because we had generic ink cartridges installed. It updated itself even though I had firmware updates turned off.
Real HP cartridges are about $80 - the cost of a new printer. So you can guess what our next step will be and which brand we won't be buying.
Whenever I click into Louis Rossman rant videos I am always so distracted by how much I want that chair. It looks so comfy.
Re: printers, I recently replaced the toner cartridge that came with the Brother B&W multifunction laser printer I bought 12 years ago. Could not be happier with that thing. I sprung for the extended capacity cartridge at Micro Center for the replacement so there's a decent actuarial chance it will outlive me.
I have a HL-5250DN that's been going since 2005. The paper tray died a few years ago, but at this point I don't print more than a dozen pages a year so I just use the multipurpose feed tray on the front. I think the drum is down to about 30% of its life remaining, but that probably equates to about 10k pages so I don't expect it to give up any time soon.
I have had the Brother MFC-L2710DN for close to 4 years now. I have had not a single problem with it. Super easy to use and maintain. 90% of the time it's completely turned off. Once left it unplugged for 5 months. Turned it back on and worked without a hitch.
bought for $100 eight years ago -- I took it with me when I moved countries -- still going strong. toner refills available from third parties on Amazon for very cheap.
features
wifi + ethernet
laser monochrome printer with 2-sided duplex printing
flatbed scanner & automatic document feeder for scanner
no duplex for scanning (you will have to manually flip over the source pages if you want to scan the back side too)
HL-L2375DW has been working great for us for a while now. It cost about €125 new and we pay €30 for toner cartridges that do 1400 pages - so about 2¢/page. Wifi, ethernet, duplexing.
Still on my Brother's starter cartridge. It's been close to a decade. I've moved, gotten married, and had kids. Printer still prints, though a couple years ago I did need to replace one tiny plastic part.
This is like the printer edition of Netware! Do you remember those websites where people would post photographs of how long a Netware server was running? So much fun...
This is the you'll own nothing and like it movement from HP. You pay per number of papers printed, and get ink in the mail but you are only renting the printer from HP and not owning it. They can also shut you off if they want to.
This is like digital files instead of DVDs, CDs, Cassette tapes, etc. With DRM they can shut off your access to the files. With the physical media you have unlimited access to the medium.
>This is like digital files instead of ... With the physical media you have unlimited access to the medium.
You don't need physical media: it takes up a lot of space. Digital files are usually better. Digital files with DRM, however, are crap. Don't use it, and don't buy it.
>This is the you'll own nothing and like it movement from HP. You pay per number of papers printed, and get ink in the mail but you are only renting the printer from HP and not owning it. They can also shut you off if they want to.
Even worse, since this is crappy inkjet technology, unless things have improved since I last looked at inkjets (I doubt it), the print heads dry up over time if they're not used, requiring replacement of the print cartridges even though there's still ink. This doesn't happen with laser printers; you can leave them for a year, and then print out a page and it works fine.
I keep trying to tell non-technical people I know not to buy into this scam of an industry (inkjet printing), but no one listens to me.
Digital files are usually better, but only in the moment. Moving away from physical objects means you're now doomed to the Sisyphean task of constantly managing a backup & migration strategy and have looming futureproofing issues when the format in question becomes deprecated. Tell me again how much of a drag it is to have a set of shelves with movies on them?
"Bitrot" is not a law of nature. Rather, protection from it is a racket. Media by far outlive the usefulness of the data on them, which is subject to planned obsolescence. They sell you a solution to a problem that wouldn't exist if they themselves hadn't created it.
I own a MacBook from 2010, fully equipped with software that cost me 4 figures back then (Adobe Creative Suite, MS Office, various bits of commercial music production software etc. etc.) and came with perpetual licenses and physical media.
...yet somehow they managed to render it worthless so that they could charge me again for what I already owned, namely office software and design software.
On the other hand I own DVDs from 2010 that no longer play because of poor manufacturing quality.
Of course I can play the rips of them, but then it's effort to keep the data rotated through backups. Not a lot of effort, but still effort that most people don't want to do.
You do realize that optical discs degrade over time, right? Usually, they last a long time, but many people have found that old CDs, for instance, weren't manufactured quite right and the metal layer corroded over time.
Writable optical discs are far, far worse, and are completely untrustworthy as a long-term archive solution.
So I don't think you really can avoid the need for constantly managing and migrating your backups.
Finally, "a set of shelves" with movies can take quite a lot of space if you have hundreds or thousands of movies. To me, it's easier with music: I don't listen to that much music, and I listen to a large portion of my library many, many times over. Movie-watching is quite different from this; I don't re-watch movies or TV shows very often, but it's nice to have them available for those times I want to, or when a friend wants to watch something. So it's quite possible to collect far more video than audio, at least in my personal experience.
Nah. I've got 25 year old copies of movies that play perfectly well on optical media. 300 titles take up significantly less space than a bookshelf, and in a pinch you can just stack them all neatly in a tote or similar for long term storage. Observed reality trumps hypothetical reality.
> Moving away from physical objects means you're now doomed to the Sisyphean task of constantly managing a backup & migration strategy and have looming futureproofing issues when the format in question becomes deprecated.
You still get that with physical objects. How are your shelves of VHS tapes and LaserDiscs doing?
In a post-apocalyptic setup I can build a shelter from VHS tapes (LaserDiscs could be used to reflect sunlight on solar panels). Hard drives are inconveniently heavy to make a chainmail out of, but they could be used for light shielding against ionizing radiation.
I can put 2000 DVDs or 400 Blu-rays onto a single hard drive and then either keep the discs as backup (no cases needed, tucked away in a closet) or pay Amazon a few dollars a month. Migration is a matter of clicking copy and paste every handful of years.
I have no idea what you mean by "the format in question becomes deprecated". A physical disc will become deprecated long before the ripped version ever will.
We now pretending harddrives don't have a tendency to shit the bed without warning? Like, that's not a thing that happens anymore? And you're going to, with a straight face, advance the claim that digital platforms and media in play today will still be viable in their current form in 30 years? Because I've got optical media in the house that's almost that old that's still perfectly viable.
> We now pretending harddrives don't have a tendency to shit the bed without warning? Like, that's not a thing that happens anymore?
Most of my HDD failures hav been preceeded by either errors logged via SMART or outright bad blocks. Generally, immediate full on failures are good because you can just switch over to backups whereas with more gradual failures there is a chance of corrupted data making it into your backups. Less of a concern for write-once data like movie rips though.
> And you're going to, with a straight face, advance the claim that digital platforms and media in play today will still be viable in their current form in 30 years?
Platforms will go away, sure, but formats will be supported for a long time by ffmpeg and players using ffmpeg. Probably longer than any player for your physical discs.
> Because I've got optical media in the house that's almost that old that's still perfectly viable.
And other people had optical media fail in much less time. There are always outliers.
Anyway, pretty sure GP is talking about storing rips of optical media (otherwise keeping the discs as backup would make less sense) so you can get the best of both worlds - convenient digital files with the optical media as a disaster recovery in case your files rot first. That's my current stategy anyway.
> We now pretending harddrives don't have a tendency to shit the bed without warning?
No, that's why I talked about backups and copies.
> And you're going to, with a straight face, advance the claim that digital platforms and media in play today will still be viable in their current form in 30 years? Because I've got optical media in the house that's almost that old that's still perfectly viable.
Those optical media are a digital platform. And I do claim it will be easier to get software in 30 years that can play back an mpeg file than it will be to get hardware that reads an optical disc and... plays back the mpeg data written on the disc.
MPEG-1 turns 30 this year and every media player handles it fine. MPEG-2, which DVDs use, is over 25 and every media player handles it fine. They'll still handle it in 30 more years, I'm certain. Along with the codecs Blu-ray uses.
As for the hard drive itself, USB and NTFS should last but I wasn't suggesting using the same model the entire time. I said to migrate to a new drive every handful of years.
No, not "all of which". That benefit is one part of the story.
I assume you want to use the discs, right? The effort to swap between discs to watch a different one is not very far from the effort to copy your entire digital library. And you have to do the former every viewing, while you have to do the latter once every five years.
And it takes up hundreds of times less physical space.
Also your original argument was two parts. One, that's it's sisyphean. That's somewhat true except the amount of effort is trivial and the original discs will also start to rot if you wait decades. The second original argument made was about formats being deprecated, and that one is flat out wrong. The discs will deprecate before the files will. And the part about shelves not being a problem isn't true for everyone and often isn't true for big collections.
You are ridiculous. Taking a dvd out of a case is absolutely not on the same order as acquiring and maintaining (ongoing as purchases are made) a digital backup strategy. And there's an entire graveyard of file formats from the 90s you'd have to write software from scratch to decode these days so let's dispense with the notion that digital media formats are a settled matter.
It's a drag when you pull out a movie you haven't watched in a while, and the disc is delaminating. Or you're watching something that glitches in a particular spot and you just end up fast forwarding to the next scene to keep watching, forever skipping that part of the movie. And then you remember you paid money for that trash.
Also I don't see mpv/Kodi ever deprecating support for x264. And even if there were some compelling reason to leave the format behind, you can always transcode or just redownload.
>Also I don't see mpv/Kodi ever deprecating support for x264.
Basically, this will never happen (barring some kind of planetary catastrophe). The software for these codecs is ubiquitous and easily downloadable. You can still download software for very, very old codecs that didn't get as much use as x264; this stuff is all built into ffmpeg AFAIK. This is one of the huge benefits of open formats (or at least formats with free software decoders; remember MP3 was patent-encumbered for a long time but there was still a FOSS codec).
Some weird proprietary format/codec doesn't have this benefit, such as DIVX (the DVD competitor, not to be confused with the FOSS codec).
> This is the you'll own nothing and like it movement from HP. You pay per number of papers printed, and get ink in the mail but you are only renting the printer from HP and not owning it.
This is how a lot of businesses do their printing/photocopying. And it can make sense if you're printing a lot per month. They don't have to worry about repairs/servicing or upgrading and can pay monthly/quarterly from expenses rather than capital outlay.
Doing it for home use/small printers/small usage seems madness though.
I use this service for now because my wife is a teacher and she has to print a lot of stuff, at home, in color (yea I know the schools should be paying for that but that's not how teaching in the US works apparently). The printer itself is like 100 dollars and I have to say the convenience of not having to drive to Walmart at 10pm Sunday because she surprise-printed 150 pages of stuff is kind of nice.
That said the printer only prints well for about 2 years before color images just start to streak no matter how new your print cartridge is or how many times you clean/align. I'd love to invest in a color laser but last time I went through this it was close to 600 bucks to just get started.
I wonder if it's time to check that option out again...
> I'd love to invest in a color laser but last time I went through this it was close to 600 bucks to just get started.
A color laser is effectively four laser printers in one box, so it is inherently going to be multiple times the cost of a single one.
That said, unless your wife is printing mostly actual photos that she cares about having in top quality, the color laser is the right answer if she actually needs color.
Inkjet printers are for photos and nothing else. They range between not good and bad at documents, always have, and always will. Anything greyscale made of mostly solid colors is laser's territory.
Brother has color laser printers starting at around $250, but they get you on the toner cartridges... $75 each and it takes four of them. It probably works out to be cheaper than an inkjet though since you don't have to worry about toner drying out when you've only used half the cartridge.
Serious question: why not try inkjet with refillable tanks? I use Canon Pixma for 2 years, I print A4 full color page every day, one time I printed color book and BW book with a lot of images. I spent like $ 8-12 on non-original ink and I didn't even finish these 4 200ml bottles yet.
This is really a key point. Inkjet printers are great for printing photos and will work great if you do so frequently. But if you don't, they have issues.
Unless you print something in "full color" (and even if you do), you rarely use the inks evenly. One cartridge will always run out or dry out faster than another. Also, ink can dry out in the jets - causing clogs and resulting in streaks. Also, if a cartridge dries out, the printer thinks it is empty and almost always requires you to replace it before printing even if you don't need it.
They're great for photos (especially Canons), but a simple BW laser is a better investment if all you print is documents. If you need color (for documents), a color laser is also more ideal. It is much more expensive up front, but also a good long-term investment. Toner you use less frequently (like cyan) won't dry out. It'll just sit there until the odd day that you need it. Prints-per-cartridge are usually higher since the cartridges are typically larger, physically. Streaking in the conventional sense isn't even possible with how the tech works. Price-per-print is typically much lower. Especially if you consider less trips to the store, and less replacing of wasted cartridges.
A $600 color laser (more like $400 now) can be an expensive upfront investment, but for printing color docs, it's almost always cheaper in the long run.
Source: I worked retail in college and sold printers and had this conversation literally thousands of times.
That's what we recommended. Print something that uses all the colors at least once a week to keep the ink moving. I believe some printers have a "test" print that does exactly this.
If $(perceived PR value of pretending to recycle) - $(envelopes) < $(marginal cost of making cartridges actually recyclable) then you can bet they are going straight in the dumpster.
This ignores that there are options besides the envelopes.
If they were just going to throw them away, they'd do something like team up with Best Buy to have an cartridge recycling bin available. Most of the PR value at a fraction of the cost.
Actually sending prepaid envelopes means they're probably recycling them.
Nothing bricks the printer. The title is misleading.
If:
A) You have subscribed to HP Instant Ink
and
B) You stop paying for your subscription
The ink you have in your home as part of that subscription will no longer work in your printer.
You can use other ink in the printer. The printer is not bricked. It simply disables the revocable license you were paying for to use the ink in the cartridges they shipped you. They sell cartridges that don't have this model.
Whether or not the model is dumb or the idea that the ink "stops working" if you stop paying makes one chafe, the printer itself does not magically turn into a paperweight. (And the ink is supposed to be returned to HP.)
> If the government actually cared about the environment
With so many issues affecting humanity, it's impossible to address them all and immediately unless you live in an authoritarian yet super-efficient regime. If you like that, look into Singapore.
Considering how much time, energy and money my government spends on bullshit, all the while saying how important the environment is to them, I'd say this argument doesn't hold much water.
Alright, my understanding is that the big ones are Canon, Epson, Brother, and Hp.
Depending on brand and model they call them inktank/eco-tank/mega-tank/inkvestment ... and so on.
Mine is a Canon, but from what I've seen/heard Epson, and Brother have happy users as well. Honestly haven't heard from anyone using a Hp inktank so I can't say anything about it.
I bought an Epson ET "EcoTank" I believe the model is a 2711, printer/scanner combo; It was ~£200 a year or two ago, has no display so the interface is a bit rubbish, and it was a nightmare to get working since all of mine and my wife's machines run Linux, but we got there.
We print from our phones over WiFi, we print all sorts of colouring in and cards and various things for the children, it's barely 1/4 through the tanks of ink which came with it.
The print quality is _ok_, not good enough to print family photos to go in a picture frame, but good enough for an invitation to a children's birthday party etc, but I had had enough of buying printer after printer where the 3-4 weeks between needing to print would dry out the cartridge and I'd be throwing away another £40 (or fighting with 3 or 4 sets of "compatibles" until one worked.
This feels as close as it can be to how 3D printing is for me, where I can stick basically "anything" I want, with a 1.75mm diameter and a melting point below 300C into the "print head" and it'll just work.
I regret to inform you that I bought Canon Pixma with refill tank and I happy with it. I print colorful A4 every day, sometime bw pages, for two years and so far I spent like $8-12 on ink refills.
Yeah I am still working on the bottles that came in the box, family of 4 with college students that print out a lot of work.
For me it is not even the cost of the ink that bothers me the most with the ink-cartridge-printers, it is the constant complaining about Cyan cartridge being low, and then refusing to print even black and white documents, then you replace one and the next day it starts complaining about Magenta or Yellow.
With the ink-tank there is a window into the tank - and you can see how much ink is left in each tank by this fantastic AR (Actual Realty) feature.
Sorry, looks like I failed on trying to sarcasm. Im pretty happy with this printer, but somehow there always a crowd of people praising laserjet, and usually its mentally exhausting to go against crowd.
Generally speaking ink printers are regarded as a decent option for someone whose printing is predictable. Its the people who print a bunch this week and then nothing for a month or so and then another burst, who benefit from laser printers, because there's no ink to dry up. It's not that hard to find yourself in this "sweet spot" where neither print shops nor ink printers are good value for money especially if you live in a country where bureaucracy is still paper-based.
On another subject, why do so many youtube people have to record themselves with a giant ugly microphone, whose sound quality is usually just average by the way, hanging from a huge arm in front of them, instead of using a simpler lavalier setup?
Because a lavalier setup is something you have to wear, but a giant ugly microphone on an arm is something you can just sit near.
It matters for mental effort when you just want to sit in your comfy chair and have a talk; all you have to do is hit record or stream on your computer, not mess with hooking up a microphone and a hardware recorder and such.
It's not (always) because these microphones have superior sound quality or anything. It's because of the convenience.
...which then inspires people who aren't youtubers to buy voice microphones which they aren't going to learn how to use so you either don't hear them, or they sound like their lips are almost resting on your ear.
Most of the one I watched definitely prep their video, their lightning, everything. They don't just seat, hit record and talk. Taking 30 seconds to mount a lavalier and pair it to OBS would totally be a routine.
I have an older model, when the new ink arrived the significant other tossed out the old cartridge. How was she suppose to know it wont work if you have no old previously accepted cartridge?
The lamest part is that it does print a test page AND prints the windos test page too. It bricks it self with a cartridge error the moment it receives a normal print job.
Over the holidays my parents asked me for help with their printer. Turns out their printer had disconnected from wifi so it couldn't reach the subscription verification web service. Their desktop app could connect to their webservice and the printer but evidently that isn't good enough.
It actually made me stop and think about starting a printer company, until I remembered Brother exists and isn't garbage yet. But even they have started a print rental service. :(
Exactly this happened to us recently and we ended up switching to a different brand printer a couple weeks ago. What is really strange is they must have done this like a ban hammer and why now? Our printer had been on an expired card for for literal years (ran out of black ink ages ago, but could use all the colors the same).
Edit: also kind of funny to see the printer we changed over to mentioned in this thread as a common replacement.
If you truly want to own the devices you buy, once they’re home add firewall rules to block their connectivity to their manufacturers, ad servers. Your smart tv or printer can continue to happily work without access to HP cloud servers.
This is until 5G becomes so ubiquitous that manufactures start including connectivity chips in all their devices so they don't have to rely on you connecting to the internet <:{o
If the printer has Wi-Fi, then all that really needs to happen is a business agreement with Amazon Sidewalk or Xfinity WiFi and a software update. If that happens, then lots of those offline printers could be online overnight.
There's currently a glaring lack of high-performance repairable devices. Sure, the Framework laptop is a fun experiment, but it's tiny and has no GPU, so it's useless for our line of work/hobbies. I'd imagine many others feel the same.
I wish people would throw out "thin and light" and make something practical. Nobody does it right. There are heavy laptops out there but they always sacrifice things like the display for that purpose.
Maybe one day we'll try to build our own laptop, but that requires such an astronomical level of expertise and commitment and money that we probably won't ever get to.
Yes/No :) YMMV, but I do rate the framework a tad higher than just an experiment. This is technically the 'first-of-a-new-kind' of a product and or laptop. Give it a few more generation.
The FW-Laptop might not have been the best example but my point is as much as these "evil-companies" do "evil-things" (like H.P now) there will arise a natural counter-market force an products (opportunities) to be "less-evil"
We contacted Framework directly and asked if they planned to build any larger or more powerful laptops. They said no. The most they can do at this point is try to set a precedent.
He was right all along. And many of us always knew that. But some of us at least expected the industry to not be THIS sociopathic. This randian. There would at least be some semblance of sanity, we assumed.
It appears not. Apparently the desire of 'the market' to extract maximum profit at ANY cost right here and right NOW tramples everything else. Consumer trust and the next decade's profits that hang on that trust be damned. Better to extract everything NOW, rather than build something long-lasting.
This can only be solved by regulation now. We are back to where we were at the turn of the century before consumer protection laws and regulations existed.
Nobody is forcing people to buy this garbage and there's plenty of alternatives. My car and no car I will ever buy will have a subscription model. No printer will either.
I never wanted a mobile with non-replaceable battery but suddenly the "market" decided that this the only option on offer
I never wanted a social network or search engine that spies on me and creates my behavioral profile for sale, but suddenly the "market" decided that this the only viable business model for those services
I never wanted a digital only payments system but soon the basic anonymity of using cash will be "suspicious" activity
> My car and no car I will ever buy will have a subscription model
You don't want a "subscription car" but I can assure you pretty soon both you and your car data will be traded amongst insurance companies, "brands" and who knows who else
Joe Consumer doesn't have the time, education or energy to do anything about all this. This is down to regulatory capture of the institutions that should protect us from out-of-control corporate or state interests. This is the stark reality especially in the US. There are slowly diverging attitudes e.g., in Europe, where 500 million people and 27 countries don't agree on much but managed to agree on a few consumer / data protections.
Lets hope we can reverse this dystopia before it becomes inescapable.
Cash has been considered de-facto evidence of illegal activity in the US for years. Banks are required to report cash transactions over $10,000. Not only are the police allowed to confiscate cash as de-facto evidence of criminal activity, they get to keep some of it too.
In a cashless society the bracket $0-$10000 becomes de-facto illegal as well. Nobody can accept non-digital payment, no matter how small, even if they want to.
Even in a perfect society that is not run by private rackets, captured governments, prone to drifting into authoritarianism etc, making the entire economic system contingent on particular electric/digital infrastructures seems absurdly cavalier and asking for deep trouble in the future.
I don't think you get the point. An officer can find a wad of 47 $1 bills in your wallet. They can claim that no one would carry around such a high number of one dollar bills unless they were making low level drug deals selling product on the street to end users of drugs. After all, wouldn't you just put a couple $20's in your wallet?
So it is not "become" but is in fact already illegal.
Yeah, ok, cant really verify those claims, but its a different issue really. If the police system is abusive then cash is just one of the countless other excuses it can find, as in: "Hey that Rolex of yours, it doesn't really fit your stand in society"
They still got an HP but I finally got my parents into buying a laser printer instead of fooling around with inkjet and its cartridges. It was still quite a bit, and more than $100, because they insisted on color and multifunction printer but after a week and still so far AFAIK they’re loving the laser printer.
I extolled how about my black and white laser printer like 5-7 years ago and I am still on the toner that came with the printer.
My Brother laser printer is one of my all-time highest ROI purchases. Ironic that it's not just TCO, it cost hardly more upfront than the HP / Epson junk it's permanently replaced. After decades of constant annoyance w/ unreliable low-quality printer ink scammy nonsense, I have a fast, quiet, reliable, low-(zero?)-maintenance machine.
I own 2 printers. A Brother laser printer (about $110) and a $59 HP Envy printer running Instant Ink. I gave away a working HP Office Jet and am totally satisfied. I totally understand the bargain. I’m paying for prints, not ink. I’ve had way fewer problems with this HP than any inkjet I have owned. Swapping ink carts costs me nothing. Support has been surprisingly good. I’m happy to pay HP $5.99 a month for 50 prints. If something goes wrong, the onus is on HP to get it working or they don’t get paid. Note that I have 2 printers so even if problems with the HP, I still have the Brother.
Why on earth people fell for this subscription racket in general is beyond me. I understand "subscribing" for things like Netflix. But "subscribing" for things like heated seats in your car I think is pure insanity.
In theory it makes sense for people who live in warm climates who might occasionally drive to colder climes. And that is what BMW had in mind apparently. BMWs sold in Scandinavia will not have the option to subscribe apparently.
More fodder for the “dumb” devices market. Hold onto your offline car & toaster. Seriously, this is both astonishing and revolting for most people, but maybe we all need to learn how to keep our dumb stuff working instead of throwing it away.
What's next? Scanners only working under a subscription? Your Wi-Fi router or switches only working when a license is active (even your LAN)? Your chargers, PSUs or UPSes only being allowed to work for 6 months, before you're forced to buy a newer model? Needing a monthly subscription to use your OS or browser? I don't even know anymore...
The printer example feels like it shouldn't be legal. The whole printer ink situation feels a lot like that. The companies are probably going to get away with this, because they're the ones setting the rules, you're free to not use their services and instead turn to the non-existent companies that will put the users over maximizing profits.
Edit: Louis suggests Brother as a brand that doesn't do this. However, what guarantees are there that they won't?