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Electronic Frontier Foundation Printer DRM

HP Replaces 'Free Ink for Life' Plan With '99 Cents a Month Or Your Printer Stops Working' (eff.org) 193

Posted by EditorDavid from the half-lives dept.
In a new essay at EFF.org, Cory Doctorow re-visits HP's anti-consumer "security updates" that disabled third-party ink cartridges (while missing real vulnerabilities that could actually bypass network firewalls).

Doctorow writes that it was just the beginning: HP's latest gambit challenges the basis of private property itself: a bold scheme! With the HP Instant Ink program, printer owners no longer own their ink cartridges or the ink in them. Instead, HP's customers have to pay a recurring monthly fee based on the number of pages they anticipate printing from month to month; HP mails subscribers cartridges with enough ink to cover their anticipated needs. If you exceed your estimated page-count, HP bills you for every page (if you choose not to pay, your printer refuses to print, even if there's ink in the cartridges). If you don't print all your pages, you can "roll over" a few of those pages to the next month, but you can't bank a year's worth of pages to, say, print out your novel or tax paperwork. Once you hit your maximum number of "banked" pages, HP annihilates any other pages you've paid for (but continues to bill you every month).

Now, you may be thinking, "All right, but at least HP's customers know what they're getting into when they take out one of these subscriptions," but you've underestimated HP's ingenuity. HP takes the position that its offers can be retracted at any time. For example, HP's "Free Ink for Life" subscription plan offered printer owners 15 pages per month as a means of tempting users to try out its ink subscription plan and of picking up some extra revenue in those months when these customers exceeded their 15-page limit. But Free Ink for Life customers got a nasty shock at the end of last month: HP had unilaterally canceled their "free ink for life" plan and replaced it with "a $0.99/month for all eternity or your printer stops working" plan...

For would-be robber-barons, "smart" gadgets are a moral hazard, an irresistible temptation to use those smarts to reconfigure the very nature of private property, such that only companies can truly own things, and the rest of us are mere licensors, whose use of the devices we purchase is bound by the ever-shifting terms and conditions set in distant boardrooms. From Apple to John Deere to GM to Tesla to Medtronic, the legal fiction that you don't own anything is used to force you to arrange your affairs to benefit corporate shareholders at your own expense. And when it comes to "razors and blades" business-model, embedded systems offer techno-dystopian possibilities that no shaving company ever dreamed of: the ability to use law and technology to prevent competitors from offering their own consumables. From coffee pods to juice packets, from kitty litter to light-bulbs, the printer-ink cartridge business-model has inspired many imitators.

HP has come a long way since the 1930s, reinventing itself several times, pioneering personal computers and servers. But the company's latest reinvention as a wallet-siphoning ink grifter is a sad turn indeed, and the only thing worse than HP's decline is the many imitators it has inspired.
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HP Replaces 'Free Ink for Life' Plan With '99 Cents a Month Or Your Printer Stops Working' More

HP Replaces 'Free Ink for Life' Plan With '99 Cents a Month Or Your Printer Stops Working'

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  • Buy Brother (Score:5, Insightful)

    by olsmeister ( 1488789 ) on Sunday November 08, 2020 @10:03PM (#60701432)
    I have had a Brother printer for the last 10 years. Zero problems and cheap ink.

    • Similar experience and my business ownerbro has three and loves them. I support his PCs but have never had to touch a printer.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by vivian ( 156520 )

        Speaking of PCs - every laptop I have purchased in the last 15 years has been ah HP.
        No longer.
        I refuse to continue to support a company that thinks this kind of practice is ok.
        The decision was already halfway made because frankly, their laptops seem to be getting worse and worse, but this kind of dick move is the icing on the cake.

    • Brother LASER! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Sunday November 08, 2020 @10:27PM (#60701514)

      Seconded. Never looked back.
      But please don't buy ink printers. The design is inherently crap, and always will be.

      Get a normal laser printer. Toner is much cheaper, and lasts longer.

      If you want photos ... I don't know how it is in the US, but in Germany, every drugstore has a couple of photo printers that make your inkjet look like a sorry joke and a normal photo print costs only 5-10 cents, which is much less than your inkjet too. (It does A4, and you can order anything from a picture album to a cup with a photo on it.)

      • Re:Brother LASER! (Score:5, Insightful)

        by hambone142 ( 2551854 ) on Sunday November 08, 2020 @11:19PM (#60701690)

        I agree. I gave up on HP printers "post Carly". She directed R&D to cheapen the printer mechanics and the quality decreased.

        Canon just sucks up ink "cleaning the print head". I've had my printer use half a cartridge cleaning.

        I finally settled with a Brother color laser printer. Reliable and none of the ink problems. Also inexpensive to run.

        • Another example that americas greatest enemy are its ceos.

        • Re:Brother LASER! (Score:5, Interesting)

          by michelcolman ( 1208008 ) on Monday November 09, 2020 @05:36AM (#60702392)

          I threw out my Canon after it used so much ink "cleaning heads" (for example to prepare for a scan job) that it had saturated the head cleaning sponges and ink was spilling out everywhere, smudging the paper. The HP I had before that was slightly better, but worse quality and still cleaning more than needed.

          I bought a Brother DPC-J1100DW color inkjet printer with huge ink reservoirs that last 3 years (probably more in our case since we don't print that much) and are easy and cheap to refill (the refill cartridges are just bottles of ink which is sucked into the internal reservoirs). The printer is a little bit more expensive but has already paid for itself since we would have needed at least 2 sets of cartridges on the Canon in the same amount of time, and we're only halfway on our first fill on the Brother. The printer hardly ever cleans its heads, in fact I sometimes have to activate the function manually when some of the heads clog up (which is not a problem, and far better than wasting whole cartridges worth of ink over the printer's lifetime by cleaning way too much).

          Never going back to Canon and HP. Certainly not with these new HP rental schemes where the printer refuses to print even if there's plenty of ink left, and they just revoke free for life programs. HP is now permanently on my naughty list.

      • +1 You and I don't agree on much, but we do agree on this.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        These days you can just order colour prints online. They often have offers where you get a load for free too.

        Having said that I have a colour laser because it's handy for printing schematics. I should really just get a large tablet to display them but I've had this thing for over a decade. The original cyan cartridge is saying it's nearly empty and I'm not sure if I'll replace it, I've used clone/refilled black ones before and they are as good as the originals. It's a Ricoh.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tflf ( 4410717 )

        If you want photos ... I don't know how it is in the US, but in Germany, every drugstore has a couple of photo printers that make your inkjet look like a sorry joke and a normal photo print costs only 5-10 cents, which is much less than your inkjet too. (It does A4, and you can order anything from a picture album to a cup with a photo on it.)

        Except for locations offering passport photos, a service with a high profit margin thanks to strict documentation, composition and quality requirements, here in Canada, in-store photo printers are rapidly disappearing. Third-party on-line photo printing services have been reducing in-store demand for years. For the chains, photo kiosks are being replaced by branded on-line printing services. On-line is cheaper and easier than putting kiosks in each store, and frees up valuable square footage for the sale of

    • Yeah, don't understand why anyone buys HP (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Sunday November 08, 2020 @10:46PM (#60701578)
      when Brother and Cannon both exist. Cannon has printers where you just pour ink into a reservoir. Brother's laser printers are cheap, durable and print great.

      • Epson has cartridgeless inkjets now, too. And there have long been continuous inking systems where you had reservoirs above the printer, connected to the cartridges with flexible lines. If you're willing to deal with calibration, or don't care much about color correctness, you can easily get away with third party inks. I have a Canon MX890 and it has small-capacity carts and goes through them quickly, but I got eight sets of el cheapo replacements for $15 which have been perfectly adequate for my purposes.

        • Re:Yeah, don't understand why anyone buys HP (Score:4, Informative)

          by Zappy ( 7013 ) on Monday November 09, 2020 @09:35AM (#60702950) Homepage

          With Epson ECO Tank, it's not the ink that is the problem, when the printer deems the waste ink sponge full it stops printing, at all. Without recourse. All official doc's you can find will tell you, you cannot replace and you'll risk spilling ink and just buy a new printer. The sponge was completely dry BTW, it's a counter not a sensor.
          For me this happened halfway through the second ink bottle.

          Not going to buy an Epson printer anytime soon.

          Got a Kyocera laser printer instead. Reconciled myself with the fact it will last only 100k prints, replacing all the parts who need replacing after 100k prints cost 5 times the price of the printer.

      • when Brother and Cannon both exist.

        My printer is a Samsung. I'm super happy with it.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sconeu ( 64226 )

          My only issue with Samsung was driver bloat, and the Linux drivers left some files publicly writable that should not have been.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by MrL0G1C ( 867445 )

          I got a old HP LJII for less the price of a toner cartridge... and it had a toner cartridge in it!!

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

        Epson and HP(!) also have ink tank printers. They are really expensive upfront compared to cartridge-based printers, but the cost per page is much lower too. Laser printers are also more expensive upfront than cartridge-based inkjets, and traditionally, they are not great at printing photos, but for text documents, they are unmatched.

        In the end, you decide based on your usage.

    • I bought a canon g2010. tanks. (Score:5, Informative)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 ) on Sunday November 08, 2020 @11:10PM (#60701656) Homepage Journal

      I can put whatever the fucking liquid I want into the tanks.

      this is the norm in asia. hp printing business is dead in the water already. if you got a tank printer next to it and with the hp one you would need a credit card and to make a plan and subscription and shit which one do people choose? well not the hp one thats for sure.

      • > you would need a credit card and to make a plan and subscription and shit which one do people choose

        Boomers. "Oh, HP is a brand I know!"

        The warehouse clubs are full of HP ink carts that cost $600 a gallon or whatever.

        Some people won't do any research and will only trust what they see in front of them. Amazon still seems weird and sketchy to them. They are HP's core market.

        I spoke to one oldster who had an egregiously wasteful printer and she just expected that to have a printer costs $40/mo but she n

    • I have two HP printers:
      1. An old Laserjet that just works.
      2. An all-in-one inkjet that is primarily used as a scanner. All-in-ones are the cheapest way to buy a scanner with a document feeder.

      Can anyone suggest an all-in-one with a document feeder that works well with Linux?

    • I moved to laser. Didn't need colors, so I bought a Brother laser printer/scanner/fax (not using fax anyway). Quality is great, prints quickly, toner replacement is easy.
      HP can go fuck themselves as far as I'm concerned.

  • It’s 2020 FFS (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AmazingRuss ( 555076 ) on Sunday November 08, 2020 @10:03PM (#60701434)
    Let the paper go.

    • I thought like that too.

      But then I realized: A printer is just a screen with a really slow refresh rate, that is really cheap too.
      That's how one should use it. For when one needs a big amount of screen space at the same time.

      • That's how one should use it. For when one needs a big amount of screen space at the same time.

        My computer screen is a 60-inch 4K TV from Costco.

        I can fit eight letter-size pages on the screen at once.

        I haven't printed to paper in months. I use my printer mainly as a scanner.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Tell the IRS that. When you have to call up financial documents for the last seven years at a moment's notice storing them on an accessible and reliable digital medium is a real problem. Anything cloud-based can disappear with no repercussions - "you didn't read our ToS?" Printing them out, putting them in a manilla folder and then shredding/binning them after seven years is a whole lot easier.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bert64 ( 520050 )

        Anything paper based can get lost, damaged, burned, eaten etc too.
        At a moment's notice searching digital files is much easier than looking through a stack of dead trees.

        Free cloud services sure cant be relied upon, but if you pay for a service it will come with an SLA. And of course for anything important, you keep a backup somewhere completely separate right?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by bogeskov ( 63797 )

          Are you under the assumption, that disks and could storage doesn't go "poof" every once in a while, even the expensive ones? Or doesn't get damaged... Experience tells me that, syncing with remote doesn't bode well, when your ssd silently begins failing. Ie reads blocks of zeroes, where data is supposed to be. Slowly but surely your backup is corrupted. And the odd file or two that suddenly gets rsync'd during the night due to changing hash, is not enough to raise red flags.
          And tell me about that magical OC

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Bert64 ( 520050 )

            Digital storage can have checksums to guard against corruption, combined with multiple backups so the chance of all copies becoming corrupt and unrecoverable is very slim. If the data is important, you can keep more perfect copies in different locations until you are satisfied with the level of redundancy.
            You can also have cryptographic signing to prove legitimacy.

            Your talk of faded and/or smudged ink show exactly why paper cannot be trusted, as there is no protection against that and it becomes guesswork t

        • Re:It’s 2020 FFS (Score:4, Funny)

          by Alumoi ( 1321661 ) on Monday November 09, 2020 @03:50AM (#60702212)

          And of course for anything important, you keep a backup somewhere completely separate right?

          Damn right, on paper. In a manilla folder.

        • I think you missed the poster's point. The IRS uses paper. Submissions are in paper. I send them a 941 once a quarter on paper. I keep digital and paper copies of everything. You conform to the IRS methods.

    • Re:It’s 2020 FFS (Score:5, Insightful)

      by freeze128 ( 544774 ) on Sunday November 08, 2020 @10:50PM (#60701592)
      No, don't buy inkjet printers... No matter HOW cheap the price. Laser printers have toner that is already dry, and won't clog the print heads.

      I hate to break it to you, but PAPER just served a HUGE role in the recent U.S. Election. Until there is ubiquitous electronic voting that is secure, reliable, and tamper-free, there is still a need in this world for words on paper.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by teg ( 97890 )

      Let the paper go.

      While I agree in principle, there's just too many things I need to "print, sign and return" or otherwise have to print - even if I digitally sign when I can. Not every month, but sometimes multiple things a month. I bought a cheap Epson Ecotank printer a couple of years ago, and it has worked like a charm since. No further purchases necesarry - unlike the Canon I had before then, which seemed to eat ink even when not in use.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      Unfortunately some orgs don't accept electronic documents for a lot of things, notably the UK government. Sadly I still find I need to print stuff occasionally.

      Been waiting for a decent A4 size tablet that doesn't cost too much to come along. Colour eInk would be nice but LCD is fine. Bought a document scanner (Fujitsu ScanSnap, used) so I'm almost paperless now.

    • And here we have someone that never had to deal with the government.

    • I've been watching the new Amazon Paperwhite bounce around in price for a few months.

      It has about a 200ppi sealed eInk screen, reflective, and there's a way to get a PDF onto it:

      https://amzn.to/32t8M0z [amzn.to]

      It gets as low as $129 foe the good one which is just amazing and could finally be a paper replacement. I haven't looked into sideloading yet, but assuming I can get SyncThing-Fork installed, I can just have a folder in my $HOME to put PDF's into and then grab the device and go read a paper in the hammock out

  • Brother works for me. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by couchslug ( 175151 ) on Sunday November 08, 2020 @10:13PM (#60701472)

    Note to Brother personnel reading this. Do not imitate HP! The old HP was sold off as Agilent and the new HP is a shitshow that needs to (I'll put this gently) fucking die.

    • Agree.

      I have an HP inkjet printer in my office. It's a hand-me-down from a corporate "work from home" package. It's a piece of shit. It was always cheap shit, but now it's cheap utter shit.

      Nowadays I use it as a scanner, because the ink is long gone - and it was one of the printers they sent an update to, and 6 months later stopped them working with non-HP ink. I don't print much, so replacing dried out ink was too expensive before the HP shakedown.

      Even as a scanner it's shit - HP seem to have killed off th

  • This works in the short term (Score:4, Informative)

    by wakeboarder ( 2695839 ) on Sunday November 08, 2020 @10:18PM (#60701482)

    But eventually it pisses people off and reduces the hp brands image. I hope whoever signed off on this at HP can't sleep at night for the trouble they are causing consumers. Yep, you can make more money short term, but people have choices.

    • Don't worry. The managers that thought this crap up will already be off with the money by the time HP notices in the numbers that this fires back,

    • It seems more to me that they are purposely trying to kill off part or all of their printer division.

      No matter who is running HP, they can't be this short sighted or stupid.

      A binding contract is likely preventing them from outright killing off their printer line, so they are trying to work around this by sabotaging that division.

    • These are the "managers" that reduce costs at the expense of product quality and customer satisfaction. They get their bonuses for meeting the quarterly goal, move on and are never held accountable for their short sighted decisions.

      I've seen it happen first hand.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Bert64 ( 520050 )

      Why would they care? Whoever signed off on this at HP will get themselves a big bonus for increasing quarterly/annual revenue, then they'll be off to another company and won't have to deal with the fallout.
      This is always going to happen so long as people are rewarded for short term performance like this.

    • I hope everyone here does as much damage to HP's brand with word of mouth as possible, make sure no one buys their printers. Post it on social media

  • Long ago I opened an account at a new bank franchise in town advertising, for a limited time only get free interest bearing checking accounts. After a few years the branches were well ensconced and they converted the interest bearing accounts to monthly fee based.

  • A plan titled "Free Ink for Life" with no asterisk attached to that phrase?

    Sounds like easy grounds for a small class action.

    Similar to companies offering unlimited (something) plans where the something is not unlimited.

    • * For the life of the plan

      Which they just ended.

  • On the downside looking forward! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by AndyKron ( 937105 ) on Sunday November 08, 2020 @10:28PM (#60701518)
    It's just another example of why people are shit.

  • Materially False (Score:2, Informative)

    by fermion ( 181285 )
    As always, Doctorow is a fanatic trying to pick evidence to prove his dogma, rather than argue based on reality. Actually looking at the terms and conditions, the plan does allow to bank pages, up to three months worth of your subscription.

    Also, you do not get a new cartridge every month. You get a new cartridge when you run out of ink. You may lost pages if you don't pay for a new month, I don't know, that might be true.

    What I do know is that if you a old person stuck in the stone ages and print your

    • Ten cents a page doesn't sound so bad.

      We pay almost half that at work on a volume of a million/year or so.

    • The most efficient way for a person is print is to buy a cheap printer, use it to print the 100-150 pages it has ink to print, then throw it away.

      Don't those printers have special cartridges included? Special in that they have less ink than the normal cartridges, just so that your suggestion doesn't work.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by N1AK ( 864906 )
        Cheap new printers are often sold with smaller capacity or small cartridges but still work out cheaper, or at least equivalent price, to just buying ink.

        I'm not entirely agreed with Fermion's points but it strikes me as a much more rational and less dogmatic opinion than the original article. The free for life promotion is shifty if they killed it so quickly. What cracks me up is the complete disconnect between some comments and reality; especially those assuming this will be hated by consumers. Consumer

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by fermion ( 181285 )
        The official number for the setup cartridge from HP is around 100 pages. If you print a few pages a week, like most people, who just have the printer around to scan a few things, and print, that is several months of use. Most third part cartridges, unless you go the store and trade, are sold in multipacks that are $50-$80. Now, of course we are all incredible wealthy so that money is nothing to us. For a family, though, getting $25 is conceivable, while $50 for such a discretionary expense is not

        So th

  • Looks like HP is trying to kill off it's printer business.

    The only people this would get are people who don't know any better making impulse buys.

    Maybe HP has a contract requiring them to sell consumer grade printers they are really trying to get out of, so they are doing their best to douse this division with gasoline (coming up with an absurd plan guaranteed to piss people off) before lighting it on fire (setting said plan in motion).

  • From the company that started Silicon Valley... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by DanDD ( 1857066 ) on Sunday November 08, 2020 @11:08PM (#60701644)

    Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard started silicon valley with the novel concept of developing unique capability by direct and rapid customer communication and collaboration, then defining profit as the ability to capitalize on their employees ability to continue creating even more. Their first product enabled the success of Walt Disney, they brought to market the first desktop calculator, then the first hand-held calculator. An HP calculator with a magnetic strip storage device was used as a secondary navigation system on the Gemini spacecraft. And all the while they never had a single mass layoff or reduction in workforce - until the hiring of Carly Fiorina.

    Now HP is the marionette of the MBA, capable of nothing more than obscuring incompetence and self-serving psychosis behind quarterly profit statements.

    In this day and age, to buy a product from HP, any product, is to pleasure the devil.

    A bit of the innovative soul of HP might be left in Agilent, but a lot of damage was done before it was spun off in '99.

  • sarcastic subject, as it's the awful cartridge money grubbing that really needs correction.... but I think I'll be sticking with my LaserJet 4 plus for the time being. Won't prattle on about it here, but just printing black and white pages, even if I had to go to a shop to print something in color multiple times per month, I suspect I'd still come out ahead of someone stuck buying 25ml of black ink at a time for $50+ a pop.

  • The 99 cent thing is new. Someone is confused.

  • HP was once a name to be respected. The heritage and quality have passed on to Keysight, Agilent 2nd. And "HP" a very distant third.

    • I used to recommend them to IT customers because the cartridges don't dry out and if the heads dry out, you only have to replace the cartridge not the printer. Their prices were already exorbitant, now I'm actively campaigning against them. Get a laser, a cannon or brother.

  • Stop falling for it.

  • Buy an epson ink tank (Score:3)

    by sethmeisterg ( 603174 ) on Monday November 09, 2020 @01:01AM (#60701876)
    Refills come from an actual bottle and are reasonably priced as well.

  • Disgraceful (Score:3)

    by hoofie ( 201045 ) <mickey&mouse,com> on Monday November 09, 2020 @01:14AM (#60701922)

    If only we could harness the energy of Hewlett and Packard spinning in their graves we could eliminate Fossil fuels overnight - they must be approaching the speed of light at the moment.

  • Why anyone would buy a HP printer is beyond me when there are far better choices out there (both for laser printers and for inkjets)

  • ... and it still works great.

    In that time, I've replaced each cartridge anywhere from 2 to 4 times, depending on the color.

    Toner cartridges are more expensive than ink cartridges, but one cartridge lasts me several years, so it is actually way more economical in the long run.

    • About the same here... after inkjets over inkjets in the 90s and 00s, with $$$ cartdriges, smears and everything, I bought a colour laser printer (Samsung, before HP buy them), wireless, so I can put it anywhere without thinking about wiring. I have it for 10 years, still works fine, change toner from time to time, can print from every PC/Android devices.

  • The last time I needed to print something was 3 months ago. The time before that was 2 years, and before that, I don't even remember. Similar for mailing a cheque. In fact, each time in the last, say, 15 years, the only times I've had to print, mail, or use cheques, has been when interacting with the government. No business I work with has required it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      Same, but probably bigger intervals.

      I fly internationally to see relatives - no paper required.

      I do my entire job, and the printer in my office - no paper required (and I regularly question why my workplace prints anywhere NEAR what it currently does, but at least that's all on lasers).

      Personal life - no paper required.

      I have found in the last 5 years or so I'm far more likely to take paper OUT of a printer to scribble something on than I am put that paper in.

      I kind of get the "I'd like that photo as a phys

  • Only Continuous Ink Systems are worth it today (Score:3)

    by Pravetz-82 ( 1259458 ) on Monday November 09, 2020 @02:51AM (#60702096)
    I've had an Epson EcoTank L805 for over a year now. It comes with 6 colors and each color is 70 mL !!
    Photo quality is good - not the best, but it's not bad either. It's ideal for printing tons of family photos to pass around to relatives.
    The ink comes in bottles - not cartridges. You squirt it inside a reservoir on the printer instead of replacing a cartridge. The ink is cheap and also - nothing is stopping you from using a third party one as well.
    When I move and have the space, I'll definitely buy a bigger one, that supports A3 paper sizes.

  • Nobody forces you to use instant ink, we have a four in one hp with paid instant ink and save money by not buying non oem, or hp ink cartridges. I can fit any cartridge into it and probably only lose the rubbish ink quantty sensor from hp.

    Even the instant ink carts have faults in

    I do not work for hp Yes it is concerning this drm or use funny money at the company shop only but if i come across some shady scheme then other printer makers exist and i too will be off to that land of milk and honey.

    Most norma

  • Enthousiasts versus Pros (Score:5, Funny)

    by SciCom Luke ( 2739317 ) on Monday November 09, 2020 @03:39AM (#60702186)
    This used to be a joke, but it becomes reality:

    Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!

    Programmers / Engineers: My house has mechanical locks, a mechanical thermostat, a mechanical door knocker. The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
    • You can have high-tech versions of these things. Just get the versions that don't phone home and / or upload stuff to The Cloud. And yes, they're available, if you look for them.

  • What's with this superstition companies are now adopting -- " Spotify or die! "

    Companies are tumbling over each other to move to a subscription model (a la Spotify). Nevermind Spotify is yet to return a dime on its investment dollars.

    It's even catching onto people -- my neighbour pitched me on his new venture -- build an app that takes photos and snail-mails it to your contacts. I explained this has already been done, but he wasn't aware. Then he said, "we'll charge $4.99/month subscription with a few photo

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by stooo ( 2202012 )

      >>What's with this superstition companies are now adopting -- " Spotify or die! "

      Yes, strange.
      Hope it makes HP die out.

  • If you are an MBA and are tasked with coming up with an innovating way to make more money, there is always the one "go to" answer - raise prices (which includes charging for previously free things). Bonuses for everyone, if we raise prices by 10% we make 10% more revenue and 30% more profit (not actually true, but an MBA can create a Power Point saying that it is)! Actual innovation, useful new product offering people actually want to pay for is hard, raising prices is the lazy way out. It's like when the p

  • Well that was easy- I guess I'll never buy another HP printer as long as I live.

    Brilliant marketing plan, BTW.

    • Literally this. We have HP at work and I'm amazed how they chew through cartridges, but I'm not paying. Home, I have an older Brother printer, with a huge toner reservoir. I will never buy an HP printer. I like how they use up "cyan" when all I ever print is Black and White documents.

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