HP is in the rent-a-printer business now
HP is in the rent-a-printer business now
www.theverge.com
HP is in the rent-a-printer business now
Friends don't let their friends buy HP.
90 comments
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The subscription, like HP’s recent ad campaign promoting its printers as “made to be less hated,” trades on the idea that printers are frustrating commodities. The company’s configurator page mentions bonuses like “continuous printer coverage” and “next-business-day printer replacement,”
Our printers are unreliable pieces of absolute shit guys. But if you do the subscription we'll replace your shitty broken rental printer next day. Never worry that you can't print when you need to print. Mindblowing.
Just make reliable printers that work, dumbasses.
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Just make reliable printers that work, dumbasses.
Again, you mean. My LJ4 was sold at 20 years old, more due to toner scarcity than any real problem.
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Nailed it. I currently have an HP Laserjet 2100 for home printing and it is around 20 years old and going strong. Now you’ve made me think I should maybe order some toner ahead…
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“made to be less hated,”
They still want to be hated, just less.
Who's the halfwit that came up with that line lmao
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Yup. That slogan is the end result of a long line of bad company decisions.
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Just 6 months ago replaced my 1996 IBM Laser printer.
And it probably still works, keeps saying "paper jam" though I've cleaned it out. Probably a bad sensor/switch. I'll fix it some time.
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If they made reliable printers that worked, they wouldn't have a business because everyone would have a reliable printer that worked and hp would have no one left to sell printers to. The problem has always been the shortcomings of shareholder capitalism.
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Dont buy hp?
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HP is so desperate for money that this is what they need to do to survive.
What does HP (hardware) actually do these days? Where do they compete (and I mean compete, not have products in)?
They ruined Compaq.
They killed their golden goose printing business with bullshit like this.
They killed their server hardware business with bullshit like locking software, drivers and firmware behind support contracts.
As somebody who always bought HP and advocated for their hardware (many years ago), I would never buy anything they make today.
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The day HP locked all firmware and driver downloads behind active contracts was the day I stopped buying it.
I can go on Dell's website and download drivers for a server I bought in 2004. For free. By just putting the service tag in.
Don't even get me started on HP's partsurfer or warranty websites. It's a mire of hundreds of subdomains, none of which are actually managed properly.
It's no wonder they're swirling the drain. They are blatantly anti-consumer and anti-corporation.
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Wait. What? Is this real? Firmware and drivers behind a pay wall? Are they insane?
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I used to be a bit iffy on Dell years past when their reputation was largely as commodity shovelware and overpriced premium kit. But honestly, they've evolved over the years into by far my favourite of the big mass manufacturers. Not only is their hardware generally solid for the price point (with a few exceptions), but their customer service is absolutely second to none. I've never had such smooth and helpful customer support from any other hardware manufacturer, big or small.
That alone puts them leagues ahead of HP and Lenovo for me.
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Thought they could be Apple without atleast the reasonable build quality
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They make decent laptops. I had Elitebooks, ZBooks and an Omen, excellent machines. I liked them more than Dell or lenovo.
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About 90% of laptops I've seen fail are made by HP. Specifically, it's their cooling solution that always seems to fail, even after replacing the thermal paste.
They might be great laptops for maybe about 3 years, until they're not.
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A friend of mine won the top of the line omen model in a gaming tournament. We went through three of them before we just accepted the thing doesn't fucking work for shit and demoted it to a Super Gengear 64 Station boy advance and stuffed it under the TV.
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I think it's time for an open source 2d printer project, we have open source 3d printers and the technology is much more complex than 2d. Time to put HP to sleep
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Patents are prohibiting anyone from developing something like that.
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When do the patents expire? Seems like 2D printers are relatively old technology by this point.
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x doubt
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I'm sure there would be workaounds to that, also I'm not selling anything, just sharing a project and list of components. i'm not a lawyer but i'm pretty sure there's nothing they can do to stop me
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I have a brother laser printer that I love. I just fill up a tub with generic toner and it keeps printing for almost a decade now. I'm old and like to print things. I think it's much easier to read on paper and I'm happier to print out a 150 page book than read it on a Kindle lol. I've also broken multiple ereaders commuting on trains but still have all the papers I saved in binders I printed and really enjoyed reading and will last nearly forever.
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the amount of engineering and programming hours spent to make their products worse is just a symptom of how stupid, wasteful decisions are made when there is not enough competition in these industries.
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There are relatively recent refurbished Brother laser printers on NewEgg for under $200.
You can get a used older model on eBay for under $200.
And the chances that used older model will work just fine for you for years to come is high.
My Brother is between 15 and 20 years old, only on its second toner cartridge, and still working like a charm.
There are a lot of options to do color printing for cheap if you only need it very occasionally like most people. The local public library may even offer free color printing.
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Man, I thought for a moment you were saying you had a teenage sibling that had was on his second cartridge.
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Bruh
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When HP requires HP Smart account to print, the brand was already dead to me
Also any recommendation for printers?
EDIT: damn, I think I am going to get a Brother Laser Printer in the future
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Never had a problem with Brother printers
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I mean, they're printers. So...
But yes, Brother is definitely one of the better options on the market.
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Everyone loves Brother for good reason.
I've had a decent experience with my Xerox too.
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If you don't need color printing, I've had a fantastic experience with my Brother monochrome laser printer, fwiw. So much cheaper than ink.
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I have a colour laser printer from Brother and have also had a great experience with it, been going strong for 5 years now
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Brother (Dc4020 model if I remember correctly). I have been using it for 10 years using off brand color toner and very well so far.
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I love my Canons, especially the canon laser printer
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Brother are good but I got a Kyocera about 6yrs ago and have never had to change the toner. I've been through about 2 blocks of paper in that time. Prints great.
Plug & Play on Windows and Linux
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God forbid I recommended you to buy an HP ever, but it feels like they've been awful only in the ink jet section. At least my HP laser printer (283 something) doesn't require me to have a(n) HP Smart account (I don't even know how/where to set up one), I've had it for ~3-4 years now, and it's been reliable and trusty ever since. I can imagine they started pulling the same shady shit with the new laser printers, but this one seems to be working as of now. Fingers crossed.
EDIT: Still buy a Brother, I have only heard amazing things about them; just saying it's not happening everywhere - yet.
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HP is in the extortion business now....
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Which printer you get depends on the plan you choose. They start at $6.99 per month for 20 pages’ worth of prints and whatever the current HP Envy model is, and go all the way up to a $35.99-a-month affair that gets you an OfficeJet Pro and 700 pages. If you go over your page allotment, HP will add more for a dollar per block of 10–15 pages.
This is 100% a trap for elderly people who reflexively print everything they see on the computer.
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I can see it being an option for some people. If you print low volume but regularly every month. And you need a printer that always just works. The problem is the monthly limits! The base package is 20 pages per month, just printing out a pdf manual or something would eat that up in a minute. I would want unused prints to be added to next month.
Otherwise it is very similar to how it works for businesses having larger office printers.
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And it's still more expensive than a brother printer after a year and a half, and one of those will last decades.
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Brother FTW 🐐
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I'm 2.5y into testing that claim, with a MFC-J6930DW. So far, no issues at all.
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I spent way longer than I ever hoped to primarily selling printers. This is the answer. I'd wager a solid 80% of people would be better off buying a cheap brother laser and just going to walgreens/office depot/where ever the 2 times a year they need to print in color
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Yea I definitely fall into the 20 pages or less a month category. Hell I probably fall into the 20 pages or less a year category. But I'd never add a subscription for something I can just buy out.
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It's not just a subscription, it's a two year contract with a large early cancellation fee.
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Those who see this as an option are not well. They are neglected by the tech literates who could help them do better and the people who understand the value of ownership that could help them be better.
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I don't know what are you talking about. I have a Canon printer is being 10 years since I bought it and its working like new. This is the reason why HP can get away with this idiotic move.
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A laser printer always just works.
My 1996 laser just got replaced 6 months ago. I replaced the toner once or twice... Because I'm a low volume printer.
Low volume is probably also just B/W. But even a color laser isn't that much. Canon has a line of office color that aren't awfully expensive, and not large.
Why would I pay for a lease that over it's contract term is as much as a Canon color laser that will:
- Run longer on it's starter toners
- Never clog
- Probably run for 10 years or more
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If you are over the initial pages, then it is $1 per 10-15 pages. Which is much cheaper than the original $6.99 for first 20 pages. $1 per 15 pages probably costs the same if you own HP printer and buy HP ink.
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The subscription, like HP’s recent ad campaign promoting its printers as “made to be less hated,”
Literally "cause a problem, sell them the solution" 🤣
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I bought a Canon laser printer 10 years ago. The only thing I've needed since then was a single new set of toner. (And a bunch of paper, obviously.)
Even back then it was pretty obvious that ink jets are waste of money and everyone that I knew who had ink jets were just constantly complaining about them.
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FWIW we have dumb business owners to thank for that.
They've been doing this with the Indigo's for 8+ years that I'm aware of, so probably much longer. And ofc businesses fell for it because just like most cloud shit, nobody can be bothered to calculate actual costs, just fudge stuff and get your bonus/pay rise for pretending to have done something beneficial.
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I appreciate the context you added but I think it is important to underline that ultimately we still have hp to thank for this. They didn’t have to be an awful company.
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Oh, I'm not denying that they are greedy assholes. But at the same time I feel like we're in that comic, they saw an terrible opportunity, implemented this shit and were like "no way anyone is going to fall for that", and "we" allowed them to like "we" seem to do with many other terrible things in this world, and here we are with them laughing away at "our" stupidity.
There seem to be just enough dumb people around to enable assholes like this to exist, which I find sad and disturbing. It's almost like there is a reason certain groups want people to stay dumb and ban books, ban those who are different from learning etc
Couple of other things about the print stuff; I seriously doubt this even needs to profitable for them in the short term (it likely is), so unless it's dead on arrival, the longer it keeps going, the more chances this will be the only available solution....perhaps a last ditch effort to milk us dry before printing dies?
And for anyone who comes across this in the future, at best you're paying 10x per page compared to what medium size business did many years ago, and no you're not even getting a real service.
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I guess hp won't care but, while I have bought hp computers for years, this last time I went looking at other brands because of this printer nonsense.
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As you should. The obviously don't have any loyalty to their customers, don't give them any back.
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I am sorry some sort of dark curse forced you to only buy hp computers for years, that sounds rough
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
The company debuted a subscription service today — just like CEO Enrique Lores said it would last month — called the HP All-In Plan.
So if you decide HP All-In isn’t for you after all, you’ll have to return the printer and go back to rubbing elbows with everyone else at FedEx whenever the need to print arises.
That way, if a firmware upgrade blue-screens your printer, at least you have some recourse that doesn’t involve driving to a store to buy a whole new one.
And receiving ink before you run out is great if you are, like me, the kind of person who ignores the “low ink” warning all the way until I’m fully out and am actually printing something critical, rather than coloring pages for your kid, for once.
But those are mostly functions of the fact that I don’t really print that often and rarely encounter the annoyances of printer ownership.
One is HP’s plan, which appeals to the frustration of user-hostile experiences like scanners that don’t work because you bought third-party ink and printers that become unusable without some serious effort because you moved overseas.
The original article contains 451 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 58%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
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Has always been meme
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I got a Pantum laser printer and it's free of all the rent-a-printer crap that the big ones are pulling now. It was easy to set up with my Linux system too.
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UFLPA Entity List - https://www.dhs.gov/uflpa-entity-list
they were placed on it last year. specifically, this section:
A list of entities working with the government of Xinjiang to recruit, transport, transfer, harbor or receive forced labor or Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, or members of other persecuted groups out of Xinjiang
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HP printers are about to swarm the recycling centers…
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We have around 250 HP Laserjet 1320 printers in our company and while they are generally quite reliable, their age is slowly taking the toll. Each one prints 50-200 pages a week and their guts are becoming a bit loose. So number of paper jams, mispicking, and other breakings increases every month... In near future we'll be probably forced to replace them, but with what?
These were pretty cheap printers back then, aftermarket toners are dirt cheap and it is still possible to buy parts for self repairing online. Bosses won't allow the replacement to be some fancy expensive printers or cheap ones that turn to shit in months. These HPs are running for maybe ~10 years? What is the brand/model I should check nowadays? Bearing in mind we'll have to run hundreds of those? I'll appreciate any input you might have.
PS: located in EU
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At home I have a Brother, but our IT uses Kyocera. We print a lot in manufacturing and they are reliable.
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Weren't they from the start, more or less?
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Even if it wasn't
90 comments