Mother-in-law needed one too last Christmas, and we ended up getting her a Brother as well, even if the cost was a bit higher than the HP equivalent, purely because of their practices.
Vote with your wallet.
HP explicitly offers a subscription model of printing in which you can pay by the page. But cue the outrage about (surprise!) why that can't be subverted.
I don't know who still makes decent printers today -- I see a lot of people recommend Brother -- but why buy new when there are tons of cheap old laser printers from the days before they all became anti-consumer garbage?
For the audience, the key is using the Vista USB drivers from the site. Good thru 10 and I assume 11.
> It's plug and play on Linux,
Did not know that. Which distro? I have an Arch install that might benefit (from that slow, reliable 1010/1012 slog).
Pretty cool that we've let ourselves be led into a world where there's a rising private tax on use of "the printing press" and accept the choices that enable monopolizing control in the first place. Buyer's boycotts promote accepting the parameters but rejecting this one bad thing that just happens to be a product of those parameters and leave people exhausted from uninspiring campaigning with questionable impact. Like voting blue (or red whichever you want) harder to try to fix this kind of problem.
Speaking practically on topic, I haven't seen any Wirecutter-level consumer awareness campaigns in tech lead to material lasting change against corporate interests. The state of most Wirecutter type coverage of product categories seems to be generally worsening and getting more expensive rather than resulting in consumer-friendly change from market pushback. What you advocate for is essentially a Wirecutter movement and is as radical as Wirecutter is which we can see the underwhelming results of already.
1. You are not OK with Shell dumping so much oil in the sea, so you stop buying Shell. But your action doesn't have any effect: you stop buying shell, oil still in the oceans. Boycott isn't the best path, unless it's really massive.
2. You are not OK with HP printer practices, but you don't necesarily want HP to go bankrupt or to pass a law banning HP practices. You just don't buy HP printers and you live happy afterwards. What other people does is not your problem. Boycott works.
You can say that HP selling ink subscription doesn't have any externalities, so every individual that buys one of such subscriptions is to blame and they don't shift costs to other people. You have options that keeps you safe from HP practices. Ask any Mac or Linux user how do they feel about Microsoft pushing trackers and ads on their OS: at best they don't care, but probably they laught at it.
— John Donne, 1623