Brother have gotten to where they are now by not innovating
retro.social
retro.social
My dad is restoring a 1969 MG Midget. The right turn signal stopped working. Using nothing more than a voltmeter, I found a disconnected wire and a short to the frame.
I replaced the entire length of wire that was failing with $3 worth of wire, solder, and heat shrink tubing.
The lesson here is repairability and simplicity.
We’re constantly lectured to be “environmentally aware” by companies that no longer ensure their products will last a lifetime. There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn’t be used for the rest of your life. My Brother printer is nearing 12 years and is still on the same damn print cartridge. My Neato robotics vacuum has had countless parts replaced and is about the same age.
If you truly want to be a good steward of the earth, stop demanding/consuming latest and greatest, endless product and UI refreshes, and instead demand 30+ years out of a product (with small repairs).
As if large corporations base their business strategy on ethically/environmentally-minded consumer demands. At most they will propagandize or triangulate their engineering approach slightly - just enough for the media cycle to turn to some other issue. Gotta make those quarterly profits stand out!
Also - if you haven't changed a printer cartridge in 12 years than you are printing very little (which is fine, but it's not a typical use-case by which to evaluate longevity).
Other than that, definitely agree :-)
This is the reason I chose GNU/Linux phone Librem 5.
>There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn’t be used for the rest of your life.
At some point we must reach peak tech. In the Elite: Dangerous universe, there are quite a few ships you can use, but the majority of them are designs that are hundreds of years old. They are modular spaceships, of course, so they have received upgraded technology as time has gone on, but there are some quirky little ships flying around.
Compared to phones though, we'd need to get carriers to guarantee their old networks stay functional so old cellular radios will still function. Maybe when tech advances enough we CAN have a modular phone it will be less of a concern.
Over a 200,000 mile design lifetime, a modern car is way more reliable and way less work to repair than your MG Midget (by virtue of not breaking as often in the first place). Yes, today’s cars aren’t designed to be collector items that will sit and rot in a barn not being driven and get easily restored by amateurs in 50 years, but why should they be?
Not if you drive it very much/for very long. See this graph [1] (from this article [2]) for instance. Note that they're evenly diving 173,151 miles across the 13 "years" (and don't ask me why they decided to make the x-axis "years").
And that's with a modern fuel efficient car, not some ancient one.
[1] https://graphics.reuters.com/ELECTRIC-VEHICLES/EMISSIONS/rlg...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...
Driving emissions numbers I remember off the top of my head are Swedish averages, around 2.5 tonnes CO2e per year (15000 km/year). This is averages for the Swedish car fleet, which tend to be smaller models and more modern than many countries.
So: sure, production emissions are a big factor, but driving the car can easily win the efficiency savings back in a fraction of the car’s lifetime.
On the other hand I also know people who drive a multiple of that.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
But the point being made about repairability (and simplicity) seems good.
Modern cars are often more work to repair. They're not particularly modular, and to the extent that they are, they often bury one module under several layers of others. It requires you to disconnect and move working parts and assemblies to uncover the broken one.
Modern cars also use replaceable assemblies to speed up repairs, but it also means that even for small problems like a damaged wire in a harness, you often have to rip out the entire system it is "inside" of and replace it completely. The manufacturer has tons of ways of requiring you to "over replace" parts like this on a modern vehicle.
> but why should they be?
That's not an excuse to make them as disposable as they've become. You can't use "the climate" to blindly turn this into a black and white issue.
I also wonder about the original humvee, which I think was designed to be "user" serviced in the field.
The disposability has to be factored into the environmental impact.
Most MGs have been in the landfill for decades. It wouldn't be a surprise if this car had been sitting on blocks in a garage for decades. It's disingenuous to imply this car is still running for any reason other than because it has an owner that both wants to restore it and has the ability to do so.
I suspect once its restored there's a fair chance that it'll park in a proper garage and be driven a couple of times a month on nice days during summer until the days start cooling off and it gets stored for winter.
My current car, which cannot be jumpstarted since it has a 48v battery for ignition and driving, and has dash-breaking OTA updates requiring a visit to the dealer or a proprietary 1200 usd software, and can be easy stolen by unplugging a headlight and feeding data into the common bus, would disagree.
To do some wiring that'll be bulletproof and last:
1. get wiring rated for under-the-hood heat (the wiring sold at auto parts stores is no good for that)
2. get crimp-on connectors
3. cut the plastic off the crimp-ons
4. put heat shrink tubing on the wire, well away from the end
5. crimp the connector on
6. solder the crimp joint using a thermostat controlled soldering iron
7. move the heat shrink tubing over the joint, and heat it with a bic cigarette lighter to shrink it on
8. voila!
P.S. Crimped connections don't last. After about a year, they'll work loose a bit from vibration, and corrosion will creep in, and you'll get a loose connection that is very frustrating to find. Soldering it prevents that from happening.
You're right about not letting the solder wick up past the connector. But that's not an issue if the wire is properly supported with a clamp.
My experience with crimps is electrical gremlins, with soldered crimps, no trouble at all.
OEM crimps also come with a molded housing designed to keep out moisture (and corrosion) and provide mechanical support for the joint. The crimp-on connectors at the auto parts store are vastly inferior.
That's called a crimping tool. They grow on trees. They're designed to achieve the correct amount of force to make a gas tight, permanent connection without destroying the contacts. All you need to do is select the correct connectors for the wire size you're dealing with and squeeze it.
I watched a professional cable installer once crimp the coax F connectors on. I got the manufacturer and model number of it. It's from an outfit that only sold to professionals, and cost about $200. Since I was going to pull all the coax myself in my house, it was worth the money and I haven't had trouble with the results. The consumer grade crimping tools from the hardware store are terrible.
It's the same story with wirewrap tools.
Take a look at these:
https://www.amazon.com/Qibaok-Connectors-Insulated-Electrica...
Crimp a wire in it. Look at it from the connector side. You'll see the bare conductor inside the connector. That's where the moisture gets in. Heat shrink tubing won't shrink enough to cover that. Wicking solder into it will seal it against moisture and corrosion.
Never had trouble with the completed soldered/crimped connections for decades. I use them in my car. With crimp-only, it's only a matter of time till I get erratic connects. It's particularly irritating with the stereo, as the speakers go in and out or suffer the crackling with a loose connection.
Solder will fill any voids in your contact, causing the bond to break as your entire assembly heats and cools.
Solder will also wick up the strands, making the resultant wire brittle.
Moisture ingress can be solved with the correct wrapping. After all, the extruded PVC insulation on the wire in the first place shrunk to fit it, right?
I have electronic equipment in nearly continuous use for 40 years. Daily heat/cool cycling. No solder breaks in it.
It seems that this debate is an old one:
https://www.linkedin.com/advice/0/what-pros-cons-soldering-v...
https://blog.peigenesis.com/soldering-vs-crimping-advantages...
https://www.sig4cai.com/soldering-or-crimping-which-is-bette...
P.S. I'm pretty good with soldering, since I've done it professionally, so the disadvantages of a poorly soldered joint don't apply.
https://www.amazon.com/JRready-Connector-Waterproof-Electric...
The cheaper knock offs can work well, too.
My crimped and soldered ones work fine, though, and cost basically nothing.
Well, I can't argue with that.
I've studied this a little since it effects my work, but I don't claim to be an EE. Sadly, I'm not finding any definitive authorities on the subject with a quick googling, though all the top hits tend to agree with the sentiment of not soldering crimped connections.
This was a short article that I ran across, dealing with the topic. As usual, the comments on hackaday are all over the place, but I still find them useful.
https://hackaday.com/2017/02/09/good-in-a-pinch-the-physics-...
Interestingly, I thought nasa banned soldering crimped connections, but as far as I can tell, rereading this doc now with a quick skim for the string crimp, they only ban crimping tinned connections.
https://s3vi.ndc.nasa.gov/ssri-kb/static/resources/nasa-std-...
Interestingly, the speaker cable connections in the house are a nuisance with bad connections. Spring loaded connectors, even banana plugs, are just plain unreliable. Solder finally fixed them for good. (I'll solder on connectors, and then use a terminal strip.)
For the car, I also use rather expensive high grade stranded wire. I've been very happy with the results - the extra money pays off in time saved not having to repair them.
Were you fired for soldering crimp connectors?
I want to see EVs/plug-in hybrids with similar levels of simplicity wherever possible. Virtually all vehicles in the US nowadays are completely overloaded with unnecessary sensors/electronics that are ripe for failure.
I don't understand how with those three things, you are able to renew the blinker service subscription.
A phone, yes. A 'modern' phone conforming to our 'modern' expectations, no.
It would have to be significantly larger, less performant, and have a worse screen for it to last even ten years.
To make it repairable you'd have to make sure individual chips and capacitors are swappable, which costs ~2x power draw compared to a SOC.
Only because the code we write is crappier
I installed them on an old Marantz amp, which is also connected to my (new) TV. As he visited me, he couldn't believe the incredible sound coming from his own speakers. My friends are shocked by it too, thinking I'm some audio buff that invested 20K.
My dad regretted the gift, went to buy the same amp yet with new speakers. Various sets of it, and failed to come close to the ancient set.
I'm not sure what exactly was innovated in 35 years of audio, but my guess would be costs, not quality.
And I'm quite sensitive to acoustics. In a lot of modern "minimalist" homes I'm upset by the sound bouncing around endlessly, sometimes it's so bad I can barely hear conversations.
We built a set of these: https://projectgallery.parts-express.com/speaker-projects/zd... which are a throwback to the old HiFi sets of the 70s-80s. I _really_ like the reference sound of this set. The only thing they don't really do is the sub-sonic punch that action movies require, but that's probably ok for apartment living with neighbors.
They aren't cheap, but they are also some of the best headphones I've ever personally used. I don't make any claims of being an "audiophile" or whatever, but they're like the headphone equivalent of using my Kali LP-6 monitors.
Even with replaceable batteries, there's still https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
It would be nice if we had mobile and desktop OSes that didn't get increasingly bloated with time, slowed down, were abandoned by the vendors and were messy in plethora of other ways.
My Android phone doesn't get security updates by the manufacturer, just a few years after the release, which is horrible in the case of RCEs (like the WebP one). I can't install a newer version or a custom ROM because of a locked down bootloader (without exploits) and even then drivers are a big issue. Some of my older hardware wouldn't even be compatible with desktop OSes like Windows 11 because of the whole TPM debacle.
Other than that, digging up my old Android phone with Android 2.1 on it, or maybe my old E8400 CPU from 2008 would yield really bad experience in both cases. Could devices from over a decade ago be viable choices, if the software didn't get exponentially more wasteful? Perhaps, but that's not the reality that we live in, neither for desktop PCs, nor phones.
In the end it somewhat boils down to pure greed. Instead of stabilizing production costs and/or reusing generic components to ease up manufacturing and repair - HP, Epson, Canon, Dell, Samsung, Kyocera and others try to hype their products with whatever tech stack is currently in trend. "growth hacking" is literally their job description.
There eventually will be a ChatGPT printer on the market. It's inevitable due to what kind of people manage a printer business: It's not the type of people that know how to build printers anymore.
..."
My own methods would also have easily produced this kind of error if you set the threshold for what to consider identical when clustering high enough. But for OCR the risk is somewhat mitigated by people not trusting it to be error-free, and so it can be an acceptable tradeoff if it reduces the overall error rate, but if you're outputting the raw pixel data and let people think it's an unmanipulated image you're begging for trouble.
I unfortunately discovered that my brand new Brother printer can only communicate over 2.4 GHz wifi, which conflicts with the 5 GHz my phone requires (my router can only do one at a time, and there's no way I'm switching as needed). So USB it is.
It's one of their cheapest inkjets (MFC-1010DW), but I selected it for features more than price. Wish I had read the documentation. I would have purchased the next model up.
Nicely compact compared to the ~10 year old Canon that died recently.
That's abysmal! Every 5GHz Wifi AP I've ever come across lets you run both PHYs at the same time.
Please, on my behalf, sternly talk down to your router.
Even ignoring the massive issue of device compatibility: 5GHz and its protocols do not have anywhere the range and penetrating power of 2.4GHz. When I walk outside my house I can keep watching videos, but my laptop does this by transitioning to the 2GHz radio link modes.
Whenever you replace it, get a separate AP and modem.
Also, DOCSIS 3.1 modems come with queue management. You may benefit significantly from an upgrade even if nothing else changes.
> only 5ghz is performant
Most of these barely need any bandwidth. A printer is possibly on the higher end of bandwidth, but I think the number of printers that support 5GHZ is possibly still single digits.
And/or documented microcontrollers that are purchasable in the states?
Won't 2.4GHz have better range anyway over 5GHZ?
I think that 2.4GHz having longer range is a myth. When I worked on WiFi for Google Fiber we tested it pretty extensively and didn't see any common building materials that attenuated 2.4GHz more than 5GHz. Historically, the problem was that routers often selected low-power channels for 5GHz. If you use a channel where the maximum power is permitted, 5GHz is just as good.
The 5GHz band plan is kind of complicated. You will want to ensure that you get a 160MHz channel. How you accomplish that varies by region, unfortunately.
Oddly the C6 was announced before the C5 I think is only now making it's way onto devkits.
> When I worked on WiFi for Google Fiber we tested it pretty extensively and didn't see any common building materials that attenuated 2.4GHz more than 5GHz.
Huh interesting, I might have to play with that at some point (I'm hoping either ubiquiti or openwrt will let me do that).
There’s some standalone dual-band access points on sale this weekend for <$40 right now which would solve your problem.
Don't be. A comprehensive list of our WiFi-capable devices are two smartphone models, the printer, and two laptops that are plugged in to wired connections.
Edit: Forgot about the two wireless work laptops.
For our purposes the 10 foot USB cable solves the problem fine.
Since Wifi on the printer was not in use at this point, it was then possible to simultaneously connect an additional wireless PC when needed, directly to the printer using the printer's Wifi-Direct alternative.
Interestingly, the printer was connected to the USB socket of a Windows XP client, but I had also ended up adding some Windows 8, 10, & 11 PC's to the network through time.
IT was not optimistic since the new printers have no drivers for Windows XP, plus this was a discontinued model havng no drivers newer than Windows 8 either.
Windows 7 drivers worked fine for XP, Windows 8 drivers worked for Windows 10, so everything was good.
When Windows 11 came out, there was a notice on the Brother website advising that you would need to wait over 30 days before they would be posting compatible drivers.
When they did post the W11 drivers, they were the exact same files that had already been released for W10 years earlier. Apparently the factory only needed to confirm there were no show-stoppers when installed in W11, with no modification of the drivers needed.
All these companies still have their original core competency: Canon still makes optics, Brother still makes home equipment like sewing machines, and Nintendo to this day has not discontinued their playing card products.
Yes, you can buy Nintendo playing cards. I have several sets both modern and older and they’re very good.
These companies think in terms of decades and half-centuries. They may fall trap to occasional trends, but they’re not the ones who rush into a market to innovate; Canon started making a clone of a Leica camera and happened into doing the first indirect X-ray system in Japan, as a single example.
Lego's original core competency was toys, but not plastic ones. The original Lego toys were nearly all wooden, but they gained success with the plastic bricks.
It's unfortunate how many spinoffs they've had that failed.
[1] https://business.time.com/2012/07/23/innovation-almost-bankr...
I got years of use out of a second-hand Brother 2350 printer and then eventually some of the electronics failed. I needed a new printer and I still owned a couple unused Brother toner cartridges. Imagine my joy when I discovered that Brother would sell me a new model that still used the same toner system.
Sticking with the same spartan feature set was fine by me. It's all I need. I didn't even bother looking at the other makers' low-end offerings. Brother's approach of treating printing as a solved problem (Build once; sell often) is so much simpler and more cost-efficient than the super-frisky alternative (Build many times; sell once)
But all that stuff doesn't get in the way of the core feature, network laser printing.
One of the best bits was the no nonsense Windows drivers and easy Linux Postscript compatibility that just worked out of the box.
I was willing to forgive a whole lot of flaws due to it's low price, but it turned out have very few.
My dad’s big fancy Cannon photo printer has caused him nothing but grief. He swears up and down he needs to be able to print large-format full color photographs, but I have never seen him do so. What I have seen is his black cartridge dry out between uses and fail when he needs to print a form.
My wife is occasionally frustrated by our inability to print color, but I am more than happy to drive to Walgreens or my companies office to print a color item once every couple months. An inkjets ink would’ve dried between prints.
Once a new cartridge failed ("not recognized" error even though it was purchased through Staples) and the brother support person walked me through some secret squirrel reset code which I of course saved for future use. The fact I could get someone from the company on the line to help me was a rare experience for tech companies.
My only gripe with the toner cartridges is the requirement to enter a serial number to get a recycling mailing label. The serial numbers are miniscule.
I have the Brother MFC-L5800DW and it's predecessor (~$450). Both are amazing.
I stepped up to this price range because models at this price point have a USB slot in front so you can directly scan to a thumb drive, or print from a thumb drive.
Both have an extremely powerful scanning function e.g., scan to an SMTP server, local FTP server etc etc.
These are the Dewalt of printers e.g., full native Postscript, native LPR daemon the device etc.
Works excellently with iOS's CUPS too.
I recently used an online photo printing service for the first time.
It was awesome.
To persuade your dad, maybe send him a print (directly from some service).
No colour printing, but who cares. We do the same thing as you. When we want some photos printed (usually for distribution to family), it's no major hassle to get them printed at the local office supply.
Many years ago, I spotted an HP Color LaserJet Pro m254dw online at Costco and bought it. It's been a fantastic printer. The toner never dries out, "empty cartridges" don't prevent it from printing. It is modern enough that I can use AirPrint to print to it, but old-school enough that it has an ethernet port. The supplies status page basically says "Just because it's at 0% doesn't mean you can't print, but maybe buy a new toner cartridge and replace it when the output gets bad." It didn't require any special drivers, there's no need to link an HP account, and it has a usable web-based management interface.
So far I have the following complaints about the printer:
* After some large amount of uptime (3mo? 6mo? I'm not sure) it won't respond to print requests. Rebooting it fixes the issue.
* Toner cartridges are expensive. I priced out something like $450CAD for a set of the three colour cartridges. I'm still on the starter cartridges and, even though they're "empty", the output quality is fine.
* The word "Color" in the product name is not properly localized to the Canadian market.
Obviously I'm grasping at straws as far as complaints go!
Honestly, this thing feels like I found a unicorn. I've been looking for a similar printer for my parents, but I haven't found anything from HP that ticks all of the boxes. The next one for them will likely be a Brother.
https://www.amazon.com.au/DINGLONG-Cartridge-Laserjet-M281fd...
One of my first tasks at my first job, like 25 years ago now, was to scrape crud off of a LaserJet 4 fuser. My boss explained that they tried using remanufactured toner cartridges to save money, but they found that these would deposit crud on the fusers. Thanks to tight budgets, we ended up scraping the crud off of the fusers using a screwdriver and only replacing the fusers if they were too far gone. They had switched back to HP cartridges before I started there, but the results of the remanufactured cartridges were still around for a few years.
We also used a product called Rubber Renue to rejuvenate the pickup rollers/pads as a bottle of that stuff (which lasted a LONG time!) was significantly less expensive than the maintenance kit that contained the new rollers.
The savings for that refill kit are significant, but I also don't want to potentially ruin my unicorn printer.
Am I being paranoid? Genuinely curious.
Where I landed is that it's simply not worth the risk given the relatively small amounts involved. IIRC I bought an off-brand toner once -- the smell when printing was definitely stronger. Replaced with a genuine toner quickly.
I have a 4050DTN for regular B&W and a 5000TN for anything wide format. These two are absolutely bulletproof, I can get cartridges for my 4050 that can do 20,000 sheets at 5% coverage; a single cartridge got me through two degrees with zero problems. Currently on my third cartridge in almost a quarter century.
Will look into your M254DW as a colour option, per your experience with it.
Cartridges last for thousand of pages; no strange cloud requirements; the FritzBox registers the printer immediately and all devices in the local net can print.
Non of this was the case for my previous HP or Epson printers…
Additional software is needed for photo prints (color management and stuff like that) and (maybe?) scanning. I didn't try scanning without additional software, as I installed it with the photo print software. And since that software inly works under Windows anyway, I never bothered with scanning under Linux.
Printing works just fine so.
(Seriously, GNOME, whether to scan one side or two sides is actually important and the desired mode changes all the time. Would it kill you to dedicate some screen real estate to it, instead of filling everything with empty post-modern white space?)
Well it doesn’t work! Ink needs to be flushed to keep the lines clear. Inkjet printers need to print regularly for optimal performance and low waste. If you need a printer to sit on the shelf for 4 months between print jobs, laser is the only game in town. Toner is a solid powder and it lasts forever without issues. No clogging, no mess.
You still have the problem at the print head, though.
People were buying second-hand 1995-era Laserjets in 2010 because they were simply better than anything you could buy new. They... Just Worked.
That's not completely true.
Those printers sucked so much power you could brown out your local substation.
And the amount of ozone they kicked off could be smelled in a cube farm--I don't want to think what they would do to you in a home office.
So now I bought a color laser instead, and I couldn’t be happier.
Had an HP color inkjet before that. With that I felt like I did not have a printer.
Consumer garbage printers are consumer garbage printers.
Do you know how else you can do that? by opening the door. We need to stop "innovating" features that absolutely no one needs, because clearly the result isn't a better product, just a messier, more complex one that is frequently over-engineered and under-supported.
The refrigerator camera sounds like the same kind of thing. Modestly useful feature that may well become standard-issue someday because the underlying components can be made very cheaply at scale.
Your parents' generation probably think a number of things that you use every day are "impossibly silly".
Either that or it's Thursday, I could never get the hang of Thursdays.
Still not worth 1000usd to me, but more practical than "just seeing what's inside".
I thought there would also be electricity usage benefits but after looking at people online who have crunched the #s that might be negligible.
That said it makes such a small difference that it's really not worth worrying about, in fact you might lose more energy keeping the door open longer to find the thing you want in your packed fridge.
Air is a particularly poor conductor of heat, your hands touching the product to move it around is doing more damage than anything else. Your fridge thermometer only measures air temperature, not product temperature, which is what you actually should care about.
http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=segway_more_...
I'm just referring to the picture on that site of the segway.
The hack is to cut the RFID tag off a blank that bypasses the filter and tape it to a cheaper 3rd party filter.
The amusing thing is that its actually cheaper to replace the RFID sensor board in the fridge & use a generic filter than to use an official GE filter (re-using the cutout RFID tag from a genuine GE filter). The RFID sensor in mine died, and prevented it from dispensing water/ice. And no, I didn't choose this fridge. It came with the house when I bought it.
The worst example might be windows in the doors, so you can look into them. Except you put stuff on the door shelf and block the view or you can't really see inside all too well. Plus now you have introduce thermal issues.
How long are these manufacturers promising to support the hardware? If the fridge is internet-connected and support ends, at what point is that a security risk? This generally applies to most purchases these days...
I was looking in my garage and I found a cassette player my grandad gave me that still works. When I look around shops and at many things I own I see planned obsolescence everywhere. Personally, I find it really demoralizing.
Only works for a neatly organized fridge. The way my kids cram everything into the fridge makes this feature worthless.
Don't have the link, but I once read a study analyzing the Asian market regarding electronics. The focus was on washing machines, fridges, etc. They discovered that more features, even if useless, improves sales.
So you'll have a washing machine with 50 buttons, 20 lights, 2 LED screens. People will buy that over any simpler one.
As long as we consumers behave like this, the other companies go out of business.
I imagine a scenario in the future when all fridges have it, like all TVs now have smart features. Of course it will sold as "check fridge while you are at the grocery store" feature.
A small number of us might offset it a tiny bit, but it's inevitable that we turn this place into an uninhabitable mess. I do not believe at all that things will change in the future.
I saw a fridge that had an app so you could control it from anywhere.
My requirements for a fridge are remarkably simple, to the point the only practical use I could think of an app was alarm that I'd left the door open or something.
(If this particular app did have a door-open alarm, it wasn't on the list of features. It did say you could adjust the temperature from your office. A location I'm often worrying about the fridge.)
Who decided to call useless ideas an "innovation" is beyond my understanding.
Ideally, as I print photos mainly, I get more then 4 colors and decent color management.
Added bonus for scanning (with or without document feeder).
Not much else there. Pay-per-page subscriptions are ok, by the way, price wise for home office use.
Then it comes down to innovation in the fields of color management, ink mixing and print heads and paper handling. And inks, of course.
Anything else is just pointless, and nothing I would call innovation.
Compared to a Canon Pro-200, they break even was somehwere around 300 printed a4 photo mark if I remember my detailed calculation correctly (850 bucks for the Epson and 460 bucks for Canon).
But yes, I love that printer! Because as a person, I do not think like my busoness case, hence with the tank printer I do kot think about print costs, as the purchase price is gone and mentally accounted for.
I never compared the non photo-capable EcoTank and whatever canon calls their tank printers to the cartridge cousins so.
Then I got a decent deal on a ET-8550, and the peace of mind to not re-run ink costs everytike you print, plus the Epsons home office printer functions, closed that decision. And the Epson print quality is really good, even B/W, so far, with the right media setting and paper, no colour tints whatsoever (at least that I can see).
- make something else
- buy more regardless and make a larger batch
They have fewer points of technical failure; they don’t create security attack surface; they save bandwidth; they get you talking to your friends, family or neighbours more; most food waste biodegrades, so it’s not really “waste”.
If your argument requires saying it's fine to just throw out food, maybe you should reconsider.
A pepper that you buy, cook and then throw away represents a considerable investment:
* you spent energy cooking it
* your supermarket had to stock / refrigerate 1.x pepper to sell you 1.0, because of spillage
* the pepper had to be transported from the land, to and fro various logistic centers (sometimes 100's of miles)
* the farmer had to grow 2.x or even 3.x peppers to sell 1.0, because of esthetics (unfortunately) .. meaning often esticides, heating, etc
For me, this highlights issues that I think the IoT solutions paint over. The IoT solutions all require the same kinds of industry you're describing here, but for tech. So when those get deployed you have the food industry and the tech industry, but you still have the problem of the mouldy pepper, and the problem of food deserts, and a few other things.
I still think my "you can throw out the excess/mouldy food" and the "solve the problem by communal cooking" are better approaches than the IoT one. But I accept this is intuition and guesswork, and somewhat politically motivated. I'm sure about the politics here, but I accept I'm light on the data. I think the real problems are elsewhere than either the individual mouldy peppers and the IoT; somewhere around deeper, harder issues to do with supporting towns and cities the way we do.
You're making some kind of assumption and value judgement here but not articulating it. You're using the assumption as leverage to make an emotional push for me to think differently.
What's the assumption and value judgement? Can you weigh that against the biodegradability comment and share more of your thoughts?
I'd love to be able to see/know what I have at home while I'm shopping.
But yeah, it's a minor convenience
Our fridge is most of the time fairly full so I have a hard time imagining where would I put a camera to get a good overview of its contents. It seems that the best place is about half a meter outside. Even a fisheye would not be able to cover both door and the rest of it.
Our fridge is often 75-95% full, and things I can picture this maybe being useful for - sour cream, pickles, condiments - are often pushed to the back or on the door. I have a hard time imagining anything besides mostly "oh look, the milk jug/large bowl of last night's leftovers is blocking the camera's view of this entire shelf".
It also doesn't solve the "is that sour cream at least 1/3 full?" or equally important "is it expired?" problem, which is almost worse, because seeing the sour cream container leads to a false positive, which means I don't buy more despite needing it.
This is me too (or more realistically, my fridge is 95-105% full) but there's definitely people out there whose fridges are usually mostly empty and a camera could reasonably capture everything in it.
The thing is that turn on remotely is useless, it requires that you've added soap, closed the dishwasher and that it's turned on. At that point you might as well just set a timer.
There are two features I could see being useful: Auto-start during the night, when the electricity cost is lowest and a detailed error report, like heating element is 100% function, or water is leaking. None of those features will ever be available, because that's not why they are adding "smart" features.
Then after a few weeks the company decided they had to change their authentication scheme to something really complex and I couldn't be bothered - deleted the app and don't really miss it.
They typically have a very powerful 2.5 kilowatt heater they run in bursts - for like 5 mins when prewashing, for like 10 mins when starting the main wash, and like 10 mins again when drying.
In between those times, the machine uses only ~60 watts for pumps.
I have often pondered what a world of machines designed to meet solar output looked like - and for a dishwasher it would involve the heater being modulated to match the solar output (and knowing that sometimes the wash cycle would take longer if a cloud was overhead so heating was delayed by a half hour).
Concrete costs far fewer $$$'s than batteries do, per kwh of heat stored, it also doesn't require inverters, balancing or safety systems, ad lasts millions of cycles rather than thousands.
You can still slowly heat it up to 70 or 80°C and just add some extra heat on use, but that will still leave a lot of immediate power to deal with.
However, since my array is currently 4.4kw at 3 in the afternoon, a 2.5kw burst isn't a problem.
Once you've started an appliance on a cycle it's going to keep running, even if the sun goes behind a cloud. So you don't need to start it when the instantaneous solar power is at its highest, you need to start it when the predicted next two hours of solar power are at their highest.
And it turns out you don't need complex monitoring to figure that out.
I will absolutely never enable it.
"Less to go wrong" is my mantra for appliances. I want to switch them on and forget about them.
Your dishwasher might not implement it, but the existence of wifi-connected start function probably means that home assistant could enable this.
There's no money to save on spot price optimization there.
I have yet to see a single non-bullshit feature from any "smart" appliance, honestly.
It turns out it was a very simple Wifi ESP8622 project to wire up a reed switch + a magnetic door sensor to add such an alarm to Home Assistant.
Same - although I have experienced an interesting extension of this: HomePods now have alarm detection (the intention being to detect a smoke/burglar alarm). It is also triggered when the fridge is left open, leading to everybody in the household getting a critical alert (which ignores silent mode).
I would like a smart fridge that lets me know what is inside - so I know if I should get milk or a salad on my way home. So far nobody makes that.
I'm sure this is practically not a real issue, but my OCD paranoia cannot fathom the idea of my oven being on while I'm not at home due to safety / fire concerns.
I feel this is a terrible trade-off: a minor convenience, in exchange for a huge attack surface that could allow someone to burn your house down remotely. The folks who build IoT systems have neither the skill nor the economic incentive to keep these things secure for the 15+ year lifespan of a durable good like a cooking range.
Would be fun though, appliances can just have a "make me smart socket" with direct connection to hardware. Then it's the smart plug that needs kept updated, but more sustainable since it's used for many products. And if your manufacturer for it dies, can just replace with any other one since they'd be held to a standard.
Aren't RFID tags on all groceries a viable solution to make product info available to a fridge?
If you get a notification at work that your fridge door is left open, it would stay open until someone gets home and manually closes it.
:)
Brother Compact Monochrome Laser Printer, HLL2390DW, Flatbed Copy & Scan, Wireless Printing, Duplex Two-Sided Printing, https://a.co/d/8vMWJCK
If you want one that additionally has PCL 6 support for universal compatibility, get the slightly more expensive HL-L2375DW.
I have both, no regrets.
For a long time Monoprice sold very good Brother compatible toner for reasonable prices. Sadly, that time has long passed. Brother 1st party toner is not as cheap as I'd like but it's still decently affordable compared to other major brand 1st party toner. I've had horrible luck with non-Monoprice 3rd party Brother toner.
Brother HL-3140CW. Color laser printer. If you'd have told me it'd still be working ten years later, I wouldn't have believed you. I print so sporadically, but when I do, it just works. Does AirPrint from smartphones, etc.
My only complaint with this model is that it actually has no Ethernet port, so it connects only via WiFi. Seems like a strange trade-off for something like a printer.
Printers were a product category that were expensive for what they offered and were always kind of finicky. I can still remember never knowing if my printer was going to work when I needed it to or not.
Since I purchased a Brother printer all of those concerns went away. It works well, requires minimal set up, is reliable, and represents great value for money over a period of years.
I'm on my second printer from them in the last 10 years and wouldn't even consider a competitor unless there's a serious decline in their quality.
Edit:
Since I saw someone ask below my model is MFC-9340CDW
Apple had no choice but to make CUPs support generic printing interfaces because printer companies at the time rarely made macOS drivers, and this has benefited Linux too.
Any of the printer companies that made high end professional printers used by print designers, photographers, etc usually had Mac drivers for their entire printer lineup because Macs had a huge presence in world of desktop publishing, graphics design, and photography from most of latter half of the 80s all the way up through the 2000s.
I wasn't implying that you can't complain about it!
Couldn’t be happier with it
It's universally coupled with a lot discussion about how much of a scam inkjet printers are from any company.
> I don't print often, but when I do I want color so a BW laserjet isn't a good fit.
.....then....buy....a Brother COLOR laser?
The levels of arrogance in "well I can just throw out more than half the advice" is breathtaking...
...and then you have the nerve to blame the community?
1) Buy a cheap inkjet printer
2) Discover it runs out of quick within ~50-100 pages
3) Learn about the distinction between laser and inkjet printing
4) Buy only Brother laser printers for the rest of your life
It's a rite of passage at this point.
Inkjet is also typically more viable for non-commercial borderless and supertabloid printing, like large prints and posters.
Think about that before you email anything you want to keep private.
I dont see any way to register the sender's expected email on the printer. Back to fax spamming...?
https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...
"And here’s 275 words about printers I asked ChatGPT to write so this post ranks in search because Google thinks you have to pad out articles in order to demonstrate “authority,” but I am telling you to just buy whatever Brother laser printer is on sale and never think about printers again."
(followed by chatgpt output)
It never gets in my way, always works when I need it, is happy about the default drivers and costs me around 20€ in ink every two to 3 years.
It makes me happy to hear it once a week when it cleans itself.
If anyone knows how to fix this please let me know, I want to love my printer as well.
I print once a never, so the only answer I remember is to power cycle the little bastard.
And then I have to reboot my pc so windows 10 will find it.
There's probably a couple services I could restart instead, but reboot is fast enough I don't care.
Observation: disconnecting the printer from the network avoided the un-wake-able "deep sleep" state. Re-connecting the network made it susceptible again. I suspect it's particular network traffic that causes the printer to wedge into a sleep it cannot leave; possibly a Debian box that I've since de-commissioned. The problem no longer occurs despite having the same firmware as before and being connected to the network.
If anything its connectivity works too well: I first connected it via USB, installed the Brother drivers (i386 only, but whatever, I don't need a 64-bit printer driver really!), and CUPS shared it over the network to all my computers. Then I added an Ethernet connection and it shared itself over the network. So now there are multiple ways to reach it.
Apparently this can be fixed be reflashing its firmware but from what I can gather this requires some obscure utility that’s not generally available.
Also look at the delicious Windows 2000 style settings interface:
All the cloud nonsense is there to enrich the manufacturers, it doesn't actually make these products better. KISS!
Further, I got mine as a refurb since I wanted it in the throes of the pandemic so I wasn't going to spend big bucks on a printer and needed something for the amazon returns labels primarily...
The HP laser that was replaced was finicky at the best of times.
Wifi is the only "innovation" that I cared about when buying a new printer. My old Brother just had USB, which was fine for 12 years. But my newer (10 years old) Brother has wifi and printing from the couch is great!
They've made the best scanner by refusing to innovate in that area as well.
What happens instead is companies keep rewarding executives by increases in revenue, they keep rewarding product managers similarly, and product managers selectively choose metrics that optimize immediate revenue, at the expense of brand loyalty. This is happening to almost every tech company, and the exceptions are rare gems.
In android, if I click on a link in facebook messenger that takes me to facebook, the back button takes me "back" to facebook's home screen instead of to the messenger app. Tapping back button again does nothing. I have to switch back to messenger manually. That's 5-6 taps/swipes instead of 1, because a product manager's bonus in FB depends on how well they beg for more engagement. As a result, I rarely use any of these products. I used to spend some time in Instagram/FB. I close LinkedIn immediately after an important interaction for similar reasons.
I made a mistake of buying another Samsung product after years. Never again. I made a mistake of buying another HP product, never again. I might still consider Dell only because of how well they supported me with their monitor flicker.
None of these products have a defect that's caused by poor design, programming, or manufacturing. They all suffer from growth-obsessed mindset.
Brother is what it is, not because of lack of innovation, but because of deliberate evasion of short-sighted greed.
The shareholders can then invest into new companies and startups.
This is much better for the economy AND for the shareholders
The alternative to stock buybacks is that the corporation make stupid acquisitions and try to integrate them into their processes, thereby killing them.
In fact every society which tried to take all of their money away and eliminate them as a class (more or less violently) has failed economically. Turns out when it works properly free market competition is strongest force for economic and technological progress that has ever existed.
Stock buybacks only benefit shareholders and companies, not the economie. Trickle down and all that doesn't work, stock buybacks reduce a companies tax burden, especially when leveraged which they often are, do not lead to more investment. And they make the rich even richer.
See, for example, here:
https://hbr.org/2020/01/why-stock-buybacks-are-dangerous-for...
And salaries rise, primarily, through labour organization and collective bargaining.
I believe the parent commenter's point was exactly this. Giving money to the investor class and expecting it to benefit everyone is the definition of trickle-down economics.
> And salaries rise, primarily, through labour organization and collective bargaining.
No. Supply and demand is and pretty much always was a much stronger force.
I'm all for it as a employee AND a shareholder.
But besides that, is there anything that makes buybacks worse than dividends?
Dividends are cleaner and affect the price in well understood ways: you set a date for the elegibility, and if you bought before that you get the dividend, if you buy after you don't.
Stock buybacks are less transparent (you don't buy them all at once).
Dividends also give money to people who have shares.
There is not difference beteeen these two mechanisms in who gets the money.
Like I said, it's the tax treatment that basically stopped growth companies giving dividends. I think that we should change said tax treatment and also make buybacks illegal but that's a bit more controversial.
In any case, for both G and FB, they'd need to do buybacks anyway because of their employee share programs.
Given a certain amount of money, spending it on stock buybacks vs spending it on dividends returns the same amount of money to each HOLDING shareholder.
In one case, they receive a small sum. In the other case, the value of their stock goes up.
Which is to say, very little overhead
That’s what happens when the oil companies do buybacks instead of investing the money
This way at least the money stay in country, instead of sending overseas checks.
Stock buybacks have destroyed companies like GE and Boeing.
This is very well covered in the book about Boeing - Flying Blind. A bunch of Jack Welch mentees did the same trick, selling the company for parts and buying back the stock - until there was nothing left to sell. It was very "profitable" for a while, though!
It's not a tool for company growth - it's an accounting trick to make the wealthy ultra-wealthy.
There is a reason why buybacks at these levels were illegal (or at least very hard) until the early 80s, but there were multiple pro-big-business "reforms" that took root under Reagan which are now wrecking sensible Capitalism.
Ooh nice, TIL and thanks! I really liked "Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric" about the failure of GE and was looking for something similar.
On the topic of buybacks and dividends, it's part of the short term quarter-oriented thinking. Spinning off subdivisions and doing stock buybacks and dividends are very popular and look good on the balance sheet in the short term... but if you think about a quarter or two ahead, it's crippling. But it doesn't matter, stock go up, bonus go up, everyone happy for now, kicking the can down the road until it's someone else's problem.
That companies should always operate as worker cooperatives and never return money to shareholders?
Because stock buybacks are just another type of dividends.
Workers are the shareholders in worker cooperatives.
>You don't like fruits!?
The money in the pockets of shareholders is more effective at finding good investment opportunities than the innovation department of big ol’ corporate.
But yes, there is an argument to be made, that acquiring small companies can be a valid strategy for big companies. Overall, I think this is bad for the economy though, therefore I am glad that antitrust is pushing back on this.
My mental model is that money in the pocket of companies is "low entropy money" and money returned to shareholders is "high entropy money".
It's the same amount, but much less effective.
To be clear, I think that we need to address both of these issues: general wealth distribution and lack of affordable housing.
Most of the money returned to shareholders isn't going to be pumped back into the economy as money spent on goods and services. It just goes into the casino we call stock and bond markets where it provides some liquidity for some investment into companies, but most of it is just spinning around creating no value.
It matters whether people’s work is effective or not, because it it’s ineffective, you have fewer goods and services that can be consumed.
The factor that connects work to output is called productivity.
It matters how the goods get distributed, yes. But as communism has shown, it also matters a whole lot how many goods and services are being produced.
All the time, that's what dividends are. Not something that happens much in growth tech stocks but real common in the rest of the economy.
Imagine a human being with a growth mindset. He optimises his bodyfat to the point of anorexia. He optimises conversations by extracting knowledge then moving on. His diet is pure protein shakes and broccoli. Every morning he does six Leetcode Hards. If you met him you'd think he was deranged.
This growth ideology means every company we interact with behaves like Bob. Soon enough this Bobism filters into people through the labour market and professional values. (Like the Leetcoders). It's alienating and the only purpose it serves is an investment based economy with unclear benefits to society at large
It creates a very strange world where we have computers acting like people and people acting like machines
More to the point, if you think about it the biggest follower of the growth mindset is cancer.
And turns out that’s not just of
> unclear benefits to society at large
But actively detrimental to it, and ultimately, with a handful of exceptions, to the cancer itself.
https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-growth-was-good-then-getting-...
This obsession with growth is so utterly self-centered. I still have those chairs, by the way.
However starting 200-300 years ago the industrial revolution and various innovations have made other growth possible. Today war destroys far more than it gains you need a large industrial base to build a lot of equipment that you destroy (bombs are not cheap), plus all the equipment the enemy destroys. If you don't go to war you can instead use your industry to build more luxury goods (vacations are a valid luxury good for this discussion though we don't normally think of them that way!)
Note, war above is entirely from the attackers point of view, and it is - as attackers are - optimistic about the chances of winning a war. The defender has other considerations.
This was my life 2-3 years ago! Almost exactly. Definitely was deranged, no argument there. But I got in shape for the first time in my life (-90lbs), found a romantic partner, and got a ridiculously well paying job, all within a year. So, yeah, definitely worth it!
At some point, obsessive focus on growth has to lead way to something more sustainable.
This is not to say low-creative types make a better company. I've worked with completely different sets and it makes for polar opposites. What I find interesting is that companies/groups tend to cluster leaning towards ones which push for innovation or either shun it, again determined by their core member personality makeup. I wish there was some more tendancy for them to balance out somewhat, but it is definatey a phenomenon.
The three month stock market cycle coupled with capitalism and advertising are at the root of a ton of societal problems that we are incapable of solving within that framework. Between those three we are all just lemons to be squeezed.
As long as they aren’t acting in a way that excessively blocks/restricts competition, I don’t really see a problem with this. Old companies get boring, and eventually if they get too boring they get disrupted … maybe disrupted to death.
Growth for growth's sake is simply wrong. It is always growth at the expense of something larger.
I would expect a growth mindset as applied to health and fitness would recognise short term versus long term benefits. Maintaining a healthy bodyweight decreases the risk of all cause mortality. Losing weight to the point of anorexia would cause numerous potential problems, and quickly be recognised as not ideal and a different approach applied.
Optimising conversations only for maximum knowledge extraction is not a valid approach within the broader goal of optimising social interactions to maintain a healthy group of friends and family who you enjoy spending time with and can depend upon for years to come.
A diet of pure protein shakes and broccoli is clearly not in line with any reasonable approach to a healthy diet which instead should aim to have a broad a varied source of nutrients, again with the goal of maintaining long term health and supporting whatever sports/training/activities the person takes part in.
A programmer/software engineer who is serious about improving their craft would be much better served by taking a holistic view of their role and expanding their knowledge and expertise to a much broader set of skills than just algorithms and data structures.
Your hypothetical deranged person I would argue is operating under the exact opposite of a growth mindset.
I'm lambasting the "growth strategy" that leads companies to release worse products via over-optimisation. I am pointing out how this sort of 'growth strategy' would lead to absurd behaviours if a human applied the same logic.
I think it would be reasonable to class his mode of being as that of individual growth mindset.
Analogy is a literary device for conveying an idea. You obviously understood the idea being conveyed, thus, the analogy did exactly what it was meant to do.
The point isn't that the particular strategy for health and fitness is right or wrong, it's that the growth mindset causes the person (Bob?) to over-focus on that aspect of their life to the detriment of more important but less obvious ones, like personal relationships, being kind to others, or enjoying fallen leaves in autumn.
Bob spends his 20s trying to improve his bodyfat percentage, max his bench, get a Porsche, and build his 401k.
He misses out on his niece's early childhood, loses his highschool friendships, and breaks up with his girlfriend for a job opportunity in a different city.
This is like the printer company focusing on revenue instead of brand loyalty or its reputation.
But there seems to exist another phenomenon that is described in the book The Mindset, where the term originates, which is quite different.
Let's take some examples from partner dancing which I am very familiar with.
In some dance cultures, it is customary for the leader to try to maximize the area on the dance floor that is occupied (or "owned") by the couple. This is done, so you can dance more freely, do whatever you please. Such leaders may use many methods, such as intimidation and even physical force to push "weaker" leaders away from the area they consider their own.
There are other dance cultures, where the leaders try to co-operate. For them, the area on the dance floor is shared. I feel where the other leaders are going, in a way I dance with the other leaders as well. We will try to harmonize our movements so that we can all share the area. The leaders who are able to effectively use the space are highly valued in such cultures. Beginners are given a little bit more slack, of course, but at the same time, non-cooperating leaders may be pushed out by the co-operating leaders.
I once participated in an Argentine tango dance event (called a milonga) in Buenos Aires, which was for locals only. Many milongas are filled with tourists, so the locals try to keep the tourists out from certain events they consider their own.
I was invited to the event by a friend, a follower, who knows many locals and so is accepted member of that event. But even knowing my friend did not give me any slack, but my co-operation was put into a rough test from the beginning.
Many leaders intentionally surrounded me on the dance floor, and pressured me from all sides. As I am quite experienced in dancing in small spaces, I did not hesitate and was able to continue my dancing and keep co-operating with the other leaders although they were putting me into this test. After I had passed this test, I was accepted, and the testing stopped.
I have also been invited into events where one key requirement to even get allowed to apply is that the organisers know your dancing, and they especially need to know that you will co-operate. These are lovely events, because the level of co-operation is very high.
I think one key part of the real growth mindset is co-operation. You give up on fighting for some resource (in this case, the area you occupy on the dance floor), and you will gain something more valuable -- co-operation with the peers -- and through this co-operation you will have enough of the resource you need -- in this case you will always have enough space for your dancing.
Another part of the real growth mindset appears to be the attitude of anti-fragility. If I accept the challenge of trying to learn to dance without aggressively trying to occupy space -- even though I would be skilled enough to do it -- that pressure will eventually teach me to become an even better dancer. It is not easy, however, it may take years of persistent effort to overcome this hurdle. But without this pressure I would have never learned.
It already has: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius
And I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of glad the healthcare industry has a growth mindset that “what we have is good enough”.
It’s how humans advance. If cavemen thought “well this is good enough” well, we’d still be living in caves.
Where did I say that?
> And I don’t know about you, but I’m kind of glad the healthcare industry has a growth mindset that “what we have is good enough”.
No, you really don't know about me. But there is plenty of innovation in healthcare, and not all of it is super costly (though some of it is). Like every other industry it is a confusing mixture of regulatory capture, people that really care, people that only care about their income stream or bottom line and people that wished they could do even better. The difference between say 'big pharma' and your average nurse of doctor is massive and to lump them all into one giant heap is not very productive.
> It’s how humans advance. If cavemen thought “well this is good enough” well, we’d still be living in caves.
The 'this is good enough' is a strawman. There are plenty of things that really are good enough, and which have turned into pathways that are borderline extortionist.
And there is plenty of innovation that is not cancerous.
But do deny the reality that short term stock market driven goals of eternal growth are incompatible with a sustainable and healthy society is a non-starter for me, it is so incredibly clear that to ignore it is almost wilful at this stage. "After me, the deluge".
Yet here we are - with the most prosperous and healthy nations all based on a model around, what you call, “short-term stock market driven goals”.
May you have give an example? Because I look around and don’t see what you see.
The problem with reality is it is not clean or simple. For example having chlorinated water keeps you from getting any number of terrible diseases when you get a drink. At the same time it's a deadly chemical that takes huge amounts of industrial processing to make, and if not treated right is a source of pollution.
Not any different then the 'forever chemicals' we've made. They were highly stable and did their jobs well. They also are terrible cancer causing bioaccumulators that have caused tons of misery.
Open ended problems do not have simple solutions. They have trade offs. It's a good idea to fully understand the trades you're making.
> investment based economy with unclear benefits to society at large
"unclear benefits"? Unlimited growth is causing the environmental collapse.
Growth mindset is the _personal_ belief that _your own_ abilities are not fixed and can grow. It provides psychological benefit when faced with difficult problems and improves grit. It is not the classic HN over-optimized self. It says nothing about _requiring_ growth.
But for this conversation, the point is made well enough, I just hoped we could avoid a viral pushback against a perfectly reasonable thing.
I like how you phrased that as the positive result of a (personal) growth mindset. For non-native English speakers, the word "grit" might be interesting to learn about. Aside from the other common meaning of "coarse grains as of sand or stone"..
> In psychology, grit is a positive, non-cognitive trait based on a person's perseverance of effort combined with their passion for a particular long-term goal or end state (a powerful motivation to achieve an objective).
> This perseverance of effort helps people overcome obstacles or challenges to accomplishment and drives people to achieve.
> Distinct but commonly associated concepts within the field of psychology include "perseverance", "hardiness", "resilience", "ambition", "need for achievement", and "conscientiousness".
It reminds me of a similar term, "gumption".
> gumption - Boldness of enterprise; initiative or aggressiveness.
You can have ordinary well functioning products that just do their one thing and do them well, and thus grow market share.
There is nothing about 'growth' that says your product must add and add features until it is un-usable, which it seems like people are saying is 'growth' as in 'personal growth'.
Just build good products and 'grow' market share.
Printers have failed this by making their products bad by growing features, and thus Brother is winning because it can simply print. A printer that can just print, and not wash your car.
But it's absolutely crucial to VC funded businesses. Current VC groupthink isn't "how can we create businesses that deliver value", it's "how can we create businesses that we can convince other investors to see as valuable before we cash out and move on?"
That's why we have things like "increasing headcount" as a goal, because increasing the number of people a business employs increases its perceived value. It doesn't matter if it destroys team dynamics, increases the burn rate, etc. It's a tool used to make a company seem more valuable before the VCs exit.
"How can we steal a man's shirt while convincing him he only lost it[1] instead?"
If there's only so many shirts to go around, and they have to come from someone else, maybe we just load a bag full of rocks, lie and tell people it's full of their laundry, and then leave the laundromat before they notice. When they do notice, they will blame themselves. "Why oh why," they lament, "did I not immediately recognize it was a bag of rocks all along!"
That sounds more like a sustained model with unhealthy targets.
I'd think a growth model would be more like uncontrolled addiction, where the goal dosage continually increases and stays out of reach.
Growth is good, but it will eventually cap out. It's what people do when that happens that really matters.
>You've mastered the highest paying technology, you've moved to the highest paying location, etc.
If you've studied artificial life and see societies as mechanisms for executing the genetic algorithm, you see the faults with the growth ideology you've criticized. It's a plateau-making machine: it will tend to reward what's working right now, and starve out the genetic pool of anything else, leaving the resultant society unable to adapt.
Computers acting like people and people acting like machines is a bad trade-off. It's not at all focussing on the strengths of each. There's a reason societies (such as big cities) that seemingly focus over-much on caring for useless and suboptimal people (compared to the darwinism of the wild frontier), end up burgeoning and becoming hotbeds of accomplishment. If you treat people not as machines, but as the genes of the genetic algorithm, it suddenly makes a lot more sense to be humanist: you'll get unexpected wins out of unexpected traits being cultivated until they can be useful in their own right.
indeed there's a notion of quality in innovation and development, and also market rhythm fit..
as a kid, waiting 3-5 years to see the next version of photoshop or office was long but good, when the web came, you could get a near direct line with the devs.. instant download, constant updates.. and it quickly felt like a disease, this growth is just instability under disguise
Of course people here are getting hung up on your analogy. It's no surprise. But what you've written here is a very real consequence of our growth economy because humans are merely inputs into hoarding monetary capital. All other capital, including people, with the exclusion pf land and some selective niceties are expendable towards that end.
Once you hit that ceiling, the only reasonable thing is to focus on churn, not growth (as it will have the most impact). But that is like explaining that a "circular line on a map is actually a straight line" they say they get it, but they still see a circular line.
How would these "consumer groups" even work? Would they be democratically elected? Appointed by governments? How would they be insulated from pressure from companies trying to suppress competition? It would inevitably lead to a thoroughly inefficient and corrupt system...
This! Each and every time I see an Instagram link I avoid clicking on it for the same click/login capture nonsense. If they opened it up for views only with out logging in, I'd probably actually end up using the service. Short-term protectionist strategies like these will be etched into the gravestone of Meta/Facebook.
At our company we're trying to do the same thing now, supporting logged out users is just too expensive and not worth it.
Logged in users receive more errors.
Thanks, caching, for allowing me to continue procrastinating.
Ultimately we prioritize our logged-in customers.
Any app that does something other than that is wrong and should not have been approved.
Kent Beck calls this the Explore and Extract phases (with the middle phase being Expand). I'm not sure if you had this talk in mind as you were writing your comment, but if not I think it'll resonate with you.
The worst part is that when companies MUST switch must switch to "sustain" because they can't squeeze out any more growth or their efforts to squeeze out more growth become counter productive, they instead switch to enshitification and drain their user base, and the company, of all the value they can, essentially running into the ground for a few more quarters of profit and bonuses.
As an aside, I'm sad that "growth mindset" has been hijacked to mean "grow at all costs" when it originally meant "the belief that a person's capacities and talents can be improved over time". It was originally a term of nurturing, not of exploitation and infinite capitalism.
But if this strategy underperforms as badly as we as customers feel it does, it will eventually drive its perpetrators from the market. If they think that their positions are unassailable, let them remember how the unassailable GMC and Ford felt in 2000s.
Google kind of did this for a time with Inbox and similar products. Apple had multiple phone lines (less like this, but a tad). Facebook has multiple social media platforms. Block has square and cash app (among other things).
The American growth at all costs mindset (particularly quarterly) is excellent during the technology exploration phase. It spurs radical innovation, but as a technology matures it becomes impossible to meet growth expectations. In response to this the spiral of Enshittification kicks off and eventually the company and it's products fade into irrelevance. Stability in such an environment is impossible (the gain knob is cranked to the max).
The German Mittelstand are different, typically they are much slower to innovate during the technology exploration phase (I think mostly due to the German economy not really rewarding early stage innovation). However as a technology matures the Mittelstand's strength in stable, gradual evolution and refinement really shines. They focus on being the best in their niche and grow by expanding to new markets, opening adjacent product lines etc. Enshittification is the last thing on their minds (the system is critically/over damped).
What you are referring to is simply Capitalism.
Capitalism is where 'capital', aka money, ultimately, owns the 'means of production'. And it also innovates, and creates the means of production, by deploying money to uncertain ventures; building a new factory or whatever.
The problem is that deployed capital needs to earn a return, else why bother. In other words, everything needs to grow. The system just doesn't work without growth.
'Growth' can be, people doing more things, or, more people doing things, or, making more money from the things people do (though I'm not sure that's actual growth). We've come a long way in the last century with the first two, and now the focus seems to be on that third option.
IMHO the current system is past, or at least fast approaching, it's expiry date, and we really should have researched, and have at least a vague idea of a plausible future replacement, by now, otherwise we might be doomed to recycle the 20th C.
While I'm not advocating for the growth mindset, you seem to be neglecting why, exactly, most executive incentive packages so frequently include stock options. They are directly intended to defer the rewards over a defined vestment period to align their incentives for the long term success of the company.
I've worked in several support organization that sincerely prioritized providing good support to customers. They paid good tech's good salaries, hired good managers, and we provided great support. Sales team members would come to me and say they were selling support contracts with ease because of the support provided, "easiest money I ever made" was a common refrain.
But eventually at every company customer / tech support eventually is viewed as a cost, an annoyance. After all when customers complain what do they complain about? Even the best customer's can't praise support enough for companies to avoid eventually seeing it as an annoyance and eventually cost that is easily cut. Good managers see it coming and jump ship, support for support teams starts to erode and the culture changes.
I worked one company where the engineering team would secretly invite some of the support staff over to their building when they had a team lunch ... because they liked us and knew that our team lunches (low cost pizza) had been cancelled.
It happens time and again ... :(
Eventually I moved on and learned to code. Maintenance is hard and not valued.
This is OK if management is paid and get bonuses by the money they make by selling products. If they make money and get bonuses by selling their shares or increasing their value, they cross the line between industry and finance. Finance doesn't give a f** about industry. They'll eat one after another like we eat cherries. Unsustainable growth and enshittyfication are two tools to squeeze the most money from a company and if it dies in the process they move to the next one.
Somewhat pedantic comment: the phrase "growth mindset" is also psychology jargon that refers to the fact that many skills are more learnable than most people realize. It contrasts with a "fixed mindset" where people assume you have to work with what you've got.
Just wanted to point that out so people don't get confused between the healthy idea of being able to grow and the idea you're addressing, which is more like a compulsion for businesses to grow economically.
The one overwhelmingly large difference is that the professionals that deal with it on the context of people are well trained and know not to push it over the point it becomes harmful. But that detracts nothing from the point.
However, investors aren’t interest in buying stock in a company with poor returns. They have other options with better returns. It comes with accessing capital in the public markets.
The other issue is that a sustainable business quickly becomes a dying business when competitors innovate and you don’t.
I honestly can’t think of any business that just prints cash without a daily struggle to keep the company growing.
Exactly. We have two new Brother multifunction printers at work and they're pretty great. They're exactly like printers, you tell your computer to print a document, that's where it comes out. No hassle.
All this other BS that HP, Epson etc. are pulling isn't innovation, it's extortion. "Just be a printer that isn't shit" is innovation in this environment.
This topic reminds me a lot of the recent thread on Signal being so comparatively small but being scaled so big (and shaming big tech companies for being so big). https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/signal-meta-google-too-b... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38382811
Yes! What I see instead is a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot mindset. Its everywhere I see. I wish there was a way to see and fix this before its too late.
The right way to treat your loyal customers is also micro-intangible, hard to show clear numbers and so does not bear any rewards for a manager taking this approach. Instead, the opposite of screwing loyal customers for new ones is rampant, easy to cook up numbers and so amply rewarded not just limited to tech companies.
Unless the same management chain is responsible for new customers and leaving ones, this is an internal conflict of interest and its effects only show at the macro level.
I've seen many once-popular restaurants go this route, losing long time repeat customers who prefer well priced, familiar drinks and dishes over hit or miss exotic overpriced ones. They don't complain, they just stop coming back.
Car manufacturers, Appliance manufacturers, Food chains, Internet Service Providers, Telcos, tech startups are all guilty of this. Factions at MS, Goog, AAPL too are guilty.
Exceptions here are really really rare. I've never bought a brother printer, but it will be my next.
Honest question: what's wrong with Samsung? I'm pretty happy with their phones and SSDs but haven't had any experience with their appliances.
https://www.openprinting.org/driver/epson-escpr/
It is true that they don't officially provide support for these drivers, but they work fine for me and are even GPL-licensed so that they can be (and are) packaged with Debian. Printer was immediately recognized via Avahi and worked pretty much out of the box.
I must also say that I really like the new "EcoTank supertank" concept, it's way cheaper and ink lasts a long time. So it's not like all innovation is bad. I had a Brother before and it actually had quite a few issues (leaked ink like crazy, and very poor photo print quality) but admittedly, it lasted a long time.
I've had a lot of clients with office and I do remote support, always recommended OKI because they just work.
This is all that's needed from a printer:
- 1 day delivery to the door (yes, from OKI).
- Register and get 1 free large black cartridge.
- Print mono-tone or single color, don't need all of them.
- Windows and MacOS installs drivers OOB, no need to download or install anything.
- It connects to WIFI, everyone can connect and print.
- Only 1 e-mail from OKI in a year! (From registration)
1 - They count pages printed and will simply stop printing when they've determined you've printed enough even if you still have toner in your cartridge.
2 - They will not work with third party toner cartridges.
3 - They won't let you refill your own toner cartridge.
So you are forced in to buying Brother's toner, and and forced to do so before you may actually want/need to.
We run third-party toner in all of them, and they'll keep printing until the print quality fades.
I personally haven't tried refilling toner cartridges in a long time, it's not worth it when third-party toner cartridges are as cheap as they are and the Comprenew up the road takes the empty ones back for recycling.
At work, we have an MFC-8950DW laser printer and it's not very good. It leaves streaks on the paper and the toner doesn't seem to fix properly all the time. I end up with printed pages that smear or the type rubs off. That printer replaced a much older Brother laser and it was better. We "upgraded" simply because drivers were not available for 64-bit Windows.
Brother HL-L8260CDW
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B06XDS1XW7/R2MQHUVV9JX7N...
There's also a fill port right on this printer's starter cartridges. Brother even provided a removable and reusable fill plug.
#1 is a simple setting in admin console of the printer -- at least for my model.
It is called "replace toner" = "continue".
Default setting is "replace toner" = "stop printing".
I print for MONTHS at a time after the printer displays "replace toner" message with perfectly dark prints. Even when the print starts to fade out -- this setting ensures the printer wont refuse to print. Just keeps showing the low toner warning.
#2
I have not come across this restriction myself. Happily using cheap third party toners bought off Amazon for about 6 years now.
#3
Did not try but my guess is that should work too. I was just not motivated enough to try because cheap $10 toners on Amazon do the job for me.
Because I'll chime in with everyone else -- my HL-2270DW has been going strong for a decade and I've only ever used third party replacement cartridges. And it'll give me a "toner low" warning but still keeps printing.
The starter cartridges even come from the factory with a fill port covered by a removable plug.
The above applies to Brother printers that use TN43x series cartridges. Cheaper models have the reset chip dance.
Last 4 years, I've owned a brother b/w laser printer. I replaced the original cartridge with a long life cartridge after the original was depleted.
It just works, it prints from my work pc, mobile phones, iPad, private computer, and even guests needing to print can connect and print.
Previous frustration of low quality, special paper, engine failures etc. is nothing but a faint memory.
It was amazing because, when you printed something, it would print. 8 pages a minute, guaranteed. When it was out of paper or toner a lovely woman's voice with a British accent would tell you to add paper or change the toner cartridge, and then it would continue to print.
In hindsight, it would have been more than worth it to keep my NeXTstation working just to act as a print server for the printer.
I now have a Brother laser printer. It prints when it feels like printing. Sometimes it doesn't bother to wake from sleep, and there's no way to force it out of sleep, so you have to unplug it and plug it in again and wait for it to boot. Depending on the complexity of the page it can take anywhere from ten seconds to 10+ minutes per page. When it's out of paper or toner, there is no audible signal. You have to walk over and look at the little LCD display.
To be fair, it's loads better than the HP inkjet printer we used to have. We held a family activity where we beat that one to death in the front yard with a sledgehammer.
I purchased an Ink-Tank Printer in 2018 and have been using it with no issues. I have refilled the printer only once in the last 5-years. I live in a close-gated but large community. During the pandemic, I help with printing -- a lot, from documents to photos to whatnot. It survived.
My daughters use it for school work, printing stickers, taking photos, etc. Now, my suggestion is -- Brother. Three of my friends have bought them and are all very happy.
Brother works.
It is both sad and fantastic that they could use this as the slogan for their company and it’d just be an accurate statement (as opposed to their competitors that do not work).
Its PDF parser doesn't seem to support all PDFs, and for some PDFs it will PRINT, on paper, an error message from the PDF parser.
So not only did it not print a perfectly valid PDF, it also wasted paper and ink for it.
You can't know beforehand which PDFs it'll support or not from looking at them, any computer / phone PDF viewer supports those. It could be as simple as a PDF sent by an airline.
They should:
1) use a proper PDF library, not some half baked one
2) if something is wrong with the PDF, show the error on screen, not waste paper for it
My Brother and Epson have both have trouble with printing old out-of-print machine manuals that used ancient PDF versions. They'd happily accept the job, and then proceed to crash the print spooler and more-or-less break explorer on more than one machine with the same set of drivers.
The problem would go away if I converted the pdf to a newer version or into an entirely different format.
I finally picked up a new HL-L2375DW (and passed on the trusty old printer) and have to admit Brother made excellent innovations. As far as there were any annoyances, they are fixed. I no longer turn it off, it remains in standby sipping <<1W of power. And driverless printing is just great.
For example Suzuki still sells the DRZ400/DR650 bikes new in the US and both haven't been updated in like 20 years other than color changes
The rumor is they are grandfathered in so they can't do any changes otherwise they'd have to pass modern emissions rules
It would force companies that make printers to be honest, as otherwise we'd just get the open hardware one that doesn't force bullshit upon us.
/s
(HL-1450, MFC-8880, MFC-8890, MFC-L3770, some of those at the same time.)
If you mean the gearbox, contrary to amateur opinion, nylon is probably a superior material to the cheap metal ones they replaced.
Because their mixers are still made in the US, labor saving cuts are much more worthwhile to them than materials.
(Their non-mixer offshored lineup is overpriced crap though).
A good example is the removal of the spring & washer used to secure the attachments: they are only a few cents of material, but they greatly increase the life expectancy of the mixer. Now you'll have to get those for $10-$20 from a 3rd party...
Oops. Do they? I ripped mine off years ago. It makes a bit more clatter at low speeds but I haven't noticed any damage.
Contrast to 10-15 years ago, feels like I would've been needing a printer on a weekly basis, at least.
Would be much cheaper and more inclusive to ask for a small fee and print it on professional devices centrally organized by the school.
Well - now the free market has figured it out! There's a private company who will buy everything for you on the list and deliver it to your classroom.
Welcome to America.
Yes. COVID saw some of this move to Microsoft Teams at our district, but some teachers are definitely holdouts. Some teachers want essays handed in on paper for marking up, as well.
For now, they are probably still the least bad printer option (talk about a low bar), but I'm my opinion they really don't deserve the effusive praise they receive.
nothing else to add, other than "they don't make 'em like they used to"
oh and here's a bonus pic showing the $6 price tag from when I bought it 20 years ago https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oAFemqYAfiHp2lWLqjwYCTI4WW0...
Brother deserves credit for its practice of stealth postmodern retrocomputing, for lack of a better phrase, if you will.
Cheap components are durable and scale, whether hardware, software, or SoC blurring the lines between the two.
Sadly, what this demonstrates is just how much the cloud dreams of Brother's competitors have diminishing returns because they are so tied up with authoritarian control regimes that have nothing to do with users' experience with their respective devices. Quite the converse.
Many companies today start from the solution (yes, LLM, I'm looking you) and then looking for the problem.
15 years ago, I bought the cheapest laser I could find, which was a Brother. Put two cartridges in it over the years, and last year it died. Some devices couldn't print to it due to driver issues, but it was easy enough to send to another device to print. Otherwise literally no complaints.
I did some comparison shopping, and while Brother was no longer the cheapest, it was still pretty cheap. I'm not sure most of my family even remembers it's a different one, other than it printing more easily from every device.
I replaced one grey box with another, but I mostly get to ignore it, and that's wonderful.
When it eventually died I got a wired Brother B&W laser printer, and it's been incredible. We've put many thousands of pages through it, easily, changed the toner twice, and it just keeps on working. It is a simple, boring, wonderful piece of tech.
I do not want my car to run its own OS or to get over-the-air updates. Any update for my car should be installed with a socket set.
The fact that we still have not standardized on a (very) few kinds of CMYK toners for laser printers and CMYK print heads for inkjets is an indictment of the people at the top of every printer company.
Ryobi promised to use one battery on their 18V cordless power tools many years ago. They stayed with it through the switch from NiCd to LiIon. I still buy ONLY Ryobi One+ cordless power tools.
Will someone please standardize on one or two 9" wide toners (for 8.5x11 and A4 paper,) and one or two 12" wide toners (for 11x17 and A3 paper?)
Make the toners standard and every business that hates stocking dozens of models of toners will flock to your company.
They do not have to the world's bet toners. They just have to work. I suggest the use of a common and freely-copied toners from a laser printer whose patents have expired.
The printers do not have to be tiny. Leave an extra few inches of height to allow for extra capacity toners that only business customers will buy.
That could seriously happen with LLM AIs. Imagine a hardware switch that activates a single board computer (SBC) with a mic, a speaker, a connection to the printer or copier to read status messages, and a LLM that cam answer questions about the device.
Companies (and secretaries) would love the one brand of printer or copier that helped you fix their machine.
The only issue I saw is the toner color match on laser models could be a bit better. Still highly recommended for anything except photos.
"Innovating"
The high-speed inkjet-bar systems and Dye-sublimation printing kind of specialized in photographic printing.
Patents do expire eventually. I think most people mistake 23 year old ideas as "innovative" when they enter the high-volume consumer markets. Derivative and opportunistic is a different business model.
One, propably accidental, innovation was Epsons ET-8550 / ET-8500: Dye ink based tank printers in A3+ and A4 respectively with two blacks and grey. They produce very decent photo prints, even B/W, decent color management and incredibly low cost per page for inks. They are somewhat pricey so, but can double as a home office printer. Something a, say, Canon Pro-200 cannot.
And I am not sure if print quality is so much different, both being dye ink printers (the Epson ones have a second pigment ink which is used for certain media settings, works reasonably well on normal photo paper but not great, results are supposed to be very good on some fine art papers which I haven't tried yet).
I say accidental, because Epson never marketed those two as photo printers. There is a reason so why no decent photo printer is included in any pay-per-page service, otherwise those would be great!
I'm surprised people say no driver is required, auto-recognized out of the box etc. In contrast, I agree with the parent post that Brother requires a very non-standard binary installation that will throw various errors on a clean Intel 64 bit Ubuntu 21.04 LTS installation.
I tried this 4 times with 2 printers, 3 times it did not work and 1 time it worked. Never got WiFi to work on a Brother laser, so had to go by USB, which is annoying.
Edit: Still better than my $450 HP duplex business printer, which stands unused due to forced subscriptions and rejected cardridges. So far, the best experiences I had with a Kyocera b/w laser and Lexware b/w laser (the latter in the office, so I did not install it). Brother is okay, but with random driver fiddling required.
Ubuntu has been going through some issues driver wise (glitching after EOL of several legacy repos), and sometimes not every program will render out the right pipe. USB shared printers never seem to work well in linux. Try the native OS printer detection once your network sees the printer mac/ip (LPR mode should work). Note too, some printers disappear/reappear on network change overs.
What is the make/model/year where you can't reach the printer web-page on the IP?
But if you look at, say, fashion, it's clear that the market still needs "innovation" (by that I mean new fashions, new trends, etc). If you stop doing this, you don't get the next generation, and your customers slowly age out and your market shrinks. Forget about growth, de-growth is literally unsustainable, and businesses need to be sustainable.
Identifying whether the market needs the innovation or not is hard. Smartphones are in a weird place right now where each generation feels a little less convincing, and people are starting to talk about whether innovation is needed. We're not quite seeing the rise of "Brother" like products yet, but we are seeing an increased focus on longevity which is likely an early indicator.
It seems like something that the EU could make itself useful with, for instance.
It is old, but works with Android print service, although it takes a good while for it to connect to the printer. Brother's Print and Scan application works faster, although it's also not ideal. Printing from Linux is not very nice, but at least some old Cups drivers are available. I usually do not bother and print from Android.
The biggest surprise for me was printing from macOS. It shows me all the options I never new this printer had, the biggest thing being automatic two side printing. I would like to know how Mac's do it.
The scanning is ok on my device, although the paper feeder for automatic scanning doesn't work reliably which is a pity.
What broke in this one was the Drum, so I dived into printer tutorials and information to see that printer Drums are rated for an x amount of prints, the repair shop we took it to said it was because of that but in a negative way when its pretty normal in all sorts of things to break after the rated amount.
In the end, the repair shop owner looked for an used drum locally so we can get it cheaper, She got it and sold it to us for $50 bucks.
I waited to see if I saw any black friday deal to buy it and save it but didnt happen.
Model: brother hl-2240
One of the problems with repairability in the US is cost of labor. It's why there's a casual attitude among many South Asian families to take it back to India etc and have someone fix it.
On a larger scale, it's what they do with Toyotas - buy well built but heavily used Toyotas in the west, and ship them to East Asia and Africa where they can be repaired and last another 100,000 miles.
I think there's a YC company working on a recyclables marketplace.
Maybe Brother has gotten where they are by being dependable and reliable for what their brand offers and delivers to those who care about it.
Their devices often do a lot more out of the box than advertised too.
They don't seem to cripple their devices either, you typically get the full suite of software to go with the functionality at any price point.
Even their higher end label printers have features to print to them programatically that is often only in higher end printers.
Brother has swung above it's weight. Generally third party inks work with them well enough.
My most recent printer is an Epson, but otherwise, there's a fair bit of Brother in my life to set, and forget.
I have to use HP MFPs because their scan-to-email is actually decent and can do authenticated SMTP sign-ins but I hate dealing with HP and their shitty toner practices.
Always works with no fancy drivers and aftermarket toner is cheap.
Part of the reason though is selection bias. I prefer the simplicity of a B&W laser printer and don't mind the "lo-fi" aesthetic.
It’s like $50 now and the toner lasts for soooo many pages it’s basically free. In other words, for the price of an inkjet cartridge that lasts maybe a year, this thing lasts forever.
However, VueScan [1] - something I hadn't used since my Epson scanner in the mid 1990s - saved the day! They support scanning for it, and after a quick purchase I was able to scan from it again.
This sounds like shilling for the company, but just posting here if anyone has a similar problem to me. I wanted to scan something but macOS 14 (and maybe 13 or 12?) wouldn't work with my Brother multi-function scanner... although the printing still works fine.
Otherwise I'm still very happy with this scanner - one software purchase and one set of toner cartridges in over a decade is pretty good total cost of ownership :)
The only innovation they ever made was the addition of a repeat spacer, which was a nice touch.
I use to use Canon printers and in the 90s, as computers were becoming more powerful, they moved the "smarts" into the drivers inside the computer reducing cost. The printer no longer accepted anything but dot by dot instructions from the driver. Being strictly windows driver, my new printer was a paperweight with my Linux os. Since then, the Linux Community has developed support from the printers but I moved on to Brother. Canon has lost me for good. I've been a loyal user of Brother printers for decades. They just work, reliably and more economically.
But... now we just buy whatever HP or Apple ships and hire an intern to manually do the thing we were trying to automate.
It did take Time to stabilize the design, anything before the ql700 is clunky. But the ones I tried after have been Great
I ended up buying a thin client and installing full windows 10 as a print server.
The only feature I insisted on when I bought it was that I wanted it to be ink tank-based instead of cartridge-based. Other than that, it's completely unremarkable. People really need to assign more value to "completely unremarkable".
I am quite annoyed after "breaking" two Inkjet printers in 5-6 years and want to buy a laser one this time, but am not sure how is the cartridge issue different between laser and inkjet. Do laser cartridges last longer? Is it less problematic to use non-original cartridges?
How well non-original cartridges work is highly dependent on the printer model. Some have more complex authentication of the cartridges and others it’s a simple page counter.
The main downside is color is a significant increase in cost of the printer as fairly expensive pieces need to be duplicated for each color.
Laser cartridges are just boxes of fine black dust. You can buy a matching box of fine black dust from somebody else, or refill your (empty) box with a different version of fine black dust, this won't matter much at all.
Having said that, I use a Brother b/w laser for 10+ years, and — with original toner being sold on Amazon at $40 and delivered for free to my door — have never bothered with neither refilling nor using "aftermarket" toner.
I have a basic Canon which, to be fair, has worked well for ten years or more but I want to be ready for when it eventually stops working.
I'm only using the Brother Windows app for scanning purposes, as the OCR works well for my needs.
It's been 2.5 years, no issues whatsoever, just needed one toner change after a while.
There is a reason laser printers usually have their own room or remote corner in offices, they aren't really great for air quality.
As for price, a hl-2140 is $50 and will last you for 10k pages if not more. I don’t think inkjet pricing economics ever win here even with the pay per use the latest “pricing innovation” the inkjet companies have invented. I love that my laser printer has 0 maintenance aside from filling the paper tray and I never have to think about it. It ran out toner after like 7 years of very occasional printing and there was lots of advance warning. The printer itself just works with no issues.
Seems like the subscription might be a decent deal if you actually print quite a lot, though.
Personally I love the Brother printer I've had for ~13 years now.
I looked at color lasers and they seem to take TN229 cartridges. There are 3rd party replacements, but they seem to cost more than the brother ones.
also, in a twist, most printers on amazon have been strongarmed into doing "amazon dash replacement" stuff bolted on.
brother also has added a toner subscription service.
And reviews complain that when the printer decides the toner runs out (by numerical count), you can't do a "keep printing anyway".
I can't tell without buying a newer printer first, but I think you need to just check reviews first.
Highly recommend a zero feature Brother laser printer. Yes, the replacement toner will cost nearly as much the printer but if you reach the end of the toner you got your money’s worth.
You should be looking for one that is black and short, rounded rectangular. Like a much larger Apple TV shape. It should have like 3 buttons max. Anything else and you are out of my territory so who knows.
Kinda like "The Framework" laptopts but for printers.
These have had some mild innovation and software nonsense which I'm sure will age like soft cheese, but you cannot overstate how amazing driverless printing is. Linux, Android, iOS all print, scan, no setup, full feature-set no questions asked. Blew my mind. Three years and thousands of prints later, and I'm certain it's the best £400 spent on a printer. Wish they made a large format model at similar specs and price.
I can just do "Add printer" without having to download any proprietary printer software on Windows. the iOS app makes printing from there a piece of cake. Brother FTW!
I think the situation with printers and appliances share a common cause, the financialization of firms that is part of “late-stage” capitalism as evidenced by the shift between C-M-C transactions to M-C-M, and now M-M’ (see https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/daskapital/section2/).
My Brother printer doesn't treat me like I'm some kind of asshole. Just try an HP printer and see how it abuses you.
Brother products are roundly recommended because they don't put asshole chips in the cartridges. Brother printers do have fake counters that indicate out of toner/ink, but those can be reset easily and they are not tied to cartridge chips.
In spite of this, the devices are cheap, comparable to their competitors whose low prices are subsidized by the ink racket.
I even considered getting a monitor, but you can't get one as big as a TV.
They’re not cheap, but that’s to be expected if they’re not heavily subsidized by ads and content analytics like many smart TVs are these days.
Merely being able to scroll and read the whole thread without logging in shows how hostile the overly-innovated alternatives are.
It's like having 5 min of Tech Christmas[1] away from our still-detonating, Florida-flavored[2] tech dystopia.
[1] Halloween really. It's not endlessly co-opted. No joy sapping baggage. No toxic expectations. Halloween is the Brother of holidays.
[2] In August. In an election year.I'm in the same boat as others here, I bought a laser Brother about 20 years ago - €100 or so - and it hasn't missed a beat ever since. Probably the best purchase I've made and it still "sparks joy" for me.
I'm betting lots of people haven't experienced this, because their old printers are still working great.
Sometimes you need to change and innovate to get there, sometimes you need to stay where you are and keep an eye on it. But "It just works." is the quality that sells products for the long haul.
Only after I set it up with the TCP/IP protocol, it works fine and is available every time.
Windows, Linux or Android, all of them connects wireless and prints, and no funny stuff with toner cassettes.
Perhaps not financially smart, but I buy my toner from Brother just to support them as a thank you for this piece of hardware.
A print that Just Works with a range of different devices when you plug it in is (unfortunately?) fairly innovative.
I was just on Brother’s website thinking I would get a printer and 20 minutes later I’ve given up. Their website is really bad. In my first five minutes I think I closed the pop up advertising their Refresh ink program five times.
They have a soooo many models but thankfully there’s a help-me-choose button. I went through that and at the end it recommended something that had everything I need. But there’s no buy button at the end. The more information button says I need to contact a dealer for pricing.
I think checking duplex-copying pushed me into their business line (even though I chose home at the start). So I started over and skipped that option and at the end I got a different recommendation but again, no buy button and the only listed retailer was Walmart. I searched for it on Google and I think it might be a discontinued model.
Their help—me-choose function didn’t help much because my number one feature is that it not have DRM’d cartridges (ie accepts third party cartridges) and that’s not something you can filter by.
- TVs not stuffed with spyware and "smart" features that stop working randomly!
- Appliances, ditto
- Cars, ditto
Although now I feel like I'd better go buy like 10 Brother printers, because it's only a matter of time till some private equity firm decides the company is leaving money on the table by not requiring you to subscribe to the CEO's OnlyFans to get ink and buys it out to squeeze out some revenue from the brand before poisoning it.
[1] https://www.brother-usa.com/supplies/ez-auto-reordering/refr...
They’re simple, reliable, and relatively affordable, so they’ve given me no reason to seek out alternatives.
(I only wish Xerox was as smart. I still miss my Phaser wax printer).
This makes it extremely easy to archive receipts.
Rasterisation:
- It supports PostScript, but the rasteriser is so slow it's a problem. If you print a PDF without any transparency in it it's fine. If you print a PDF with the slightest bit of transparency in it, expect a 30 second delay of the "Data" light blinking per page. This destroys the print speed and probably wastes toner due to not having the next page ready in time.
- Its official print driver isn't just a PPD but has some binary blob Linux executable configured as a filter. This is obviously completely unusable on non-x86 platforms. I assume the object here is to rasterise stuff on the host before sending it to the printer to avoid the above issue, but it is a proprietary solution.
- Even using the official drivers on Windows, plenty of documents take noticable time to rasterise per page (e.g. heavy PDFs containing high-DPI scans taking tens of seconds per page), and you still don't get the rated print speed. So the above doesn't fix rasterisation time anyway.
The consumables game:
- The toner cartridges for this printer are NOT chipped. This is good. It's actually incredible how it works; there is a 1 bit mechanical 'register' on each toner cartridge which comes set from the factory, and when the printer senses it, it clears it mechanically and resets some settings such as page count since last cartridge change.
- However, after accidentally buying the wrong cartridges for a newer kind of Brother printer, which had a very obvious set of electric contacts added, it's become clear that Brother is now chipping its newer toner. This cannot bode well IMO.
- Furthermore, the printer will refuse to print after a certain amount of time with a given toner cartridge. Sometimes it will detect there doesn't seem to be toner in it and you can fix this by taking out and shaking it. But, as per the service manual, there is also a hard cutoff after which it just won't print (unless you use the service mode to make it pretend you've inserted a new cartridge). According to the service manual, this is because there is a 'bias voltage' which needs to be adjusted over time as a cartridge is used, and this is reset when you insert a new cartridge. Hence why they have the 1-bit mechanical register. The problem is that their bias voltage lookup table with respect to page count so far seems to run out after the rated number of pages, so it just refuses to print after that even if you have toner in there. You can use service mode to reset this and make it act like there's a new cartridge in there, thereby resetting the bias voltage to the initial value, but I assume this is done for a reason and would lead to suboptimal results(?). So the effective result is that Brother LED printers will automatically demand a new cartridge after a certain number of pages, even if toner is remaining.
I'm currently substantially more happy with a Canon G650 tank-fed inkjet. It's been about a year now and I still haven't had to refill it, which means it consumes consumables even more slowly than the Brother. Of course one of the great things about tank-based designs are they can't be chipped and the ink level monitoring is open-loop.
I will also say the Brother is now unusable for colour printing, as it comes out all garbled. Unclear why this is, perhaps it is due to some bad third-party toner (I never buy genuine), so I'm not really holding this against Brother, but it is another downside in practical terms.
IMO printer manufacturers should be banned from selling print cartridges, and should be required to publish specifications for their manufacture instead.
There is a deep-seated myth that capitalism creates innovation. Capitalism builds enclosures, first quite literally [2] and now through intellectual property, rent-seeking, legislative barriers and so on to keep competitors out.
Look at the story of Tetris, invented by a few guys in the USSR for fun, basically. And what did the Western capitalists do? They simply licensed, re-licensed, sub-licensed that creation.
Printer companies maximize profit by creating enclosures. Limitations on ink, control of the drivers and so on. There's no motivation to innovate. industry is ossified.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGKsbt5wii0
[2]: https://www.joewrote.com/p/the-origin-of-capitalism-the-encl...
However, if you're thinking I missed the point, that it's sometimes better to just... not innovate, you're mistaken. I agree with it, but there are absolutely areas where the intended purpose is not well defined or simplistic. Innovation is needed, it just takes experience to know where and when to innovate.
There is nothing even close to this brand.
To experience the polar opposite, fire up an HP sometime.
Khhhhhhaaaaaannnnnnnnnn.
I was in doubt exactly between this printer and a brother printer (similar features) but for the brother printer just wasn't sure it would have worked, and during the pandemic I didn't want to risk it.
Brother shit: a multifunction printer they had fed the paper differently and usually poorly from the manual feed slot. If you opened the paper tray, it loudly alarmed for three full seconds, classically conditioning me to avoid using it.
A brother laser printer said it was out of toner. Replaced the toner and it said it needed a new drum. Replaced the drum and it turned out to just be broken. Cost of parts equal to a new printer, plus time wasted.
But, you know, every other printer is garbage, too. Inkjets dry out (HP, Epson). Electrical faults cause the printer to hang or reset (Lexmark). Poorly written drivers cause the printer to waste a ream of paper printing junk on each page, probably trying to print PCL as ASCII (Samsung). An HP I had literally stressed out its own ribbon cable to the print head until it failed-a design flaw.
But few things are as garbage as Instant Ink, pop-up ads, and needing special online apps to access the basic functions like scanning.
Oh, but then I remember AirPlay for audio having all kind of weird issues and delays even with hardware which works. So, wireless would sound good but would be broken for the important session.
Innovations in 2023 are "we stick our cloud in the product even if it does not make sense and we will annoy people to death with it". Or marketing shit like 100 megapixels sensors and slow cards/ports/CPUs to work with these megapixels. But sounds cool.
Innovation? That rarely ever happens. It might be on corporate values lists, but no execs actually value innovation. You don't increase profits quarter over quarter by innovating. It's too risky and too expensive. It's safer to beat the familiar drum, and from time to time buy a startup that actually makes something good.
This is like with "smart" TVs. I just want a screen. Fuck right off with your godawful software. The only easy devices I've found for this are projectors. I know it's possible to find "professional" market panels, but it shouldn't be that hard.
TL;DR: buy "Refresh"-free Brother printers.
Friday i wasted 3 hours because windows decided it did not want to print anything.
A microwave needs two dials - one for power level, and one for time. Not a calculator keypad, not buttons with +1 and +10 on them or any of that nonsense - dials please. And start/stop buttons if you insist. That's it. It does not need a 'defrost chicken drumsticks' programme cluttering up the ui, because that function is far better fulfilled by a human repeatedly running the thing at low power for a few mins then poking the food with a finger
If we are going to get fancy wifi/Ethernet just for ntp so the time is always right.
Dealing with this right now; At someone's place with such a dial microwave and they work around its incredible lack of precision at the consequence of burned or frozen food.
I’m sitting right next to a brand new brother printer that, once per month, forces me to unplug it, reboot, and re-enter my Wi-Fi password using a nightmarishly Byzantine “up/down” input mechanism…into a LCD display seemingly from 2002. Would really love even a mediocre mobile app to help with this (somehow mine doesn’t support it). A quick internet search shows my experience is not uncommon.
Brand is a powerful thing I guess. 15 years ago you release a somewhat not-terrible product in a stale category…and decades later you can do no wrong. Makes sense I guess, how many people have had the chance to evaluate first-hand more than 2-3 printers in their life.
Not that it'll solve your issue with any guarantee, but if you haven't looked into it yet... .