HP CEO: "Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription."
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
It was a delight to see dozens of hacked HP printers with tubes directly going into containers of ink doing all the printing.
The printers had small custom circuit boards attached and were mostly dismantled up to the very core of the machine. As far as I could see it all worked very well and print quality was also good at a low price (even for local standards).
HP doesn’t stand a chance against humans who are determined to solve a problem.
Which makes it sound like a breach of copyright law.
[1] https://epson.com/ecotank-ink-tank-printers
Haven't used them personally but it seems like a positive step forward.
https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/maxify-gx6021?color=Black&t...
The question was how to justify this to the customer. Ultimately they had to reinvent their products to make the conversion seem worth it. MS365 solves a lot of pain points in business. For the most common basic use cases, Office online works better than the client software. Features and fixes arrive right away instead of waiting on a version install cycle. Security is Microsoft’s problem now, not mine.
It seems like HP still needs to go on that journey. Subscription printing needs to be way better than printing now. If it were me, I would look at Comcast’s WiFi model, where they leverage everyone’s routers to give everyone WiFi. Imagine being able to easily, instantly, and seamlessly print from any HP printer you happen to be close to. Add in some business partners and it could be compelling. Hit “print” and walk into the nearest CVS to pick it up. Take a page from streaming video services and do partnership deals where it comes as part of another subscription (“Comcast Gig Internet now comes with Print Anywhere included.”)
In this model you would pay for access to printing, and separately pay for the added convenience of print at home if you want it. A local print device becomes an upsell, not a barrier to entry.
HP is going to continue to try and squeeze more profit from a diminishing market and users will not benefit from that no matter how they try and creatively package it.
I can think of 4 things I used to print regularly: homework assignments, tickets to events, coupons, MapQuest directions.
All four of them are no longer necessary to print. Homework is now usually either done by hand on notebook paper or uploaded somewhere as a PDF. Tickets and Coupons are now done via QR or bar codes in an app or e-mail. Google Maps and Waze on your phone made printed MapQuest directions obsolete.
Printing will continue to be less and less common. These days, I go to my veteranarian and they offer to e-mail me the results and care instructions for my cat rather than printed 5 pages of crap.
There a better options. Friends don't let friends by HP printers.
"We have seen that you can embed viruses in the cartridges. Through the cartridge, [the virus can] go to the printer, [and then] from the printer, go to the network."
I don't see any instances of this type of attack in the wild. Also, if you made your cartridge "dumb" then there would be no threat vector any more.... no?
Really, this whole supposed security issue is bunk and hokum. I do appreciate their efforts to give the world more reasons not to buy HP Printers.
Mine has been going for nearly a decade with no issues to report and almost no one has anything bad to say about them, so I'm curious what issues you had?
It was great when it worked, though. Got two years out of it.
It can't print photos well (at least I assume, I haven't tried) but I'm generally not doing that at home anyway. For printng a large amount of simple flyers it's cheaper and faster than an inkjet and perfectly passable. I sometimes print labels and other things that are fine as long as I use laser media.
It has no problem accepting third party toner cartridges I buy on Amazon. Works great over Wi-Fi from pretty much all my devices.
Never buying HP again, even if it weren't for this.
The greatest tragedies in branding history are that you can no longer buy an HP oscilloscope, or an IBM PC.
1. Buy laser rather than inkjet unless you're printing photographs every day.
2. Brand doesn't matter as long as it's not HP.
The question I'd really be asking is, do you actually need a printer? If it's once a month a less... any of the Office stores will do printing at about 10-15 cents a page for B&W, probably a bit more for color. They'll also have a ton more choices of things like paper/card stock. Many of things things you "needed" to print a decade ago are now often electronic tickets - I'm thinking things like confirmations, flight confirmations, that sort of thing.
It's a 5-15 minute drive for me to get to the print shop. It's near food options that I eat at somewhat regularly, so I could just tack it on to a trip to dinner, but still...
I'd rather spend the $150 once and never need to go to the print shop ever, though I did need to recently to send a fax because the DMV is still living in the 90s.
Side note...my smartphone is...well...a phone, in addition to being a computer. Why the hell can't smartphones send faxes?
As for the why... faxes operate over the legacy network using an acoustically coupled modem.
At some point, yes, the digital signal from my phone gets converted to an analog signal to be sent over traditional telephone wires. My phone just has to produce the right noise for a receiving fax machine to understand it once the noise is converted to an analog signal.
Looked into it...so many of them want you to subscribe or have a stupid pricing scheme.
> As for the why... faxes operate over the legacy network using an acoustically coupled modem.
There's nothing special about a fax connection. It's just a telephone line (which my phone has). The "modem" part could easily be done in software. All it has to do is synthesize the right noise on the line.
Like, I get it in the spreadsheet sense that more money and recurring revenue is good for HP. But how exactly is this supposed to play out in the marketplace?
Are there any examples of other companies successfully executing a similar strategy?
Note that I said can above. Just because things can be cheaper doesn't mean the costs will be passed on. Just because the costs can be cheaper doesn't mean you will find that savings.
They gotta do a whole lot better to make that a reality.
They both have their flaws, but nothing approaching the BS that HP pulls.
Printing quality goes down after not printing for a long time, but the automated "cleaning" (or whatever it's called) program solves that in a minute
I got a Laser Brother multifunction center recently and whilst it wasn't the absolute cheapest option, it seems you get what you pay for. I could connect it to wifi on first attempt, and everything just worked on first attempt. It's incredible to have printing & scanning that "just works."
I can't phantom why, through. Printing is nowhere near as ubiquitous as it used to be and many private people don't need to upgrade their printer often, so you're just making your new products worse than your competing old products on the used marketplace.
I'd shift the marketing to encourage better, high fidelity printing that requires special ink or guzzles through existing ink even faster. Make money off of the ability to print your own high fidelity photos on glossy paper (that HP also sells). Printing office docs is more or less a solved problem for everyday folk so it's way too late to rent-seek.
Otoh, I worked in an office with a high volume printer / copier, and I definitely see the value in paying for some managed subscription instead of actually owning the machine, unless they really make it absurdly expensive. Just like cloud, it's easier for lots of companies to not have to own and maintain physical infrastructure.
From cheap WiFi webcam to high-end cars, they finally found out that constant revenue is better for them than one lump sump, especially now that technology has reached a point where you don't need to change your hardware every 3 years.
And for a business, recurrent small fee are easier to manage than large fees that are often limited by amortization.
The "price per page" has long been a efficient business model in the professional copier world.
This is true, but I'm not sure it's can be adapted for home use.
Every price per page agreement I'm familiar with involved leasing a machine and carrying a service contract. Both of those agreements make sense when we're dealing with something with a price tag of a new car that is a critical part of a business, but not so much when it costs a few hundred dollars and prints nothing more urgent than Amazon return labels.
Save the planet lol
Printers come with "starter" cartridges that contain only a fraction of the ink of a full cartridge.
I did not pay more.
More discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39105752
And earlier
I'm incredibly happy with my MFC-L3770CDW and I'm so glad I spent the effort tracking it down.
HP Laptops: crap. HP Inkjet printers: too expensive for actual use, stop working when you need them. If they still make other stuff I'm unaware of it, I see the HP brand as a negative signal.
Boeing has been mentioned often on HN as an example of how management can destroy a very good company. I think HP is actually a much better example, they were the brand to emulate and now anything they do is what you really want to stay away from.
https://doctorow.medium.com/oh-great-theres-drm-in-printer-p...
Think about how many people still idolize Bose when you can get better quality sound for the same price or even cheaper.
Obligatory plug for Brother printers without any of this nonsense.