HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Never own an HP printer again is the right answer. Vote with your wallet and feet. Any company that is this consumer hostile should not be surprised when consumers choose another vendor.
My new printer is intentionally neither HP nor inkjet. HP can get stuffed.
So their low-volume plan is 35¢/page, scaling down to 5¢/page. That’s obscene, but not surprising. Corporate greed has been HP’s stock-in-trade for many years now.
So ironic that they call the printer “Envy.” It’s been decades since I envied anyone with an HP printer.
I had bought in to their $20 printer with free printing for life up to like 10 pages a month they offered years back. The printer took forever to setup, the cartridge never worked the month after (the ink dried perhaps?) and eventually they reneged on the deal altogether. The experience was deeply frustrating. Then I bought a $350 Brother printer. Worked right out of the box, never dealt with drivers and anything of the sort, prints effortlessly from my phone. I've had reliable printing for years and I'll never look back.
Sure they were tanks, but you could do most of the service with a Philips screwdriver. The 2 most common failures were the fuser or a DC controller board and both were simple to replace, imo.
The current HP is a ghoulish parody of the HP that was.
Might as well go to FedEx Office (formerly Kinko's) for that price.
Consumer Ink printers (inkjet/bubblejet/marketingjet) are truly a scam.
“giclée prints”
The entire reason that I need to print things is because I have use cases where there are no acceptable electronic alternatives.
This is creepy as hell. Everyone knows social media sites are spying on them, but a printer is just hardware you pay for. The real value here is probably that it will slip under people’s radar.
As a home user I print < 5 times a year. I'm sure some print more but how much can it be. Do schools still ask kids to hand in printer assignments?
What would interest me is a simple way to print something and either get it in the mail the next day or in some pickup box. I'm guessing that exists and I'll have to explore it once my 15 year old toner cartridge finally runs out.
Email them a PDF, they'll print whatever you need. It's probably worth it to keep a basic laser printer at the house (my ancient Brother doesn't even have networking or duplex printing - but it's USB-connected to my iMac, which allows AirPrint with Printopia, which is well worth the $20) for things you need a copy of right now, but for a hundred copies of a 20-page handout, a print shop is almost certainly a better choice.
People still think Bose is the premium audio brand despite plenty of other brands catching up on audio quality and selling for a lower price.
As a consumer I'd never go for this trap though. I just have a cheap brother laser.
Years ago I worked for a state university where senior management was doing the mirror image trick - they weren’t able to get any more money for opex but plenty of money for capex. So they padded out all these projects with contractors, such that our project’s budget was paying 100% of the contractor’s hours but only actually getting 50% of them, and they spent the other 50% doing day-to-day “keeping the lights on” stuff.
I suppose public sector finance can have very different fundamentals from private sector.
What a despicable company.
I'm just waiting for printer companies to start selling the content of what you're printing to companies for AI training.
Marginal gravity. Just an idea I'm pondering.
Because for any product, no matter how ridiculous - whether it's the "I'm rich app" [0] or motorised spaghetti forks and other Chindogu [1], there's always some tiny minority of people who will buy it.
Those people are the proverbial clueless rubes who have no real experience, sense of context or value, but discover some product and assume that "it's normal". Maybe they never needed a printer in their life, but suddenly need one, and the first thing they come across is this outrageous HP product. Without any corrective influences they just purchase.
To this we add Erica Chenoweth's 3.5% rule [2].
Now this handful of idiots set a kind of precedent that accrues more and more "almost idiots",and eventually otherwise quite reasonable people are being sucked into a giant black hole of madness.
In no time everybody wants a broken expensive, piece of crap that spies on you, and the last percentile of genuinely sensible people are left holding out - being mocked by the new majority as "unreasonable" Luddites who resists "progress".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chind%C5%8Dgu
[2] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35...
You do what you want, but I personally wouldn't buy anything from HP, regardless of price, power, or aesthetics.
Who knows if the brilliant business minds currently in charge of the printer division will bring this magic to servers. I for one have no interest in finding out.
But some of my friends place the date at 2002, when they merged with Compaq.
Never buy HP.
At best it's a waste of you time and funds. More likely it's a costly waste of your time and funds.
I doubt I will ever buy a modern HP product, seeing as they are so stridently enshittifying their printers.
It's great having a printer that'll use up a fuser in its life, and it's even better that you can replace said fuser in twenty minutes.
Full stop. Not ever gonna do it. For the forseeable future, I can get, and already own, a cheap laser printer that will trundle along and make the few pages I need every month.