Ink is completely full: Woman warns of HP printers. Won't let her print anything | Hacker News Reader

Ink is completely full: Woman warns of HP printers. Won't let her print anything

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8 pointsjosephcsible10 comments

It's because of the subscription based ink which has hardware and cloud based DRM(!).

HP even warns about it when you cancel the subscription (in small print and legalese, though), which is free for the first 12 months after purchasing a printer or so I believe.

I know because my parents have a HP printer (probably also the last because of these shenanigans) and I had to throw away a full set of ink because they cancelled the subscription (cost is way too high for the amount of prints being made). They didn't understand at all why the printer refused the supplied ink, even after I tried to explain it.

The simple and safe approach is to just say "NO" to anything with an "HP" logo on it.

Your best interests are the last thing they have in mind. Either trust me or learn the hard way --- like the lady in the video.

As a business I could see value in something like this. Also as a business I would want same day service contract on my printer as well if printing was critical to my business. Because just having the ink when your printer breaks as a business you're still dead in the water. As a non business person that prints a modest amount, it seems totally ridiculous. The nagware that they already have on printers should be sufficient enough for non-business use.

My dad uses this program. It sounds insane to me, but when I expressed some distaste for the idea, he pushed back and said he loved it. I have a hard time understanding that point of view.

> I have a hard time understanding that point of view.

I guess, this program can be viewed by your dad as a "being able to print - as a service" offering where the value is not only in being able to print, but also in being able to stop caring about ink cartridges. Some folks don't mind to pay for services that take trivialities off their minds.

There's nothing wrong with such a service in principle, but it should never be implemented in a way that a brief Internet outage keeps you from being able to print to a local USB-connected printer.

I suppose. There are a lot of things I don't like or use on principle, even if it might appear to make my life easier in the moment. Things that push us toward, "you will own nothing and be happy," tend to fall into that category. Other things, like Temu, which accelerate the race to the bottom and promote mindless consumption of disposable goods, is another category I try to avoid on principle. Over time, I think both categories will make the world a worse place.

I can't get behind these things and I carry some animosity for people who support and spread them. In both cases, I think the people supporting/using these things are not thinking things through and are only thinking about today at the expense of tomorrow. I think this is the core of my struggle when I try to understand the other side.

On the one hand, thinking about ordering ink is a thing of the past (a fairly trivial task for a home user imo). On the other hand, when the internet goes down, or something happens which impact the user's ability to pay a monthly fee for ink, their ability to print is completely gone. Never mind that they have everything they need and have paid a lot of money over time for it. The printer then becomes e-waste, even when it should work perfectly fine under a different pricing or subscription model. A simple ink monitor with an auto-reorder based on usage patterns should be enough. That wouldn't require locking it down, the user could cancel any time and still use the printer/ink they have... then if/when they are ready to sign back up, they can. Or just order ink ad-hoc. I'd have no problem with this.

Put like that... where can I sign up?

I fundamentally don't get the value proposition of this, either. Whatever demographic this appeals to is clearly one that is very alien to me!

One demographic this appeals to is the shareholders. I doubt their user/market research said anything about people willing to pay for this.

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