Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by WarOnPrivacy | Hacker News Reader

I need this part explained to me.

    And it's about why I still believe in HP despite everything that went wrong.

This utterly baffles me. [checks] The post isn't 25y old. Author is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and analytical skills.

The only way that remark makes sense:

    1) HP has some enterprise division that makes stuff I'll never see and
    2) Author is Enterprise only doesn't know their consumer division exists.

Because it's been decades since I've ran into new HP kit that didn't fall somewhere between awful and unusable. I say that without the least exaggeration.

DV series laptops? Bad mainboards and a class action suit before willing to honor warranties.

Post DV laptopts? Awful to use. Trackpad buttons requiring a painful amount of force. Trackpads that fail. Weak performance. Mediocre screens. Rigid plastic bodies that broke easily - especially at hinge points.

Desktops my customers bought? Out of the box unusable. Weak CPUs and 4GB RAM in a 2020 build. Barely browses the web. Put in a corner until thrown away.

Printers? As in - Any HP printer? Crapware. Hostility and sabotage. Intentionally hidden costs. Then there's HPs wireless printing....

As a brand, HP is unsafe. I rate them less desirable than Yugo because Yugo (at least) didn't have teams of MBAs dedicated to crafting bad user experiences.

I have good experience with HP laptops. Not their 200 euro consumer trash (but honestly, anything marketed towards consumers is trash these days, from any vendor), but HP's ProBook and Zenbook line. Probook is more plastic fantastic, but the repairability was great. Zenbook got hot, but always remained quiet (until the Nvidia GPU kicked in, but that's on Nvidia). Driver support and UEFI update support were both excellent, both in terms of support duration and general stability.

I've also got one of their thunderbolt docks. The only downside I've found so far is that MAC address forwarding doesn't seem to work outside of HP laptops. Everything else works great on normal devices.

As long as you avoid their cheap crap, HP are fine. Unfortunately, they do sell cheap crap, and consumers love cheap computers (even though a second hand computer with better specs would serve them much longer). Every brand that sells cheap hardware has gained a reputation for being terrible. It's why Apple's laptops start at the price of "used car" and Google's Chromebooks start at "two tanks full of gas".

I have an HP ENVY laptop that’s very nice. Amazingly good screen, takes SODIMM and M.2 NVMe, flips around as a 2-in-1, and is quite thin and light for a 15” laptop.

But omfg the HP website and product lineup are impossible to use and figure out! Dell does it better but is still too complex. Why are there so many product lines? How does a normal person figure out what to buy? HP has excellent engineering but horrible marketing and sales and it’s been this way for decades.

I feel like this is every PC manufacturer except for maybe Framework. Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus, MSI, their websites and product lines are all confusing piles.

Apple has its problems and their store page is getting worse, but at least most of their product lines are easy to grok configure.

I don’t need an MBA to know if it’s hard to buy something, people won’t be likely to.

MacBook Airs are marketed towards consumers, and they're certainly not trash, are they?

> It's why Apple's laptops start at the price of "used car" and Google's Chromebooks start at "two tanks full of gas".

“Used car” is a wild exaggeration. For many years, people have been able to buy MacBook Airs that overperform for 90% of consumers for $1,000 (sometimes even less). This device will last at least 7 years, if not 10.

https://www.costco.com/macbook-air.html?screen-size=13-in+13....

This is ancient reference but I used to have HP's nx6320[0] laptop. The thing was built solid, fantastic keyboard, excellent screen - basically an all round solid business laptop. I remember dual-booting Windows XP with Ubuntu Dapper Drake on it - worked perfectly.

[0]: https://support.hp.com/in-en/product/product-specs/hp-compaq...

> This utterly baffles me. ... Author is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and analytical skills.

The author is intelligent enough to not burn bridges with a company where he has a lot of useful connections. So this section is him basically waving a white flag at them.

HP got split since then - the HP you think of today is not the company it was in 2010. Too bad, HP used to be a great company that earned their great name.

Your questions though are valid.

Were they used to be great? I definitely remembered HP having a very bad reputation even back then. Like every time a ridiculous printer feature that costs user’s money it was HP.

Think back to 1980. (which may well be before you were born). I'm not sure when they started sliding back, but I'd put the start somewhere around 2000.

That sounds about right. Just checked and that's when Carly's tenure started. Compaq ruined DEC, HP ruined Compaq, then HP ruined HP.

We had a cheap LaserJet 1000 printer at my first job back in the day. I think that we printed hundred of thousands of pages and I aways trusted it.

But the InkJet printers sucked, just like everything else HP now. But HP had a good reputation.

> We had a cheap LaserJet 1000 printer at my first job back in the day.

Those were good. I also liked the 1100, in spite of it being an early software driven laserjet.

I had a particular soft spot for the little 1010/1012 lasers. They were persnickety because they require a software defined USB port and Windows 7 was the last OS supported. With a little kludging they work on Win 10. I'll find out soon if they do Win 11.

But like every good HP experience, it's in the past.

You would hardly believe they once made top of the line voltmeters, oscilloscopes, atomic clocks, calculators - even their printers were once the best.

And the company was an engineer's paradise--that's why Woz was so reluctant to quit.

That is not a bad rep for the shareholder. They were great in those terms. And gave lots of market opportunity for everyone else but HP dominated the scene.

I can still remember when they had a sterling reputation (including but not limited to their legendary calculators). Our family had a friend who was an HP engineer and I once got to go to work with him and see one of their giant plotters in action. It was awesome. Now I actively avoid all of their stuff. Not sure I can think of another brand whose reputation has changed so much for the worse.

When I sold printers in the early 90's, HP Laserjets were broadly considered to be the gold standard.

HP definitely was once a great company. Most longtime observers would say the downfall started with Carly Fiorina and the ill-advised Compaq acquisition. Both Hewlett and Packard's sons opposed the acquisition, if you dig up some old articles you can find their rationale (which I think proved to be totally right), and you can see how Fiorina essentially smeared them, a bit of foreshadowing for the generally shitty human being she showed she is in later years, IMO.

My first inkjet printer was an HP DeskJet in the mid-90s. It was rock solid. At that time, HP printers were the best consumer printers on the market, with a reasonable price/quality balance.

HP also had a good brand image due to its servers (HP PA-RISC) and calculators (like the HP 48GX).

They started to go downhill when they made big acquisitions like Compaq and Palm, and the Itanium architecture failed. It's like IBM: They became so big and stretched that their best products turned into crap.

I remember using the HP ThinkJet which I thought was fantastic and quiet and so small. Ironically I was using it only to output raster images while developing HP LaserJet competitor firmware that emulated PCL 5e. I was told it won a PC Mag shootout for LaserJet clones.

The LaserJet 4000 (and 4050) was a beast. It was so reliable, you would swear that one would have to go on an epic quest to Mount Doom to actually destroy one of those things. You're 100% correct about what HP used to be like; I miss those days.

About the time they sold off their test instrumentation division they start sucking royally. Agilent still makes great stuff though.

Keysight now, agilent followed HP's lead and spun off the unprofitable instrumentation division. Almost like expecting what is essentially an R&D division to be as profitable as medical electronics is a mistake. Although they have a good enough core that they've launched 2 successful companies out of that R&D division, which I would argue is where the DNA of the original HP is. So give it 10 years and keysight will be selling off their test equipment division to juice their stock...

TIL that Agilent was still in business. I thought it was a straight name-change to Keysight for their electronic test equipment business.

Very popular choice for LC/MS

Ask a greybeard electrical engineer, at one time they were making the top grade test and measurement equipment. Older HP gear still brings a premium compared to other vendors, but we're talking stuff made before 2000-ish. They absolutely did cutting edge work and built rock solid gear, but that division has been split off twice into different companies. And keysight gear (the current successor) isn't anywhere near as great as the older stuff.

You aren't wrong. 70s and 80s HP scientific gear was the gold standard - often because it was pioneered into existence.

I was recently fixing a WinNT 4.0 box, attached to a daily-used 30yo HP Spectrophotometer. The latter needed no service.

Had a black and white laserjet printer in the late 1980s. Was a magnificent device and super reliable.

> HP has some enterprise division that makes stuff I'll never see and

It's a separate company now: HPE "Hewlett Packard Enterprise". He mentions them in the blog post, but if you don't know that in 2015 HP split into two companies, you might not realize. He holds stocks in both companies, HP and HPE (in 2015, it was the same number, but since then there were some splits).

HPE sold its software arm to Micro Focus subsequently as well

I was part of that transition. Great times explaining why my job changed 4 times in 18 months.

Startup -> HP -> HPE -> Micro Focus -> new job after I got tired of all this corporate deck chair rearranging.

> This utterly baffles me. [checks] The post isn't 25y old. Author is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and analytical skills.

One lens on this is that according to him he hasn't sold a single share since he left the company. That would mean he has a substantial monetary reason to see that people keep believing in HP.

These were my exact thoughts about HPs printer division. These should be studied in bussiness schools as the definition of enshitification for the next 25 years. PC side of HP is a different story. Their high end consumer laptops are crap compared to dells xps line. Comodity/Enterprise gear is equivalent to Dell (primary competitor) at the generic box and monitor level. Maybe a bit better on the power supply and managemet side. Worse if you bought into VMWARE ecosystem. So I thought HP…meh…dying company with legendary history of innovation in the 80s and 90s. Then I bought an HP z840 workstation for homelab. This thing is a beast. Engineered out the wazoo! Three pcix16 slots, 1+ TB RAM, 40+ cores. Documentation for days. Way better than similar era Dells. At least in the late 2010s they still had it, for the right price. For sure not unusable or any where near awful…even 10+ year old kit.

Ive got no idea about gear in the last 3 years or how they will do financially going forward. But if you are looking at the used market, the enterprise workstation gear in the late 2010s has tons of value.

I must have the last good HP printer or something. Mine is the "HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw" which is a WiFi enabled colour laser printer. It prints nicely, a set of cartridges lasts me for multiple years (low usage of course), has a built in scanner that works with the drivers available for Linux (even over WiFi), and is happily chuntering away on 3rd party cartridges. No issues whatsoever.

Honestly I'm expecting it to suddenly stop working or something given all the horror stories I hear about HP, but so far ... working just fine.

I'm a bit sad that HP are the last resting place of the Digital Equipment Corporation and that neither they nor the external company that they licensed OpenVMS to offer any VAX VMS hobbyist license, but that's for sure a niche thing to whine about.

Their laserjets are fine. It's the inkjets that have all the major problems.

> I must have the last good HP printer or something. Mine is the "HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M281fdw"

I have some of those in my care. They perform fine but they are locked to chipped cartridges.

And when HP learned their customers were moving the chips to 3rd party cartridges, HP worked out a method to cement the chips in place - to make it as hard on their customers as they possibly could.

When I referenced HP with the terms Hostility and Sabotage, it was the M281's I had in mind. Although, crapware applies too. They're reason #4,009,175 to never buy HP.

I have a somewhat older, but higher-end m475dn. Last year, scanner calibration mechanism started failing, and printer couldn't complete the init sequence anymore: it can't be used as a printer anymore either.

It has only seen home office use, and didn't run through the second set of toners.

No service shop wants to touch it either, so I've got a 30kg paperweight.

This is why we need all software and firmware to be free software.

I was going to chime in that I've been really happy with my HP Prime calculator, I purchased it in 2015 when I went back to school mostly because the TI calculators are absolute overpriced garbage and I wanted a calculator that did RPN. I still keep it in my desk drawer and use it several times a week, it has such a genuinely nice interface that I'd rather grab that than use the calculator on my PC. That said, from the wiki link[0] I see they sold that division off to a consulting company in 2022, so I expect that product line will deteriorate.

I'd argue the actual HP that people think fondly of got spun off with the test equipment division, first to agilent and now keysight. They're the folks doing the cutting edge engineering that is the lineage of what HP was.

The current company is probably the worst tech vendor available, I'd rather have whitelabel stuff direct off alibaba than most of their consumer stuff. I split time between sodfware development and IT (small company), so I have people ask me for recommendations on printers. This has happened three times where I recommended a specific model and warned the person that if that wouldn't work to get any other printer besides a HP. Several weeks later, they ask me why their brand new printer isn't working, and when they say they got a HP I tell them the only solution is the landfill. They have engineers specifically working to make the printers and drivers as crappy as possible, normally they're the cheapest option but that doesn't bode well. Meanwhile my brother printer from 2011 is going strong with absolutely no maintenence, and we have a small-office grade brother laser at work that has done 2.5 mil pages with only minimal maintenance (dusting with air, it lives in a warehouse). It's clearly possible to make a consumer grade printer that isn't garbage, but HP hasn't been doing that since at least the mid-2000s.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Prime

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