Why Apple Will Never Make Printers Again (2009) | Hacker News Reader

Why Apple Will Never Make Printers Again (2009)

macworld.com

54 pointsd99kris34 comments

Atari used to "make" printers. By that, I mean they would contract some Asian company to make a printer mechanism that the Atari 400/800 was able to print to, and Atari's factories would drape it in plastic that had an Atari logo. In this space, if you saved a screw you were up half a penny, which was a big deal. The printers that Atari produced were famously rickety and very, very slow because Atari was a cheap-ass consumer company that indexed on price and didn't care that it took ten minutes to print each page of your 20 page book report for tomorrow morning.

I saw the boneyard of printer chassis that didn't make it through the qualifying rounds. They were pretty terrifying.

- One printer chassis had gone through several revisions, each revision removing some major component (a motor, a solenoid) until just the bare-bones remained. It was clear that each revision reduced the printer's ability; what remained was something as close as they were able to get to an abstract idea of printing without actually abandoning the ability to print. I'm sure the cost-reducers considered that, too ("What if we gave them a tray for a hunk of paper, included a pen, and the instructions said to copy down what was on the screen?") The Ideal Atari Printer appeared to be a single motor, some kind of print head and a way to advance paper (ideally also driven by that single motor). Wackiness ensued

Now repeat that for each minor bit-player in the Asian printer mech market, all of whom were hoping to strike it big by convincing Atari that their bare-bones claptrap should be the winner in the race to the bottom.

- There was a color printer that rotated ballpoint pens in a holder and drew vectors. I was intrigued about how this would image anything on the Atari's raster display, and this issue was no doubt the reason the mechanism had landed in the boneyard. Still, it had gone through several revisions, and no doubt the Asian engineers were thinking of goofy and cheap ways to spin that pen holder, sans motor.

- There was an enormous boat-anchor of a printer, which looked like it had been submitted by a former designer of army tanks. This was the printer you wanted; indestructible, capable of printing in depths of the worst Siberian winter. Whatever you wanted to print, this printer would go through hell, cross mountains, take the enemy city and eventually your printout would emerge, using whatever substance you wanted to print on. Paper? Bark? Stone? Sure, no problem. Unfortunately the shipping costs were probably crazy.

- A slightly less battle-oriented printer chassis looked like it had also been submitted to Apple, and had an interesting similarity to the ImageWriter when that was later revealed to the world.

Printers today look equally wacky. Just go to an office store and imagine what's underneath the plastic. What knife fights drove the reduction in costs? What engineering careers were left on the cutting room floor? There's drama in consumer tech design if you dig deep enough. You want to avoid these printers, they will let you down and force you to drive to Kinkos at midnight for the remaining 18 pages of your book report.

We recently replaced an old but perfectly working HP laserjet because we couldn't find new toner cartridges for it anymore (and remanufactured toner carts suck); replaced it with an un-wacky HP laser printer that I hope will last another 15 years.

Is there a site that just does printer reviews, and also continuing reviews of the printer after one month; six months; a year; etc?

And includes true cost of running, and details of the cart so people who use third party toners or remade carts can use that too?

Just yesterday I tried to buy a DSL modem where the capacitors don't fry after a year and a half. I feel the whole market of Customer Premises Equipment (read: modems and access points for home users) is in exactly the same situation.

"There was a color printer that rotated ballpoint pens in a holder and drew vectors."

Oh man, pen plotters! In the age of B&W dot matrix, this was like the closest thing you could get to color printing in a cheap manner. I always lusted for the Sharp model that connected to the Radio Shack Pocket Computer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVkkii15TLo

AutoCAD users were really familiar with plotters back in the day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iziP0cQhOFY

If Apple made printers, they wouldn't compete on price, but on quality. And it would be developed in secrecy.

Just saying "this is how the market works today, and I don't see Apple doing anything" isn't really relevant when you talk about Apple.

Not that I think they would make a printer, but the article is bad.

I agree. And I don't think the small margins really is a problem if you come out with a "disrupting" printer. I don't think the portable music players margins were that high when they released the ipod.

Then again, I don't know what a disrupting printer would look like. Printers always appeared to me as awkward computer/realworld interfaces.

And there was only one improvement Apple saw printers needing, and they got the market to adopt it for them.

I would pay for a good printer. I bought the most expensive HP consumer printer (which was not very expensive at all really). It never works when I need it. Doesn't connect to my wifi network 90% of the time. It's bug ridden as well, crashes all the time with the weirdest error messages. The only way to fix wifi or crash is a reboot, which is annoying and takes forever. It refuses to print black and white when it's out of magenta. And it's pretty much always out of something, apparently you can get about 5 prints from one cartridge. It also constantly nags you about low ink levels, worsened by the impossible user interface. I don't even want to talk about the included software and drivers. The scanner has a mind of its own and there is no convincing it to use the flatbed scanner when it has decided you want to use the feeder. I always end up at the local copy shop.

Get a laser printer. Period, end of statement. Spend at least a few hundred dollars on it, it'll last you a decade and a half, and it'll have much better drivers than the jokes that inkjet printers come with. Plus, you'll get supplies that won't go bad if you only print every month or two. Inkjets are just complete and utter crap.

We have an OfficeJet. The color ran out a year or two ago, and I haven't found a need to replace them; I just print B&W. The only reason I didn't switch is because I couldn't find a multi-function laser printer (I need a scanner and the auto feeder) though admittedly I barely looked. It seems there are more options now (well rated Brother on Amazon), so that's my next buy once the black runs out. Screw ink printers, never again.

Agreed. A basic laser model was a revelation to me that is possible to buy a cheap home printer that isn't destruction-baiting garbage.

I have a $100 Brother laser printer that has been pretty fine for light duty for ~ 5 years so far (but that's at a print rate where I am still using the starter toner that came with it, with tape over the window). Wifi/Network too.

It depends on what job the printer is for. Printing photographs? I'd use a laser printer as much as I'd use a dot matrix printer. High end inkjet printers are simply unbeatable for printing images. Documents? Laser every time.

HP 4200 on eBay for less than a hundred bucks USD with just 20-30,000 page count is easy to find and will last a good long time.

Printers are an obvious dead end. So much so that this Onion article can presuppose it to be funny: http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-t...

Just add one dimension to it...

I've always loved this take on printers: http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers

The Imagewriter ][ was a stellar dot matrix printer. I wish I had an excuse to have one set up.

I (partly) got into Linux because I needed a cheap postscript printer: my (awesome but quickdraw-only) StyleWriter mangled everything QuarkXPress sent it.

So an old 386 laptop, slackware (on floppies), ghostscript and some jiggery-pokery gave me an AppleTalk Postscript printer for peanuts. It showed up in the Chooser as a LaserWriter II and worked just the same (except for smaller margins). The biggest cost was a RS232 to Apple-style cable.

The alternative would have been paying out for a (at the time) expensive laser printer.

And I could leave that stylewriter unused for months, yet when I came to print, the quality was perfect: no missing lines or head cleaning required. I only got rid of it when I ditched Quark.

That's the most interesting thing I've read in quite a while. Thank you.

With all the open hardware 3d printer rage, I think there's a nice spot for a 2d equivalent.

I've been thinking this a lot recently too, especially when swearing at my [trusty] old Canon printer when it eats up £10 worth of ink on a couple of unrequested cleaning cycles.

A the very least, some OS solution to ink...

Have you ever used the generic ink refill ? I wonder if they're of acceptable quality.

I imagine a very simple:

- built it yourself printer - non cute or small but trivial to open and investigate - reduced possibilities for easy open source drivers - cheap generic ink

With a simple but reliable and 'intellectually' owned device I anticipate a good increase in peace of mind for all printer users in the world.

I just bought 20-pack (5 colors * 4 tanks) for my Canon for 1/2 the price of a single tank kit. It's good enough to use to print charts and paperwork though I wouldn't trust it to print photos. For that I take it to a professional who has better, longer lasting dyes.

Does anyone have recommendations for affordable ( < $300? ) multi-function printer manufacturer/models that don't suck? Good driver support on OSX is a bonus. Thanks!

Any Brother multi-function laser. At that price you'll be black only for printing. Be sure to search out how to fool the toner out sensor as they lie.

Another recommendation for Brother printers. I've been very pleased with my entry-level duplexing laser.

Previously I had HP inkjets, starting with a Deskjet 500, and got tired of bloated drivers (60mb?? WTF is in there?) and supplies that cost more than human blood. Most of which ended up being wasted in their constant cleaning cycles.

Why Apple will never make floppy disks again

Why did this 5 year old article make it to the front page?

A technological area where Apple made strides forward. The particular market doesn't have the margins/innovation worth pursuing for a company like apple.

I saw it, read it, and upvoted it because I found the history described in the article to be interesting, slightly charming, and entertaining to read. (The part about the current printer market isn't very surprising or interesting, though. Ironically, that's what the title's about. Perhaps it'd be better titled "Apple's history with printers".) I suppose that doesn't explain how it got to the front page, but maybe explains why it's still there.

I'm curious why they never make CRTs and floppies anymore. Let's write an article about it.

It's obviously because they are devoting all their R&D efforts to fax machines.

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