Printers are just another example of how effective loss leaders are in selling products (or subscriptions if you want to call them that).
Classic example: fast food burgers are typically sold at or near cost. It's the fries and drinks where they make all their money.
It's also why accessory sales are so prevalent. I've heard of $800 cameras being sold for And then there's the whole extended warranty "scam". By the way, staff in Best Buy and the like are typically judged on how many warranties they sell, not how many products. That's why such places push them so hard.
Anyway, one thing I want to say about printers is that in the "home" end of the market there are really two types of printers:
1. Cheap printers intended to get customers into a cycle of buying expensive ink. These printers are typically sold near or even below cost. They may even cost less than a full set of replacement ink but you should know the printer rarely comes with full cartridges. Honestly, I would completely avoid this kind of printer.
It's worth noting that these printers are designed to go through ink as fast as possible. This includes using the ink to clean the print heads every day so you'll run out of ink after some months even if you've never printed a page; and
2. So-called tank printers. These have a higher duty cycle and are more expensive. Instead of cartridges you typically fill them with bottles of ink (and much more of it than you'd typically find in a cartridge).
These don't have the same ink-selling focus the first category has.
If you print at all just buy a tank printer.
As for add-on services like Adobe's cloud... I mean does anyone really trust Adobe with this?
For the record, I'm a big fan of the _idea_ of software subscriptions. I know some people like to own their software outright but software requires constant maintenance. Security fixes, bug fixes, supporting new devices, that sort of thing.
A sticker price and that's it creates perverse incentives for the company to end-of-life your software so you have to buy an upgrade. It's better to just pay a hopefully reasonable ongoing fee.
The gold standard for software subscriptions is Jetbrains. You get 3 major releases a year, annual or monthly subscriptions and when you stop paying you get to keep old versions forever.
Compare that to Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom... yeesh. Adobe's idea of reasonable pricing is monthly cost = sticker price / 12. Oh and you have to sign up for a year, get auto-renewed and it's difficult to cancel.