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HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

telegraph.co.uk

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Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#151

Post by pulvinar »

PopePompus wrote: post #133

Has there ever been another company that declined as much from its glory days as HP? During the second half of the 20th century HP was a fabled brand. They made beautiful equipment for which there was often no comparable quality alternative in the world. The pocket calculators they built in the 1980s are still sought-after, not just as collectables but also as daily drivers. They built computers during that era, but…

Plenty of other companies have declined, or just changed as the people composing them changed. But for HP, yeah, I miss their heyday too. I consider their spinoff Agilent to be the "real" HP now.

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#153

Post by denton-scratch »

sgc wrote: post #64
wongarsu wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or buy a laser printer. They cost a bit more upfront, but a single toner cartridge lasts ages (and won't dry out or get used up in cleaning cycles), the printers are generally much more robust and longer lasting, and because laser printing isn't as patent-encumbered there's more actual competition and less outright user-hostile behavior.

I use a Brother laser with non-oem cartridge. That is what Brother is known for.

I learned to hate HP inkjets. I decided never to buy HP again.

When I eventually gave up on inkjets altogether, I bought a Samsung laser. It didn't cost much more than an inkjet, toner lasts for ages, doesn't dry up, and it works fine. But as soon as I googled the support pages, it turned out Samsung's printer division had been acquired by HP, the website was impossible to navigate, and there wasn't any documentation.

So my one-man boycott failed.

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#154

Post by crazygringo »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #122
crazygringo wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Corporate fines just end up being passed on to workers No they don't, they get passed on to shareholders. The market cap of the company decreases by the amount of the fine (plus any predicted future effect of the lost money) and the stock price goes down to reflect that. If the company could get away with paying workers less or decreasing its workforce in order to boost profitability, it already would have. It's no…

In the parlance of an old internet meme, "why not both"? Also, they _are_ cutting employees. There have been a lot of layoffs recently, and some of them have explicitly stated it'd not because they can't afford those employees.

Because that's not how it works, it isn't both.

Yes HP is laying off employees just like pretty much every other large tech company right now. Which shows you it has nothing to do with fines, and rather everything to do with industry-wide overexpansion during COVID and high interest rates now.

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#155

Post by joering2 »

wongarsu wrote: post #58
DiabloD3 wrote: post #35

Did you know Brother makes really good printers that are inexpensive and live a long, happy, life? And their drivers aren't user hostile? This is one of those really good "vote with your wallets" situations.

Or buy a laser printer. They cost a bit more upfront, but a single toner cartridge lasts ages (and won't dry out or get used up in cleaning cycles), the printers are generally much more robust and longer lasting, and because laser printing isn't as patent-encumbered there's more actual competition and less outright user-hostile behavior.

I would like to vouch for Xerox laser printers. Not only they don't identify your printouts with tiny yellow markings/serial number, but also they gladly accept off-market toners, and places like Amazon have many different brands that race to the bottom of price making it easy to try out what works for you. I am on my third Xerox laser printer and couldn't be happier.

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#156

Post by gizmo »

boycott-israel wrote: post #107
gameman144 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think prison time is even what's needed here, I think these issues would resolve themselves if corporate fines were continually issued, rather than one-off lawsuits. For instance, a standing ruling that if your printer stops being able to print for no reason other than a contract breach, then the hardware is eligible for a refund. We don't need to put CEOs in prison for making consumer-hostile decisions, we j…

This is a surprisingly naive thing to say in the era of a CEO having a fiduciary duty to maximise shareholder-value over the short-term / their tenure (whichever is shorter)

This is a myth that refuses to go away. A business can go in whatever direction it chooses, even if it hurts shareholders, employees, or other stakeholders by doing so. Anything short of directly looting the company coffers by directors is fine in a legal sense. Shareholders can just sell if they lose faith in leadership, or put pressure on the board.

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#157

Post by mcny »

crazygringo wrote: post #154
pavel_lishin wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the parlance of an old internet meme, "why not both"? Also, they _are_ cutting employees. There have been a lot of layoffs recently, and some of them have explicitly stated it'd not because they can't afford those employees.

Because that's not how it works, it isn't both. Yes HP is laying off employees just like pretty much every other large tech company right now. Which shows you it has nothing to do with fines, and rather everything to do with industry-wide overexpansion during COVID and high interest rates now.

> Because that's not how it works

Exactly!

I don’t know how to deal with people who talk about the economy in terms of a perfect competition free market where all participants have full knowledge and are all equal in terms of power. If a physicist talked in terms of zero friction or spherical cows, we would laugh them off and never listen to them again. And yet people continue to talk about the economy with these assumptions that make zero friction and spherical cows look like practical applied physics.

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#158

Post by bediger4000 »

Kyocera seems to make decent laser jets. I bought a kyocera P2235dw a while back, and it was easy to get CUPS on linux and MacOS to recognize it and use it. Kyocera makes a PPD file for linux available. My P2235dw is a bit noisier than some, but it's not bad.

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#159

Post by whoopdedo »

denton-scratch wrote: post #138

Do people still buy HP inkjets? They've been doing this kind of thing for a decade, I'd have thought they should have seen their customerbase wither away by now.

Name recognition is a hell of a drug.

Re: HP disables customers’ printers if they use ink cartridges from cheaper rivals

#160

Post by emodendroket »

armchairhacker wrote: post #96
mcny wrote: post #12

The CEO and the board must serve prison time for things like this. No measure less than prison for the CEO and all board members is enough to curtail this because it just becomes the cost of doing business. No, you can’t say it wasn’t your decision. If you want to not be held accountable for the work your employees, contractors, and agents do on your behalf, you should have to prove they acted against your express wr…

How the heck would you create such a law with no unintended consequences? “If you want to not be held accountable for the work your employees, contractors, and agents do on your behalf, you should have to prove they acted against your express written orders.” So if a low-wage worker goes mad and kills his coworker the CEO should be charged with murder? What if his salary got cut and it was a customer? Where do you dr…

Step one would probably be making this practice illegal in the first place, which, as far as I can tell, it isn't. Putting the cart before the horse to worry about who's liable for doing something legal.
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