Live data from Hacker News

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

telegraph.co.uk

201–210 of 461 posts

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

#201
post #11

This issue is discussed for over 20 years now, it baffles me that there is apparently still no established solution. By the way, Apple forcing users to install apps only via its 30% fee AppStore has provoked far less outrage. Probably because people are not directly aware of the Apple premium, in contrast to the HP premium.

Maybe because most non game apps never pay the 30% fee (Netflix, Spotify, apps that see physical services like Uber, apps that require a subscription outside of the App Store) and according to the Epic lawsuit, most of the revenue (80%+) comes from slimy pay to win games.

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

#202
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…

It’s frustrating to see people argue this. Not because it’s wrong, but besides basically anything that makes it not worth doing will work. The debate to be had is over what is to be done to put policies that discourage this activity in place. Bikeshedding what to do basically just passifies the urge to debate the actually important thing.

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just stop buying HP printers. If you bought and it is still under warranty, ask for a full refund. You likely won't get it, but make sure HP waste as much time as possible dealing with this In the UK it is even worth considering to take this to the small claims court. Of course seek legal advice first. The only way HP gets away with this, because people just accept this kind of behaviour.

> The only way HP gets away with this, because people just accept this kind of behaviour please name a situation in the past 50 years where a conpany went under or lost at least 10% of their revenue from'peiple not accepting' this behaviour

Netflix is down by a lot.

Some of that may be due to temporary outlook during the COVID pandemic.

However, it's still down by more than 10% from a pre-lockdown stock price of ~380.00 in February 2020.

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

#204
post #179

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…

> 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. Purely in theory in a vacuum, yes. In practice, you'll have a very hard time finding examples where that actually happened. At best, the stock takes a momentary dip and next ~week it's back to where it was.

Well in reality it's a gradual decrease over time as the fine moves from hypothetical low-probability to actually happening. By the time the fine happens it's often already been "priced in".

But so what if the stock is back up the following week? More things happened over the following week. You're missing the fact that it would have been up even higher if it weren't for the fine. (Alternatively, the stock also might go down even further the following week. But similarly, it wouldn't have gone down as much if not for the fine.)

This is not theory, this is how stocks actually work in the aggregate. If they didn't, you'd be able to make a lot of easy money off the stock market otherwise.

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

#205
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…

> 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 This is the sort of overreaction that kills reasonable responses, like making HP reimburse everyone whose printer they disabled, trebled, plus pay a big fine to a regulator and also enter into a consent decree. Hit them with a market cap decimating fine. Then let the…

> like making HP reimburse everyone whose printer they disabled

won't happen, because most of the customers live in different countries with different law systems

> hit them with a market cap decimating fine

won't happen, because most of the costs is beared by people in foreign countries who don't matter to US courts, and most of the profits are gathered by people in US (company, owners, shareholders, employees, budget)

It's not an accident that most of the time google and apple are fined by EU and VW is fined by USA.

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

#206

I thought all brands used this eco system now with little tanks you can just pour ink in? That's all I see in the shops now. But I just have an old b/w laser

I have a Canon MegaTank printer G6020. It comes with more ink than I can print in a lifetime. I've had it for two years and the ink is maybe down 1%. The only problem is I only print a couple pages every few weeks and so I guess the ink dries out and then the head gets clogged, I assume. Cleaning the heads can sometimes help, but it doesn't always work, and only works once or twice and then it's clogged forever. It happened to my printer and a relative's. We are each missing one color. One of us is missing cyan and the other yellow, I think. We can still print in black and white though since the black color is still working. If it wasn't for that major flaw, they would be great printers. The quality and features are very good. The price was great considering how long the ink should last.

Also, when you clean the heads it ends up dumping the ink in a foam pad in the back of the printer, and that fills up and turns into a mess. I haven't looked at my pad, but that's what I saw on some YouTube videos.

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

#207
post #116

Where are the Open Source Hardware printers? Literally everybody (except printer makers) hates the printer landscape. All we'd need is to pool money to design a cost-effective open source hardware modular monochrome laser printer with open firmware.

Monochrome lasers aren't a big problem if you shop properly. You can do fine with a 1990s era laserjet. The bigger headache is color inkjets, and the ink they consume.

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

#209

Tomorrow's story should be: Customers "disable" their purchasing of HP printers in favor of cheaper, but not as cheap, rivals.

I wish. I will certainly do my part the next time I consider buying a printer but it's been shown again and again that the vast majority of people will always put comfort (and productivity) over ideology. I don't expect any meaningful loss of sales on their part from this.

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

#210

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.

I use a Brother multi-function (MFC-L2710DW). > And their drivers aren't user hostile? They offer a closed-source Linux and you need to download an installer from them (an i386 binary, which also works on i686 and x86_64); so, not great. The driver is mostly-reliable, although every once in a while it does kind of give out on you and printing fails, possibly until a restart. I suppose on Windows it's better. > really…

When I got my recently-acquired MFC-L3550CDW home, I went to set it up over the network and it just worked. Trying to install the drivers stopped it working :P.

I've not tried printing to it over USB, but over Ethernet it supports IPP and mDNS so all you need to do to print is connect the printer to the network and CUPS will find it automatically.

At some point in the last ten years, network printing has gone from dark magic to just working, and in my experience working better on Linux than Mac or Windows. Printing from Android took a smidge of manual set up but now also just works when called upon. It's almost disappointing, until I remember that while I quite enjoy tinkering I also bought the printer to actually print stuff.

The scanner? Also just works over the network. Mind blown.

Post reply on HN