HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors::“Never own a printer again.”
I paid $100 for my Brother printer and I’ve spent…maybe $100 on toner cartridges since 2010.
So, yeah, HP can fuck off.
I wouldn’t pay half that if it was the only source to feed HP employees. Fuck HP in the ass with a gasoline soaked pickle.
But then again Brother was founded by known racist Hulk Hogan, so…
Printing is dead removed. Die with it and scrabble for your final pennies
Printing will never die, there will always be a need to put stuff on paper. What needs to die is the shady practices like this.
Fair comment. I’d just love to see those sleezy evil evilcorps burn.
Luckily there are a few printer companies who are moving in the right direction. Epson started selling printers a while back where you can just refill the ink without the need of a cartridge and brands like lexmark and brother also make printers that aren’t manufactured landfill like hp‘s offerings.
I recently had to buy a printer. I do civil engineering for a utility company and need the ability to print in color on 11"x17" paper. I looked into the Epson Eco-Tank printers but they are very expensive. Based on my printing volume it would take me years to make up the cost difference between the lower end printers that use cartridges vs the eco-tank. It might have made more sense if I didn’t need the 11"x17" capability. Unfortunately, I think this is where all printer companies will end up going. Hopefully I’ll be retired and no longer need to print by the time this mentality takes over the entire business.
The reason for that is, that printers are usually sold via the razor blade principle: gift them the razor, sell them the blades at twice the price. With no overpriced cartridges to substitute the printers they usually make a loss on, they have to increase the price of the printer.
For A4 paper, the Eco-Tank printers actually aren’t much more expensive than regular printers though.
Though honestly, if I had to buy a printer, it would be a laser printer for sure. Yes, they are a little more expensive but I print very little and every inkjet I’ve owned has dried up between using them and having to buy new ink cartridges for every print job is wasteful and expensive…
HP becoming Facebook soon
They’ve been trying to make people sign up this for a while. Their drivers are pretty much malware that attempts to trick the user to sign up.
I doubt that it is a successful model for HP. They don’t offer anything other than a stupid way to pay. Who the hell wants that.
CEO Enrique is delusional
No, a ruthless evil genius. I think loads of people are going to subscribe, and they can therefore be categorised as delusional.
No home customer is going to find this worthwhile. Businesses might, but B2B already operates under different business model assumptions than B2C. This would cost more in 6 months than an average home user is likely to spend on printing over 5 years.
If you want to get customers to sign up for your subscription service, it has to at least appear like a win for them. This one is so blatantly a loss that it’ll never take. At $10 it might work, and at $6 I can see a lot of people ending up doing it. The only thing I can think of is that this is designed to attract the negative attention before getting positive attention when they inevitably decide to drop the price to something that is actually viable.
Honestly, I hope you’re right. I’m a frayed knot though.
You’re too optimistic. This is simply to prey on your grandmother
I bet you it sends them the printer data so they can use it to train AI. It’s all in the ToC
The article literally says they sell your data to advertising partners. You’re paying a monthly subscription to give away your personal data for something as basic as a fucking printer. If HP doesn’t die my hope in humanity will be gone.
I mean like, the content of your prints
Unfortunately HP isn’t going anywhere. They have a lot of government contracts and likely a ton more with commercial businesses to supply hardware.
I imagine us peons at the home use level don’t really show up on their radar when it comes to making these decisions.
can confirm, when I used to work for a government contractor, everything was HP. From laptops to servers, from mice to printers.
i had one of the cheapest versions of this plan; it seems nice, but the cheap ones have such low limits that you’re always a bit paranoid to print too freely or joyfully. plus the bullshit how they software lock the ink if you don’t pay and would rather pay shipping / recycling back just so you can’t have it for ‘free’
Weird thought, printing “freely or joyfully.”
I hate printing documents and do everything I can to avoid it, even with my little Epson inkjet that is free of most of that garbage (it does bitch at you if you use off-brand cartridges but will allow it).
Other than the occasional form or whatever that HAS to be on paper, about the only thing I print is CAD drawings so I can carry them to the wood shop with me. And I’d like to eliminate even that if I could find the right electronic device to run it on, which I’m not sure exists. (I’d like to have an ARM tablet or maybe convertible laptop running desktop Linux and FreeCAD, but there’s some mutual exclusivity in there).
i had one of the cheapest versions of this plan; it seems nice, but…
LOL, no, it really doesn’t. Even just at first glance, the entire concept of a home user renting a printer is blatantly exploitative and obviously terrible.
$36/mo is 144 pages printed at my local library. If I needed to print that many pages, I’d get an enterprise MFP.
I had to print something yesterday… I submitted it to staples and went and picked it up.
Cost me $2
I expect that 10 pages will be all I’ll have to print in 2024.
In the last 5 years I’ve spent less than $10 on printing.
If I had to actually print items… I’d get a inexpensive brother laser printer
Last thing I had to print was in 2022, so I’m also content to just use printing services.
Not from HP, I hope…
Really shitty management over at HP.
HP was dead to me 15+ years ago.
Fuckin’ shit-merchants.
HP was dead to me as soon as I bought a Brother
Or spend $15 more and get a Brother Laser printer.
😂
You’re absolutely right but seeing this comment in any recent HP thread is just getting hilarious.
They’re getting worse too. Retroactively blocking third party toner cartridges.
Then get an epson ecotank. That being said, those toner cartridges last so long that I don’t mind paying full price for one every few years.
I’ve just rejected firmware updates and will continue to do so as long as possible. If it gets to where I can’t do that anymore for some reason I might leverage my professional expertise into remedying the situation more permanently.
Yeah, brother claims 4k pages for my cartridges, but I get around 10k pages before I need to replace them. That’s pretty reasonable for a 90€ toner cartridge
One of my fondest memories was beating our old HP printer to death with the baseball bat we keep for potential intruders. I now print at the local library and regret the beating incident less and less every year.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
But HP enforces an Internet connection by having its TOS also state that HP may disrupt the service—and continue to charge you for it—if your printer’s not online.
HP says it enforces a constant connection so that the company can monitor things that make sense for the subscription, like ink cartridge statuses, page count, and “to prevent unauthorized use of Your account.” However, HP will also remotely monitor the type of documents (for example, a PDF or JPEG) printed, the devices and software used to initiate the print job, “peripheral devices,” and any other “metrics” that HP thinks are related to the subscription and decides to add to its remote monitoring.
The All-In-Plan privacy policy also says that HP may “transfer information about you to advertising partners” so that they can “recognize your devices,” perform targeted advertising, and, potentially, “combine information about you with information from other companies in data sharing cooperatives” that HP participates in. The policy says that users can opt out of sharing personal data.
The All-In-Plan TOS reads:
Subject to the terms of this Agreement, You hereby grant to HP a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, copy, store, transmit, modify, create derivative works of and display Your non-personal data for its business purposes.
My god, it’s so bad
Remote Monitoring. Reads more like something a malware would do.
Holy shit, that’s like a step away from adding in refusal to print things that are potentially copyrighted or otherwise unacceptable
Calling it now.
HP Partners will be able to print ads to your printer using your paper, and ink at random hours of the day, all day, everyday.
“We’ve been trying to reach you regarding your car’s extended warranty”
They’re reinventing fax-spam.
One of my favorite stories dealing with fax spam
https://consumerist.com/2008/09/17/man-tells-fax-spammers-to-go-fax-themselves-and-they-comply/
Go Fax yourself
My sides.
Are there any open source paper printers around? Like there are with 3D printers such as the Voron?
Build a Voron, swap the toolhead for a ballpoint pen, ???, profit!
To my knowledge, no—the type of person who would be able to create such a printer usually isn’t interested in making printouts. Theoretically, an impact character printer (daisy wheel) is within the range of an enthusiastic hobbyist with enough programming knowledge to write the driver. A laser printer of modest resolution should be within the reach of a skilled team. Inkjet I think requires too many specialized parts.
I don’t know of any open source printers, but Brother laser printers are good. Brother is a 116-year-old Japanese industrial manufacturer. Their printers are simple, reliable, they support their printers for a very long time, and they make linux drivers. AND as far as I know they haven’t tried any HP-style fuckery.
I also own a Brother printer since I ragequit HP last year. While playing with the settings last week i manually checked the firmware and noticed a possible update. When searching online for the release notes, i found thread after thread of people wanting to revert the update because it blocked third party toners? I hope Brother doesn’t go the HP way…
