>If I need to print photos, I go to a store with instant printing kiosks.

Your solution to inkjet printer ownership is... paying to use one.

"I don't get why people keep buying cars. When I need to use one, I just hail an Uber."

Not very successfully.

> your printer tries to stop you from using ink cartridges from a different manufacturer

I can inject ink into the port, for cheap.

> your car will often strongly discourage you from getting it serviced by anyone other than an authorized dealer.

Only the top-range cars, for rich and upper-middle-class people, who have the ability to buy different but won't because it's a silly status symbol.

Maybe? Most people I know almost never print stuff anymore. It's almost worth it to buy cheap, use rarely when necessary and that's the end of it.

3+ years ago? Hell yeah give me a nice printer that's a little pricy and I'll buy it. I'm just not convinced there is a market for that today outside of business and there are many good but expensive printers for business.

1. Even more so than cars?

2. Printers are also one of the few devices that need to measure liquid by the picoliter.

> products bought are bought for lowest price. Or at least reasonable price. You get what you pay for. And what is paid is often very little. Thus poor quality and need for other revenue streams.

This reminds me of the perennial discussion on airline quality. People comparison-shop by the sticker price, so the entire industry evolved into nickel-and-dime scams instead of having honest all-inclusive pricing.

Give me one good reason why this particular business model - base subsidized by consumables - shouldn't be straight up banned. I can't think of any.

Imagine your printer fails, and you need a new one ASAP for work. Now what?

I'm a member of the 10 year old printer club, and hating the idea of needing a replacement at some point.

Rent. You are effectively renting your printer, supplies are the payments. The hardware is expensive, sold cheaply, and supplies have high margins to make up for it.

It is often investors forcing this model.

Not if people refuse to buy from companies that do this

I have owned a LJ-IIp, Laserjet 5p, and currently have a Laserjet 4050tn(with less than 5,000 sheets on the engine) in the corner serving as a paperweight.

If I had known prices would explode post COVID I wouldn't have sent the others to recycling where they belong.

>You actually missed the point, it was its reliability I was talking about (if you'd ever seen one then my comment would have been self-evident). And I wasn't advising others to use one.

I did not miss the point but you seemed to have missed mine so let me reword it: Giving up everything else for "reliability" is not ideal because you just have a reliable printer that makes you miserable.

>It was built like a tank, nothing breaks and it takes a lot of bashing. I purchased it over 30 years ago and it still works because it was built in the days when engineers ran HP and not fucking accountants.

It was built during the days where they had text mode only and if you were lucky your printer could process some fonts on board. It sounds like thats all you print anyway. If you print a PDF of any meaningful complexity you'll be in a world of hurt real quick. I know from experience. All of a sudden all the reliability in the world means nothing because I can't get the contents of the darn file on to a piece of paper.

>This is the clincher fact. Nothing like that happens, it works damn fast—no RAM delay and no waiting to print. (If I want more than 300dpi I just change to another printer.)

Have you used a more modern printer?

Compare this: https://youtu.be/Ka60XggECiQ?t=131

To this: https://youtu.be/fEjD8DikLB0?t=14

The new printer printed three pages in the time it took the old one to print one! Don't even try to print a pdf or anything with graphics on it.

In addition to the engine just being faster, the speed is limited by the CPU in the printer that decodes the file and the speed by which it receives it: both of which are slower on the old printer. That is if you don't run out of RAM and then the printer errors out.

You have rose colored glasses on. This is like those crazy cat people who continue to justify their love for an animal that is scratching them and destroying their stuff all the time.

Because inkjet printing for consumers generally sucks. It's just an awful technology for consumers who may go days/weeks/months between needing to print something. I tell any non-tech friends that I can to avoid inkjet printers like the plague - they always have a tendency to break down and be non functional at the moment you need them the most.

Why should I have to try harder to make things work, when they work just fine as they are?

All of your proposed changes involve spending either more money (renting a place w/o paper walls, renting a car, renting storage) or rely on luck/circumstance (if everyone followed your advice, there would be no "buddy with a truck" - lol).

>Not an issue printing.

Are they resin printers? You _could_ do that printing in an apartment but you're looking at having to run a ton of fans and hope you have good circulation. I took mine to a friend's house and it unfortunately smelled like plastic for longer than we wanted and just not nearly as easy as having a table/bench in a shed or garage.

>bulk buying groceries - Cart + bag. Eat 2 weeks at a time with one trip. Takes 20 minutes

Wym? You mean you take a cart to the store, from the apartment? Or a cart's worth of groceries?

It's so sad what they did to their brand. A cheapish HP laser has been our main lab printer for 14 years and zillions of pages. When I bought it HP was the no-brainer buy. Is it really true that if I bought one now it'd be no good?

Except that there is always a new batch of people who don't know any better:

* https://xkcd.com/1053/

So companies can survive on that ignorance.

Because manufacturers will not mention their product is defective by design. Until I heard of the HP ink subscription scheme a year or two ago, I would not think twice if they advertised such a feature since the expectation is that I could still buy ink independently. I would not expect the printer to stop functioning if I did not subscribe.

That's not to say that I would have bought HP. I already knew that they were not upfront about a lot of things and I already had a company that I trusted. (Ironically, a company that people claimed produced cheap junk back in the 90's.) That said, there are a lot of people buying their first printer and who have little concept of what the pitfalls are. Certain types of pitfalls are rarely mentioned in reviews and, when they are, they may come off as hyperbolic. That said, even commercial products have their pitfalls. I had to deal with a Xerox printer a while back that refused to work with a toner purchased under a support contract since the printer was not covered by the support contract. (The printer was purchased separately since the Internet connection wasn't reliable at that site.)

Because they play games and the OEMs mostly sell overpriced crap in that market segment.

Then that's his fault, because millions of people made durable flexible material things with their consumer 3D printers.

A bad workman always blames his tools...

It has. Good luck finding a new printer that doesn't (figuratively) spit in your face repeatedly.

Mhmm.

> I'm not saying that this never happens; again, you're being far too broad. The topic is phones. Phones used to have removable backs, and they weren't good. The iPhone stopped that, and was way better and more popular.

No, the topic is about RTR in the context of robots and the thread I replied to was discussing phones, robots and tractors.

> Things can be made repairable, but only when all actual innovation is done. Like printer cartridges. And even then, your printer may not be very repairable, as it will quickly cost as much to buy a new printer as it will to buy a spare module to replace it, if you even know what to buy and what part is not working.

Thanks for bringing up printers. The price for consumer-level printers is far less than they actually cost because they know they'll be able to extract insane profits after the fact from ink sales. Printer ink, as it's priced by these companies, costs about $1,664 – $9,600 per gallon and they do everything in their power to force consumers to only buy it from them. They deliberately make the printers shitty and impossible to repair so they can continue to entice customers with the bargain priced newer models with all sorts of fancy marketing bullshit so they can sell them progressively smaller amounts of ink for more money.

> You're missing the point that making the same devices but with spares would be much more expensive.

BS. They don't set the price based on their costs, they set the price based on what the market will allow, and this allows them to both manipulate the market by making it seem like their products are cheaper than they are, and extract yet more money out of consumers who have little choice because the majority of consumer goods are made by a handful of vertically integrated companies. Let's take a look at the top lobbiers against RTR legislation and their net worth:

Apple: $2.26 trillion Net Worth Microsoft: $1.97 trillion Net Worth Amazon: $1.71 trillion Net Worth Google: $1.57 trillion Net Worth Facebook: $863 billion Net Worth Tesla: $709 billion Net Worth Johnson & Johnson: $432 billion Net Worth AT&T: $220 billion Net Worth Lilly, Inc. : $178 billion Net Worth T-Mobile: $165 billion Net Worth Medtronic: $157 billion Net Worth Caterpillar: $123 billion Net Worth John Deere: $117 billion Net Worth General Electric: $115 billion Net Worth Philips: $55 billion Net Worth eBay: $41 billion Net Worth

Sorry. Less regulation is exactly what created this bullshit situation where huge corporations feel entitled to extract limitless amounts of cash out of consumers that have little if any choice, and the problem is getting worse. If you think this is merely a matter of companies trying to provide the most competitively priced products and not a deliberate attempt to price gouge, you are beyond naive. Anti-consumer practices aren't a neutral facet of corporate behavior, and the organizations that profit most from it are not merely staying afloat

"Everyone" doesn't. If you don't make things, don't buy tools.

Metaphorically, you're comparing buying a radio to buying a piano. If you just want to listen to music, buying a piano is a very inefficient step to your goal.