HP Tries Desperately To Make ‘Printer As A Subscription’ A Thing
from the behold-our-self-immolation dept
When last we checked in with Hewlett Packard (HP), the company had just been sued (for the second time) for crippling customer printers if owners attempt to use cheaper, third-party printer cartridges. It was just the latest in a long saga where printer manufacturers use DRM or dodgy software updates to wage all out war on consumer choice.
There hasn’t been a whole lot of introspection going on at the company since. Shortly after the lawsuit HP CEO Enrique Lores went on CNBC to double down on the company’s position. First by making up claims that HP has to be obnoxious about cartridges to protect consumer security (false), then by basically stating that any consumer who intelligently shops for cartridges is a “bad investment.”
This week HP unveiled its latest plan on this track: printing as a service. The company’s new “All-In Plan” requires that you pay anywhere from $7 a month to $36 a month to rent a printer with a set printable page limit. During your rental, HP sends you, of course, their ink cartridges.
As Ars Technica notes, the printer must remain connected to the internet for monitoring. And the company’s privacy policy effectively gives HP full control over, well, everything:
“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..”
And of course the subscription comes with long term contracts and early termination fees should you not subscribe for the full two-year term. All told, the tone-deafness is fairly stunning.
Paying for the same several-hundred dollar printer for all eternity is precisely the sort of concept Lores has been pushing for a while. The problem is it’s not clear that anybody actually wants this. It’s also not really clear that paying up to $36 for a printer you never really own makes much value sense. Printers inherently aren’t that expensive. And ink isn’t either, if companies aren’t being restrictive tyrants.
For HP, none of that matters. Lores isn’t thinking about building quality products or building solid relationships. He’s thinking exclusively of finding creative ways to goose profits and deliver Wall Street improved quarterly returns at any cost. You can’t do that by simply providing users a quality, affordable product people like; you inevitably have to start cutting corners and nickel-and-diming users.
Once they’ve established renting a printer as a norm, they’ll just steadily jack the rental price skyward as they make the underlying value proposition steadily worse. Ultimately the business becomes less and less about making popular quality products, and more and more about making unnecessarily convoluted subscriptions with creative restrictions and ever-skyrocketing monthly prices.
Filed Under: consumers, drm, Enrique Lores, ink cartridges, printers, rentals, subscription, tone-deaf
Companies: hp
Comments on “HP Tries Desperately To Make ‘Printer As A Subscription’ A Thing”
Print paper documents?
Hardly ever .. and certainly not on the crap HP insist on selling for domestic use. I’ve not printed a document at home since before 2020, despite working at home through all the lockdowns.
So I guess I’ll stop costing HP money. I guess that makes me one of their best customers.
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My home printer had been gathering dust for ~2 years when I finally dug it out and used it last week
…to print a letter to yet another company that tried to sneak a binding arbitration clause into the mouseprint that I could only opt-out of by postal mail.
AFAIK, even the $36 “plan” does NOT include servicing or repairs/spare parts.
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According to the FAQ, 24/7 support is included in all the plans, including printer replacement should the issue not be resolvable over the phone.
Now, what it takes for an issue to count as “not resolvable over the phone” is a different matter. I doubt they’ll send over a replacement printer as soon as all possible steps have been tried to rectify a given problem. After all, that would cost them money.
Well, and why not? After all, auto makers have already set the precedent by making ‘car as a subscription’ a thing. /s
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Yeah, they’re called taxis. Similarly, people who actually wanted printing to be a service have been using Kinko’s for decades. People buy printers because they don’t want that. Of course, people in “fail-upward” jobs don’t need to understand these things.
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I hope there’s a giant fan at the top.
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Funny, I didn’t know that Tesla is a private hire firm.
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Just a taxi with an up-front $30,000 payment, that you’ve gotta drive yourself.
I’m half-kidding, but “Tesla has said it will allow individual owners to rent out future self-driving cars for a ride-hailing service”. So, yeah, Telsa really is—or was, as of 2018—planning to become a private hire firm.
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Actually, people buy printers because they want the convenience of printing at home, and it shouldn’t be on them that printer manufacturers no longer want to provide that. Nerd harder or fail harder. Your choice.
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I’d be very surprised if there’s not a way to do that online, with the document being mailed to one’s home. It still wouldn’t be as fast or as private, of course.
My choice, or the manufacturer’s? If theirs, failing harder will get them to the next C.E.O. position more quickly, so what’s the problem? If mine, I chose to pick up a discarded monochrome laser printer off the kerb many years ago (I run across several each year).
The “nerd harder” approach works very well for projects such as OpenWRT, CHDK, and Rockbox, and I’d love to see the same approach applied to printers. But it doesn’t seem that anyone of appropriate skill has ever been interested enough. That goes as far back as Richard Stallman in 1980, who was sufficiently pissed off at a printer to start an entire social movement, but not quite enough to fix the motivating problem (that is, give us useful control over our own printers). Personally, I’m not gonna risk breaking my only working printer, and don’t have room for spares.
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The nerding has already been accomplished, the only problem now is to be found in the Board room. You probably could re-word your statement to:
Reduce greed harder, or fail harder.
If it were up to me, I’d institute a rule that gave every investor 48 hours to rescind their order, buy or sell. In many other purchases of big-ticket items, we have sometimes as much as 3 days to back out of such transactions. But my intent is, this would put a big damper on “irrational exuberance”, and hopefully on the “quarter over quarter earnings increase is the only necessary indicator of financial health” mindset.
There’d be more than a few downsides for a year or two, but eventually it would all work out, and investors would no longer be nailed to the cross every time a C-suiter takes a notion to stick it to the little guy(s), just so he can buy that 130 foot yacht to motor down to his condo in the Bahamas.
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The nerding has been accomplished by the skilled employees of the tech companies, not the individual to whom AC was replying. Your point?
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Auto-makers drive taxis?
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As posted above, that’s the business Tesla wants to be in… “any day now”, as soon as “full self-driving” works…
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“It’s for next year (TM)”, as they’re still promising since 2016.
It’s part of their favorite running joke, certainly from the great sense of humor of the greatest clown that used to have a great vision for cars on Mars, and now make a permanent one man show on a service with diminishing audience.
Sometime, life is tough, and living becomes meaningless from some.
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Well, there’s cars on Fiat, so why not on Mars?
“At HP, we’re counting on you to sign up and forget you did so.
Oh and by the way, we’ll be able to see everything you print. Have fun!”
HP used to have a reputation for expensive equipment that was well worth the price. Even the Laserjet printers were considered worth the price.
Ever since the advent of the inkjet printers, that reputation has been going downhill fast, to the point where HP has joined Cannon and Lexmark as companies I want to stay away from.
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Unfortunately, when you need to print on a2 or larger sized paper, it gets a lot harder to avoid Cannon and HP.
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They spun off that division to Agilent, who later spun it off as Keysight. I think they still have a decent reputation.
As for HP, their good stuff is still around; just make sure not to buy anything from this millenium.
NO!
PDF yes, this shite, nopers!
As A Service...
This idea worked really well for Juicero.
I wish HP an equivalent amount of success.
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You can buy "tank" printers for like $2-300
Like, you just pour ink into their reservoirs. HP even sells a version, though I would never buy one. (I bought a canon G7020, basically only print family photos these days, which it’s pretty good at)
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In your case I think normal people call those “selfies”.
Just wait until HP finds out about PDFs and eFax services. Instead of subscribing to print to paper on “expensive” hardware, they can sign people up for a subscription to print to PDFs and send them to people!
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That service existed around the year 2000, though it wasn’t run by HP. For those who weren’t around or weren’t adults during that time: it used to be really difficult to print to PDF from Windows, assuming one wasn’t going to spend hundreds of dollars or whatever Acrobat cost. (The way to do it was to install a PostScript printer driver, such as for Apple LaserWriter II; then print to a file, and manually run Ghostscript on that file. Of course, it’d have to be a version pre-compiled for Windows, ’cause who could afford a Windows C compiler?)
Adobe had a service to which one could upload files (including MS Office files—convenient because Office was also unaffordable and there was not yet any decent and free competitor), and they’d send back a PDF. If I recall correctly, one could do a few conversions per week for free, and beyond that it was a paid service.
Gretchen ...
Stop trying to make fetch happen! It’s not going to happen!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pubd-spHN-0&t=7s
(seemed appropriate here)
They REALLY want people to start looking for alternative printers...
Ah yes, the wet dream of damn near every company out there: ‘Okay but hear me out, what if the people paying us money never owned what we were charging them money for, and therefore had to keep paying us money in a never-ending revenue stream?’
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lol. Yeah. The thing they will eventually learn[0] is that real infinite revenue streams tend to make any finite cost alternative infinitely more desirable.
[0] Well, lets be honest with ourselves, most of these people are immune to learning. so maybe “the thing they would eventually learn if they were not themselves”
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As other comments have noted, they’re all (or so it seems) enshittifying simultaneously. Which is to say that there probably aren’t any (new) alternative printers that are much better.
Of course, at any point in time, one company may be slightly less crappy than another; maybe Canon’s not quite as irredeemable as HP. But you’re not gonna buy a good printer in a retail store till someone makes a good third-party firmware; if that happens, then, like the WRT54G, there will be one obvious printer model for everyone to get.
I had to read that three times before I realized his last name isn’t “Loser.”
I’ll just keep using my Brother Laserjet until it dies and then try to find another old one.
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LaserJet is HP’s brand name for their laser printers. Apparently it’s become like Xerox or Kleenex now.
Many, many, many years ago when I was a teenager I met David Packard, one of the most brilliant innovators of the 20th century. I loved HP electronic gadgetry as a kid and saved up to buy whatever I could.
He’d surely turn over in his grave if he could see what these jokers have done to his company.
I wouldn’t buy an HP product today if it came packaged in gold foil.
Sad, truly asd.
An easy solution is to buy a printer off of ebay. You can get ridiculously good deals on “new open box” printers that existed before this subscription bug was introduced. I bought an M653 “open box”, unused printer for $450.00. (Retail – 1700.00) All of the color and B/W laser cartriges were full. There is no reason to buy one of the buggy subscription printers if one does a little searching on ebay.
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Just make sure you never connect these old printers to a network: that’s a bad idea for something that’s gone like a decade without a security update. Stick to USB and forget about using the ethernet or wi-fi.
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Just firewall them at the router, so that they can’t call out.
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It’s also important that other devices on the local network not be able to send data directly to them. If you’re browsing the web with Javascript enabled, it’s often not too difficult for a site to convince your browser to send arbitrary data onto your LAN (browser makers have been working to fix it for like 15 years).
For all we know, a wi-fi beacon from a nearby network could be enough to trigger some vulnerability. If not, there have been various ways to inject packets directly into wi-fi stacks, bypassing any external routers/firewalls; FragAttacks from 2021, for example (good printers had basically gone out of production by then, which means they’ll never be patched).
Kyocera or Brother
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According to online reports, Brother has started down the path of enshittification by having printers automatically degrade their output when using third-party toner—a restriction added in a post-purchase firmware update.
I don’t know about Kyocera; I’m not sure I’ve ever even seen a Kyocera printer for sale in Canada, though I recall hearing the name decades ago.
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Do you know if Canon went down the enshitti-path? Because they’re my printer go-to company.
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They kind of did, and it bit them during the recent pandemic: Canon can’t get enough toner chips, so it’s telling customers how to defeat its DRM.
The “DRM” wasn’t all that bad, though: “Depending on the model, when an error message occurs after inserting toner, users can press either ‘I Agree,’ ‘Close,’ or ‘OK.’ When users press that button, the world does not end. Rather, Canon says users may find that their toner cartridge doesn’t give them a low-toner warning before running empty.”
I haven’t really kept up with this stuff. That’s probably part of the problem, right? We acquire these things (from a store or from the street) every decade or three, which means we could be recommending some company based on a product that bears little resemblance to their present offerings.
HP Execs, in a year: “So we heard that you are accepting Ads and commercials in places there werent any, like Netflix and Amazon Prime. So we decided to Ad space in your printed documents. Dont worry, all Ads will be randomly placed, in fully blue ink, and limited to 5 per page. And the Ads wont block any of your document either, they will be wrapped around the adspace. You can opt for reduced ads for an additional 20 dollars a month, which will limit the ads to one per page.”