HP CEO: "Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription."

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/hp-ceo-blocking-third-party-ink-from-printers-fights-viruses/

by CharlesW • 2 years ago

81 97 2 years ago

amacalac• 2 years ago

I'll pay the subscription provided HP pays me, in turn, to rent the desk space that the printer lives on in my home office.

hypercube332• 2 years ago

don't forget average cloud rates for power, egress and ingress Internet data

JoeAltmaier• 2 years ago

Yeah I tried that. They got confused about what cartridges I had and what I'd paid for. Ended up paying monthly with no cartridges in my machine. Cancelled.

They gotta do a whole lot better to make that a reality.

jacquesm• 2 years ago

The beatings of our customers will continue until their attitude towards us improves. HP I'll buy from ebay, 1990's era or so. Indestructible and good value for the money.

HP Laptops: crap. HP Inkjet printers: too expensive for actual use, stop working when you need them. If they still make other stuff I'm unaware of it, I see the HP brand as a negative signal.

Boeing has been mentioned often on HN as an example of how management can destroy a very good company. I think HP is actually a much better example, they were the brand to emulate and now anything they do is what you really want to stay away from.

bestekov• 2 years ago

YMMV, but have had pretty good experiences with HP developer and gaming laptops.

dgacmu• 2 years ago

Their business-focused monitors are also good. (Though, the grumpy part of me thinks that perhaps it's worth avoiding everything they make because their printer scheme is so evil.)

hypercube332• 2 years ago

their hardware is great. The software is horrible. Drivers, their apps, firmware all suck. Also their support is also poor but I suppose on par with Lenovo

iaw• 2 years ago

If Brother Laser Printers didn't exist I'd be more worried. I don't know what people that need color printing do anymore.

skywhopper4• 2 years ago

I suggest they buy Brother color laser printers.

vlark• 2 years ago

They use an Epson.

whalesalad2• 2 years ago

my brother laser printer is such a piece of shit. so is my epson inkjet. all printers are hot garbage.

BizarreByte2• 2 years ago

my brother laser printer is such a piece of shit.

Mine has been going for nearly a decade with no issues to report and almost no one has anything bad to say about them, so I'm curious what issues you had?

izacus• 2 years ago

Brother (and Oki) LED Laser printers exist in color version as well.

mattmaroon• 2 years ago

I bought a Brother color laser printer. Love it.

It can't print photos well (at least I assume, I haven't tried) but I'm generally not doing that at home anyway. For printng a large amount of simple flyers it's cheaper and faster than an inkjet and perfectly passable. I sometimes print labels and other things that are fine as long as I use laser media.

It has no problem accepting third party toner cartridges I buy on Amazon. Works great over Wi-Fi from pretty much all my devices.

Never buying HP again, even if it weren't for this.

yukkuri• 2 years ago

Yeah, same. It's been a great choice.

systems_glitch3• 2 years ago

Recently moved my mechanic to a Brother B&W laser, their HP SOHO laser was hot garbage. Never expected to see that with HP's laser line.

supportengineer2• 2 years ago

My Brother color laser printer is great, but it does not print photos as well as an ink jet. Instead of maintaining an ink jet printer, now I just print them at Walgreens or CVS.

zhivota• 2 years ago

Brother has color lasers FWIW. If you're talking about photo printing IMO you go up to the professional class of printer or you just send out your printing to a photo printing establishment and let them deal with the mess.

portaouflop2• 2 years ago

I recently was in Cuba and also visited a local print shop.

It was a delight to see dozens of hacked HP printers with tubes directly going into containers of ink doing all the printing.

The printers had small custom circuit boards attached and were mostly dismantled up to the very core of the machine. As far as I could see it all worked very well and print quality was also good at a low price (even for local standards).

HP doesn’t stand a chance against humans who are determined to solve a problem.

declan_roberts2• 2 years ago

That’s why they use regulation and laws in the USA to try and get their way.

moolcool• 2 years ago

Is it illegal in the US to hack your own HP printer? I remember ~20 years ago there was a pretty huge cottage industry in grey market inkjet refills and DRM circumvention

skydhash• 2 years ago

I had a friend who used syringes to refill the catridges. He'd buy bottles of ink instead.

gosub100• 2 years ago

I would like to see crowdfunding of bounties that people could chip into, that are released to hackers who successfully accomplish the task. It would cost nothing to the contributor unless the bounty was claimed, and awarding the bounty would be done by a vote of a quorum of trusted leaders. Examples would be "jailbreak the XYZ phone" or "remove DRM from HP printer model 123xyz", etc.

CamperBob2• 2 years ago

Congress would shut that down faster than prediction markets and online poker.

portaouflop2• 2 years ago

build it and host it like pirate bay — I’m sure the knowledge is already out there, we just gotta make it accessible and impossible to take down

supportengineer2• 2 years ago

Epson went ahead and embraced these users, and built a line of printers for them. [1]

[1] https://epson.com/ecotank-ink-tank-printers

Haven't used them personally but it seems like a positive step forward.

epiccoleman• 2 years ago

Something really tickled me about clicking this link and seeing ... Shaq, of all people, grinning with his arms spread to advertise these printers.

prossercj• 2 years ago

Canon has one of these too. I've been using it for almost a year, and I love it. I print a lot of reading material, and the cost per page is lower than laser. In my opinion the aesthetics are also better.

https://www.usa.canon.com/shop/p/maxify-gx6021?color=Black&t...

cyanydeez• 2 years ago

which is why they likely are already in process to hijack America's IP system and political machine to try a DMCA like enforement.

xigurat• 2 years ago

As a Cuban person, I'm very proud of this... My dad, an engineer, does stuff like this all the time

g42gregory• 2 years ago

Great… We can’t even buy printers from HP anymore. What is the best other brand to switch to?

TehCorwiz2• 2 years ago

I use an Epson ECOTank printer. Refills come in a bottle. No DRM. Very low price ink compared to the alternatives. I previously used Brother printers which are also pretty good, they didn't use cart DRM either last time I used them.

They both have their flaws, but nothing approaching the BS that HP pulls.

0xcafecafe4• 2 years ago

Any issues with ink getting clogged? I was hearing such cases for ecotank variants. My use-case is infrequent printing

systems_glitch3• 2 years ago

If we ever end up needing large format color print capability in-house again, it'll be an Epson ink tank printer. Currently we just take stuff to the local print shop if it's bigger than legal size.

skywhopper4• 2 years ago

Brother printers are low-cost, no-nonsense, and last forever. I've got one that's 18 years old and has printed tens of thousands of pages. I got a new one a few years ago only to get wifi printing. But the older one continues to work on my desktop PC just fine.

jfoster• 2 years ago

Brother.

I got a Laser Brother multifunction center recently and whilst it wasn't the absolute cheapest option, it seems you get what you pay for. I could connect it to wifi on first attempt, and everything just worked on first attempt. It's incredible to have printing & scanning that "just works."

BizarreByte2• 2 years ago

This isn't surprising to anyone who has used an HP printer in the last decade. They're total crap being sold by a company that actively hates its customers.

There a better options. Friends don't let friends by HP printers.

TylerE4• 2 years ago

I can remember my dad bringing home an old LaserJet (4 maybe?) in the late 90s. The thing lasted me from late middle school through college, and would maybe still work today if i hadn't tossed it after 20 years... these days I need to print something maybe one a year. That thing was a tank though, don't think I ever needed to replace the toner...maybe once. What it didn't real have were "features". It had a parallel port interface. It talked postscript. There were Windows drivers for it, but on linux I just did it old school... dvi2ps (or whatever, yeah, I did my highschool homework in LaTeX, math class at least), then cat the .ps to /dev/lp0. CUPS had a driver, but it wasn't especially reliable so I mostly didn't bother.

bongodongobob• 2 years ago

It's a damn shame too. The HP laser printers from the 90s and 2000s were absolutely bulletproof.

timbit42• 2 years ago

I see lots of talk about HP and Brother. I wonder what people think about Lexmark laser printers.

mrpepka• 2 years ago

I wish for at least one of the competitors to take notes and ultimately consider a response: "Our long-term objective is to make HP irrelevant by creating a product devoid of idiocies they have been committing"

whitej125• 2 years ago

I must say this is indeed a fascinating threat vector.

"We have seen that you can embed viruses in the cartridges. Through the cartridge, [the virus can] go to the printer, [and then] from the printer, go to the network."

I don't see any instances of this type of attack in the wild. Also, if you made your cartridge "dumb" then there would be no threat vector any more.... no?

RajT88• 2 years ago

Well - also just don't make printers with gaping security vulnerabilities.

Really, this whole supposed security issue is bunk and hokum. I do appreciate their efforts to give the world more reasons not to buy HP Printers.

skywhopper4• 2 years ago

Right, the cartridge could (should!) be made as dumb as possible. It seems unlikely you'd need it to do more than be an ink container. But regardless, if the printer can be hacked, and the network attacked via the printer, no amount of DRM at the cartridge interface will change the risk. If HP releases a hackable non-DRM printer, it would probably release a hackable DRM printer.

whynotmaybe• 2 years ago

I guess there must be some new topics in the mba handbook because every "hardware" company is now shifting into subscription model.

From cheap WiFi webcam to high-end cars, they finally found out that constant revenue is better for them than one lump sump, especially now that technology has reached a point where you don't need to change your hardware every 3 years.

And for a business, recurrent small fee are easier to manage than large fees that are often limited by amortization.

The "price per page" has long been a efficient business model in the professional copier world.

i_am_jl• 2 years ago

The "price per page" has long been a efficient business model in the professional copier world.

This is true, but I'm not sure it's can be adapted for home use.

Every price per page agreement I'm familiar with involved leasing a machine and carrying a service contract. Both of those agreements make sense when we're dealing with something with a price tag of a new car that is a critical part of a business, but not so much when it costs a few hundred dollars and prints nothing more urgent than Amazon return labels.

Macha• 2 years ago

What is mildly hilarious about their security justification is the only reason the ink cartridges have microcontrollers to do two way communication with the printer, rather than like a barcode or something, is because of HP's attempts to block third party cartridges, so to see HP say "we have it because third party controllers might try do something bad with this" is an interesting piece of circular logic.

pwdisswordfishc• 2 years ago

Yeah, throughout the piece I couldn’t help but ask "why do cartridges carry executable code in the first place?"

realaleris149• 2 years ago

To help protect against 3rd party cartridges.

mwigdahl• 2 years ago

They have successfully bootstrapped evil.

gtvwill• 2 years ago

You know a publicly traded company lying about its actions is straight up illegal here in Aus. That would be classed as misleading investors. Also HP bricking devices remotely. Straight up illegal. Not sure how weak the consumer protections are in the US but that behavior won't fly down under. ACCC will have something to say without a doubt.

johnnyanmac• 2 years ago

Clearly. They've already had that model indirectly with ink cartridges, which is why they DRM so aggressively (or, PRM? I don't know, it's software enforced but it's enforcing on hardware).

I can't phantom why, through. Printing is nowhere near as ubiquitous as it used to be and many private people don't need to upgrade their printer often, so you're just making your new products worse than your competing old products on the used marketplace.

I'd shift the marketing to encourage better, high fidelity printing that requires special ink or guzzles through existing ink even faster. Make money off of the ability to print your own high fidelity photos on glossy paper (that HP also sells). Printing office docs is more or less a solved problem for everyday folk so it's way too late to rent-seek.

skywhopper4• 2 years ago

The silliest thing about HP's claim that your network might get hacked due to an invalid printing cartridge is that, if that's the case, then the fault is with the printer. And no amount of DRM will change the likelihood that a malicious device inserted into the printer could hack it. And anyway, this could be easily remedied by making the interchangeable part of the ink refill completely mechanical, with no embedded IC or electronics at all.

bluGill4• 2 years ago

It does seem like this claim is admissible in court if your network is hacked - HP knew there was a vulnerability and didn't fix it, thus they should pay for all the costs from this hack on our network.

alex_c• 2 years ago

Genuinely baffled at the business strategy of taking a relatively low cost commodity product, and attempting to turn it into a higher-cost (in the long term) subscription.

Like, I get it in the spreadsheet sense that more money and recurring revenue is good for HP. But how exactly is this supposed to play out in the marketplace?

Are there any examples of other companies successfully executing a similar strategy?

kfarr• 2 years ago

I think this is a case of wishful spreadsheet thinking. The numbers go up in Excel, must be good!

bluGill4• 2 years ago

Subscriptions can be cheaper for the business overall, and that savings passed on to customers. Because there is a subscription their incentive is to use less ink for the same thing, and make printers that last for a long time, both of which long term reduce costs.

Note that I said can above. Just because things can be cheaper doesn't mean the costs will be passed on. Just because the costs can be cheaper doesn't mean you will find that savings.

scovetta2• 2 years ago

How ironic! My short- and long-term objective is to avoid HP printers at all cost.

Obligatory plug for Brother printers without any of this nonsense.

iancmceachern• 2 years ago

Next up: HP exits paper printing business after demand falls to all time low.

The greatest tragedies in branding history are that you can no longer buy an HP oscilloscope, or an IBM PC.

r0ckarong• 2 years ago

Once they find a way to blank out sheets of paper after they're printed out, the company is going to explode.

newsclues2• 2 years ago

I remember buy an HP printer going to the store to buy ink refills and leaving with a brand new printer because it came with ink and was on sale cheaper than ink refills

Save the planet lol

Sohcahtoa826• 2 years ago

FYI, you're not saving money.

Printers come with "starter" cartridges that contain only a fraction of the ink of a full cartridge.

newsclues2• 2 years ago

I actually looked up the specs on the number of pages printed from the starter vs standard cartridges and because the printers sold badly (expensive ink) the discount made the cost per page printed cheaper with the marked down printers vs full priced ink.

I did not pay more.

dreamcompiler• 2 years ago

I'm the tech guy in my family and their extended circle of friends. Whenever one of them asks me "What printer should I buy?" I tell them two things:

1. Buy laser rather than inkjet unless you're printing photographs every day.

2. Brand doesn't matter as long as it's not HP.

TylerE4• 2 years ago

Not sure 2. really matters any more. Even the last few "safe" brands, like Brother, have gone down the tubes.

The question I'd really be asking is, do you actually need a printer? If it's once a month a less... any of the Office stores will do printing at about 10-15 cents a page for B&W, probably a bit more for color. They'll also have a ton more choices of things like paper/card stock. Many of things things you "needed" to print a decade ago are now often electronic tickets - I'm thinking things like confirmations, flight confirmations, that sort of thing.

bluGill4• 2 years ago

In the end owning a printer is only worth it because getting to an office supply store is such a pain when I need to print something.

snowwrestler• 2 years ago

20+ years ago I had some visibility into conversations inside Microsoft about converting their software license lines of business into annual subscriptions. The benefits to the business were obvious: revenue patterns would better match up against expenses, and be more predictable. Per-person registration and authentication would cut down on license sharing and piracy. Revenue would probably go up in aggregate.

The question was how to justify this to the customer. Ultimately they had to reinvent their products to make the conversion seem worth it. MS365 solves a lot of pain points in business. For the most common basic use cases, Office online works better than the client software. Features and fixes arrive right away instead of waiting on a version install cycle. Security is Microsoft’s problem now, not mine.

It seems like HP still needs to go on that journey. Subscription printing needs to be way better than printing now. If it were me, I would look at Comcast’s WiFi model, where they leverage everyone’s routers to give everyone WiFi. Imagine being able to easily, instantly, and seamlessly print from any HP printer you happen to be close to. Add in some business partners and it could be compelling. Hit “print” and walk into the nearest CVS to pick it up. Take a page from streaming video services and do partnership deals where it comes as part of another subscription (“Comcast Gig Internet now comes with Print Anywhere included.”)

In this model you would pay for access to printing, and separately pay for the added convenience of print at home if you want it. A local print device becomes an upsell, not a barrier to entry.

wvenable• 2 years ago

My impression is that printing is not a growing business. There might always be the need to print something but I think the heydays of printing is over.

HP is going to continue to try and squeeze more profit from a diminishing market and users will not benefit from that no matter how they try and creatively package it.

Sohcahtoa826• 2 years ago

I saw some tweet that said something like "20 years ago, we all had printers. Now, nobody does, and we're all doing fine. What the hell were we printing?"

I can think of 4 things I used to print regularly: homework assignments, tickets to events, coupons, MapQuest directions.

All four of them are no longer necessary to print. Homework is now usually either done by hand on notebook paper or uploaded somewhere as a PDF. Tickets and Coupons are now done via QR or bar codes in an app or e-mail. Google Maps and Waze on your phone made printed MapQuest directions obsolete.

Printing will continue to be less and less common. These days, I go to my veteranarian and they offer to e-mail me the results and care instructions for my cat rather than printed 5 pages of crap.

seu• 2 years ago

why.do.people.still.purchase.hp.printers

Sohcahtoa826• 2 years ago

HP has been the household name for printing for like 30 years. It's going to take a VERY long time for them to lose that status.

Think about how many people still idolize Bose when you can get better quality sound for the same price or even cheaper.

HWR_14• 2 years ago

I already have a "printing subscription". It's called Kinkos.

FrustratedMonky• 2 years ago

Next they'll make some deal with paper makers, to water mark blank paper in a way that only licensed paper can be used in their printer.

scovetta2• 2 years ago

I'm afraid we're already there.

https://doctorow.medium.com/oh-great-theres-drm-in-printer-p...

systems_glitch3• 2 years ago

My LaserJet 4 will never submit!

fuzzieozzie• 2 years ago

[time warp] The "HP Way" is dead -- but not my printer! Been using my HP LaserJet 2100 for over 30 years.

andy99• 2 years ago

My printer is like my checkbook at this point. It's something I drag out once every year or two when I have some archaic process, usually involving returning something by mail, that I'm stuck in. I hope it's going to become all the more rare and I wish there was some very basic, compact, and long lived emergency printer I could buy.

Otoh, I worked in an office with a high volume printer / copier, and I definitely see the value in paying for some managed subscription instead of actually owning the machine, unless they really make it absurdly expensive. Just like cloud, it's easier for lots of companies to not have to own and maintain physical infrastructure.

ChrisArchitect• 2 years ago

[dupe]

More discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39105752

And earlier

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39114728

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39092789

mbStavola• 2 years ago

This is why I spent so much effort trying to procure a Brother printer that for my needs a while back; most printing brands are selling you subscriptions, overpriced resources, and/or some form of lock-in. Every year it gets worse too, so this headline comes as no surprise.

I'm incredibly happy with my MFC-L3770CDW and I'm so glad I spent the effort tracking it down.

HP CEO: "Our long-term objective is to make printing a subscription."

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