HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hp-wants-you-to-pay-up-to-36-month-to-rent-a-printer-that-it-monitors/

by mfiguiere • 2 years ago

82 74 2 years ago

arstechnica.com

mattmaroon• 2 years ago

Good thing there are at least 5 other major printer brands cheaply available!

lmm• 2 years ago

HP used to be the only one with first-class Linux drivers. Sad to see them fall.

loloquwowndueo2• 2 years ago

Lol, Brother.

generic920344• 2 years ago

I used to think so, but then I upgraded to Windows 11 and found no driver for the printer.

Muromec• 2 years ago

Wait, you need drivers to print in 2024?

asadotzler• 2 years ago

Windows drivers manage printing on their own now. Don't need a vendor-specific driver any more. Enjoy.

loloquwowndueo2• 2 years ago

“brother does not engage in HP-like shenanigans” is not equal to “this old printer will work forever”. Even on Linux, my Brother printer’s cups definitions are unmaintained and not available for 64-bit systems or something. So I have to keep an old Linux install around to share the printer from. You’re still probably better off buying a newer Brother than going HP though.

thesuperbigfrog• 2 years ago

"HP is hoping to convince people that the answer to torturous printer experiences is to "never own a printer again." But considering the above frustrations, some might just never own an HP printer again."

Never own an HP printer again is the right answer. Vote with your wallet and feet. Any company that is this consumer hostile should not be surprised when consumers choose another vendor.

GravitasFailure• 2 years ago

My custom built 3D printers are somehow less annoying to use than my HP inkjet and laser printer, and I was already planning on getting a different brand when they died. This seems like HP is suddenly trying to play hard to get when they're already hard to want.

AdamJacobMuller• 2 years ago

I hadn't even thought of that, but, my X1 carbon (which I've had for only a month or so) is definitely far less fiddly than my HP printer for printing anything besides basic stuff.

friend_and_foe2• 2 years ago

I wonder why, with the ubiquity of DIY open source 3d printers, I can't seem to find a single open source design for a document printer that takes standard toner cartridges. Youd think something this simple would find the interest of some hobbyist out there.

JohnFen3• 2 years ago

I just replaced my inkjet printer because the cost of replacing the ink cartridges was too much to bear.

My new printer is intentionally neither HP nor inkjet. HP can get stuffed.

johnnyanmac• 2 years ago

I still don't know their strategy here. Businesses obviously hate this, and there's nothing a 2020's printer offers to a normal consumer over a 2000's printer you can find in the bargain bin ( in addition to be used less and less these days). easier access to ink? I buy ink maybe once a year.

sonofhans• 2 years ago

“Prices range from $6.99 per month for a plan that includes an HP Envy printer (the current model is the 6020e) and 20 printed pages. The priciest plan includes an HP OfficeJet Pro rental and 700 printed pages for $35.99 per month.”

So their low-volume plan is 35¢/page, scaling down to 5¢/page. That’s obscene, but not surprising. Corporate greed has been HP’s stock-in-trade for many years now.

So ironic that they call the printer “Envy.” It’s been decades since I envied anyone with an HP printer.

spiderfarmer• 2 years ago

Their Envy laptops were so expensive and bad they made me switch to Mac.

ok123456• 2 years ago

You're better off printing at Kinko's at those prices.

bgirard• 2 years ago

Actually it's >= $36/page if you pick the plan and print one or no pages. I'd say most people don't have a predictable printing volume and they're just praying on that. It's corporate madness they would be willing to burn their brand over this.

I had bought in to their $20 printer with free printing for life up to like 10 pages a month they offered years back. The printer took forever to setup, the cartridge never worked the month after (the ink dried perhaps?) and eventually they reneged on the deal altogether. The experience was deeply frustrating. Then I bought a $350 Brother printer. Worked right out of the box, never dealt with drivers and anything of the sort, prints effortlessly from my phone. I've had reliable printing for years and I'll never look back.

alsobrsp• 2 years ago

I only buy and recommend Brother. Always just works.

sonicanatidae3• 2 years ago

Literally decades. I truly miss the HP 4/4Si series.

Sure they were tanks, but you could do most of the service with a Philips screwdriver. The 2 most common failures were the fuser or a DC controller board and both were simple to replace, imo.

The current HP is a ghoulish parody of the HP that was.

tanseydavid• 2 years ago

There's a name that keeps coming to mind: Carly Fiorina.

Eisenstein• 2 years ago

It is a good deal if you get the cheap plan and print 20 8.5x11" full quality photos. If you are printing documents, get a laser printer.

JJMcJ• 2 years ago

35¢/page

Might as well go to FedEx Office (formerly Kinko's) for that price.

Havoc• 2 years ago

I strongly suspect that all these sketchy moves coming out of HP printer division lately aren't incompetence but rather a realisation that the business is one foot in grave & the strategic play left is to squeeze.

frankjr2• 2 years ago

That's my impression as well. If "running out of ink" is your problem, then the solution is not to go with a service like this but to stop printing and send/store/... it electronically.

jareklupinski• 2 years ago

for the few times a year i actually need to print something, it would actually probably be cheaper to send my documents out to a courier to print and bring to me some time that day , vs. buying and maintaining printer / ink

JohnFen3• 2 years ago

but to stop printing and send/store/... it electronically.

The entire reason that I need to print things is because I have use cases where there are no acceptable electronic alternatives.

bee_rider2• 2 years ago

I wonder if printing would have a future, if the main company wasn’t so awful. I quite like a hard copy sometimes…

friend_and_foe2• 2 years ago

I'm curious how much of the personal/home computing industry is destined for this situation ad well. It seems to me the only real marketable avenue by which this entire industry has grown is content consumption. Music, movies, gaming and interpersonal communication seem to be the only things people actually want these machines for, despite the sales pitch in the 80s and 90s.

WarOnPrivacy• 2 years ago

As someone who's spent decades matching biz with gear, my guidance to every client:

Never buy HP.

At best it's a waste of you time and funds. More likely it's a costly waste of your time and funds.

wkat4242• 2 years ago

My work rents Ricoh's, thousands of huge ones. It's not a bad model for them. Though part of it is the usual finance trick, moving capex to opex. They'd probably pay less if they just bought them. But finance guys just loooove reducing capex.

As a consumer I'd never go for this trap though. I just have a cheap brother laser.

skissane• 2 years ago

Though part of it is the usual finance trick, moving capex to opex. They'd probably pay less if they just bought them. But finance guys just loooove reducing capex.

Years ago I worked for a state university where senior management was doing the mirror image trick - they weren’t able to get any more money for opex but plenty of money for capex. So they padded out all these projects with contractors, such that our project’s budget was paying 100% of the contractor’s hours but only actually getting 50% of them, and they spent the other 50% doing day-to-day “keeping the lights on” stuff.

I suppose public sector finance can have very different fundamentals from private sector.

bee_rider2• 2 years ago

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.

This is creepy as hell. Everyone knows social media sites are spying on them, but a printer is just hardware you pay for. The real value here is probably that it will slip under people’s radar.

professoretc• 2 years ago

Coming soon: "HP reserves the right to retain or sell your printed documents for the purposes of training AI."

jsyang00• 2 years ago

This is just silly. You're supposed to sell SOFTWARE for a monthly fee, without which the printer is inoperable.

paulmd2• 2 years ago

who would have imagined that postscript needed to be updated annually!?

frankjr2• 2 years ago

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.

I'm just waiting for printer companies to start selling the content of what you're printing to companies for AI training.

andy99• 2 years ago

It makes sense for business (I don't know if the price is competitive), if I had some moderate amount of printing to do I can see an "as a service" model making sense.

As a home user I print < 5 times a year. I'm sure some print more but how much can it be. Do schools still ask kids to hand in printer assignments?

What would interest me is a simple way to print something and either get it in the mail the next day or in some pickup box. I'm guessing that exists and I'll have to explore it once my 15 year old toner cartridge finally runs out.

devilbunny• 2 years ago

I can't imagine that a local print shop wouldn't do that for you. My FIL recently asked about getting a color laser printer to print off some catalogs for his customers. I asked what he was paying a print shop, and while I don't remember the number, it was very reasonable, especially as it included paper and stapling. I just said, if you want to do your own, especially in volume, it's going to take you forever to print off the usual volume, and it won't save much money even if you value your own time at nothing.

Email them a PDF, they'll print whatever you need. It's probably worth it to keep a basic laser printer at the house (my ancient Brother doesn't even have networking or duplex printing - but it's USB-connected to my iMac, which allows AirPrint with Printopia, which is well worth the $20) for things you need a copy of right now, but for a hundred copies of a 20-page handout, a print shop is almost certainly a better choice.

ddingus• 2 years ago

Nope.

Full stop. Not ever gonna do it. For the forseeable future, I can get, and already own, a cheap laser printer that will trundle along and make the few pages I need every month.

nonrandomstring• 2 years ago

Why would anyone buy that?

Marginal gravity. Just an idea I'm pondering.

Because for any product, no matter how ridiculous - whether it's the "I'm rich app" [0] or motorised spaghetti forks and other Chindogu [1], there's always some tiny minority of people who will buy it.

Those people are the proverbial clueless rubes who have no real experience, sense of context or value, but discover some product and assume that "it's normal". Maybe they never needed a printer in their life, but suddenly need one, and the first thing they come across is this outrageous HP product. Without any corrective influences they just purchase.

To this we add Erica Chenoweth's 3.5% rule [2].

Now this handful of idiots set a kind of precedent that accrues more and more "almost idiots",and eventually otherwise quite reasonable people are being sucked into a giant black hole of madness.

In no time everybody wants a broken expensive, piece of crap that spies on you, and the last percentile of genuinely sensible people are left holding out - being mocked by the new majority as "unreasonable" Luddites who resists "progress".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Rich

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chind%C5%8Dgu

[2] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190513-it-only-takes-35...

a_random_canuck• 2 years ago

Thanks HP for reaffirming my position of never buying an HP printer again and never recommending one to any of my friends or family ever.

What a despicable company.

darth_avocado• 2 years ago

Yeah no. Printing isn’t a daily activity that you can forecast. There are some days I need to print 100 pages, while months when I have nothing to print. Just going to go make some popcorn, for when this fails spectacularly and pushes them further to their graves.

dtf• 2 years ago

What on earth happened to this once powerhouse of engineering and innovation?

sjwhevvvvvsj• 2 years ago

No idea, but this makes me less likely to go for HP metal next time I buy servers.

Who knows if the brilliant business minds currently in charge of the printer division will bring this magic to servers. I for one have no interest in finding out.

flypaca• 2 years ago

Servers are made by different company "HP Enterprise" though. Not related to printers/laptop HP.

ksherlock• 2 years ago

In 1999 the HP parts of HP were spun off into Agilent.

JohnFen3• 2 years ago

Personally, I think that HP completed its devolution in 1999, after they spun off their test/measurement divisions to become Agilent and left the rest to start dying.

But some of my friends place the date at 2002, when they merged with Compaq.

davidhyde• 2 years ago

I wonder if anyone will print ink greedy documents like full page colour images just to mess with the economics of the system.

neurostimulant• 2 years ago

probably not a problem for them because the inks are cheap to produce.

biglyburrito• 2 years ago

More like "never own an HP printer again". Brother is the only brand of printer I've bought in the last 15 years, for either home or office use.

rekabis• 2 years ago

I still have an HP4050DTN and an HP5000DTN. Both of them pre-date this century, and will likely work just fine into the next, providing I can still find cartridges for them and Ethernet still exists.

I doubt I will ever buy a modern HP product, seeing as they are so stridently enshittifying their printers.

init2null• 2 years ago

4050s are stellar machines. I would've been party to so many sales in past few years if they were still available.

It's great having a printer that'll use up a fuser in its life, and it's even better that you can replace said fuser in twenty minutes.

polski-g• 2 years ago

This has made me never buy any HPE servers ever again. Great job HP.

anotheruser13• 2 years ago

I still miss Compaq Proliant servers (pre-Fiorina, of course)

sprior2• 2 years ago

They really should have saved this announcement for April 1, then at least it would have been funny.

byyll2• 2 years ago

I really want to get an HP laptop but every time I see anything about their printers, they convince me not to.

quickslowdown2• 2 years ago

Their laptops are utter shit too, until you get into the $1,200+ range, at which point you might as well just buy from a better, less consumer-hostile brand. No reason to buy anything from HP, there are enough competing alternatives that are as good or better.

byyll2• 2 years ago

I was looking at the EliteBook 845 G10 which has 32GB of DDR5, Ryzen 7840U and a SIM slot(!) that I could get locally for €1200 and potentially get a discount if I return my old laptop. I think it's a good value for the price. What else do you suggest?

snapplebobapple2• 2 years ago

This should be read as "hp agrees they should be broken up due to obvious market power abuse"

onewheeltom• 2 years ago

I use a cheap HP Envy with instant ink for $4/month and it’s totally fine and mostly trouble free. I’ve recommended it to some people. Even tech support was surprisingly good. For my B&W printing, I use a $120 Brother that duplexes.

Euphorbium• 2 years ago

HP has been the top answer to the question of “what is the worst electronics you have ever bought?” for over a decade. How can they even still exist?

Sohcahtoa82• 2 years ago

Because despite how awful they are, somehow, they're still the most recognized name in home printing.

People still think Bose is the premium audio brand despite plenty of other brands catching up on audio quality and selling for a lower price.

jamesy0ung• 2 years ago

I have an Epson ecotank printer, it is pretty good and it works well. No cloud crap is required to use it and the ink refills are pretty cheap as well.

corinroyal• 2 years ago

I recently set up one of these for my parents. As a system administrator I was prepared to hate it, especially after seeing that you have to go online to set up the printer. But then the online wizard walked me through filling the tanks and printed its test page flawlessly in just a minute or so. I was impressed with an inkjet user experience for the first time in my life. And the volume of ink in those tanks means I probably will not have to do anything to that printer for a long time, where I was regularly attending to their old one.

HP wants you to pay up to $36/month to rent a printer that it monitors

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