I never have bought an HP anything. I don’t see why anyone would.
I’ve got a 15 year-old HP inkjet. Still running strong. The hardware on that thing is solid. Too bad that they no longer make drivers for it. Pisses me off that I’ll have to buy a new printer with similar specs for no reason other that software drivers. (The open source drivers available on mac aren’t giving me the quality or features that the original drivers did 
But they do let me print draft quality… )
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Not sure why anybody is surprised they did this… Has zero to do with 'intellectual property" at all… It is in fact closer to the K-Cup analogy… Anybody believe these printers aren’t sold as loss leaders by the manufacturers because they make the money back on the back end selling ink. Truth was they did this because people weren’t paying them by buying THEIR ink which is majorly overpriced and we all know it… So HP did the only thing they could do they thought to help their bottom line which was block people from using other cartreidges and be forced to buy their overpriced cartridges to reclaim their lost cashflow… Personally I find it disgusting but its basically the same fiasco we dealt with for years with Cellular providers selling phones for basically nothing but overcharging for service in order to make profit on the back end they could afford to do so… I don’t agree with what HP did but I get it… Folks its a free market we can take our business elsewhere… I used to find HP products were well made across the board that changed 10 yrs ago and hasn’t been the same since… had both a Desktop and Laptop that I had to send in for major warranty repairs after less then a year wont buy their computer products ever again
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We can cross Samsung off this list as HP has agreed to buy their printer division for $1.05B.
Now we need to alert the Federal Trade Comission to include a consent decree with this purchase reminding HP that they would be subject to sanctions if this monopolistic behavior continues.
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I honestly don’t know why anyone buys inkjet printers beyond the “glicée” market.
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This is home users. They care that it prints in color. If you think any other of what you’ve said matters over price, you’re a bit credulous towards the corporate narrative.
Like an unleaded balloon, surely?
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The Goldfinger standard applies:
“Do you expect us to makes amends?”
“No Mr. HP, I expect you to die.”
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‘Support’ is an often-misused word in this context. HP isn’t obligated to support Billy Bob’s Discount Ink. If the blue ink suddenly turns red, that’s not their problem. But they should support the printers that they sold - their products. If they were working fine with Billy Bob’s ink before and suddenly stopped working due to a change that HP made, then they should fix it.
Similar to software development. If you work on web applications, no one actually expects you to support Internet Explorer (in the sense of fly out to Washington, push Bill Gates aside, and rewrite the buggy IE codebase for them). But if the website was working fine in IE before you made a change, and the change breaks it in IE, then yes, you should find a workaround to fix the site. Because you are responsible for supporting the work that you did.
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Interesting this topic shows up on the day that I notice my HP laser printer saying “Update Ready. Install?”
I use HP cartridges due to sloth about figuring out what might work, so I don’t have that problem. But I’m wary. I can see the day coming when the update says “Your printer is too old. We are bricking it. Get a new one already.”
Sort of like what Microsoft is doing.
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I think we’ve reached peak Doctorow
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I’ve already had some mysterious problems. Fortunately I’m one of those running a Linux machine and HP probably forgot about us. Hope so. I will keep this ‘update’ business in mind when and if I have to buy another printer, however.
I suppose the whole PC thing is beginning to grind down now. I can see vending machines able to do good large-scale printing after receiving the images from tablets and phones by Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.
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This is a thing, this falling from grace of HP. They used to make really good stuff (I have a rack full of nice 1970s vintage HP test equipment), until they spun off Agilent and focused on chasing the bottom of the PC market. Now they seem to be operating on an unholy combination of the Gillette and RIAA business models.
I just bought an HP computer, but the very first thing I did was remove the Windows 10 it came with and installed the proper Windows 7 that a modern computer needs.
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Being completely pragmatic here. Why? They don’t test it, they are under no obligation to ensure it works past, present, or future. No promises were ever made.
Again, why? You can just pop up a dialog saying to use something else.
The ‘Yeah!’ roster had language like ‘unnatural’ or ‘artificial’ applied to HP’s action, where from a Schumpeterian viewpoint of course one wants to be bristling with artifice cranking out a device and updates to the device. I could almost expect better response sending a Zoidberg dunny with speech bubbles like “I can’t find Kaddish Printers anymore!” and “All my startups need a workgroup printer with 14 full-ream source drawers–and shorter than the end table.” and also “Official city fashion finally endorsed my printer hajib in 8 colors. Good enough.”
It’s 2016. Products take kitchen scraps in and put out ‘organic’ deep colors out, vary the acidity, noxiousness (for permanency,) bleed and edge treatments cannily, and have buttons that proof for 3 kinds of color-blindness. They tell you when the page is dry and keep working until you take the sheets. They tweet proofs of your work to 3 similar contacts lists for production and product lifetime management cues. They offer dank or sweet pairings. They used to make you push buttons to acknowledge problems you’d already fixed but now they fix buttons to acknowledge you.
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I feel confused and enlightened at the same time
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If you contacted support they’d probably correct it by sending you a new cartridge for starters. If that didn’t fix it, possibly a new printer.
I don’t know about the US but in Europe this is already the case. My cars have 5 year warranties subject to annual servicing by the dealer. Once out of warranty I can do what I like. It’s up to the dealer which oil they use, and it is their liability not mine.
Both cars use 5W/30 fully synthetic oil. If I change the oil myself I might get the correct one or I might buy some “performance” oil from a backstreet shop. The result could be premature bearing wear, premature ring wear, and even failing emission standards. If it came to a warranty claim, I would have to provide an analysis to prove it was the correct oil, which could be expensive.
That’s despite the fact that the standard consumables of cars (oil, antifreeze, petroleum oil) are standardised more or less world wide.
When it comes to printers the situation is more complicated because constant progress means that there is constant development in consumables, which are now about the only physical part of printers that is changing. I read what you say about ordinary users, but photographers fuss a lot about reproduction quality and a manufacturer with a better process gets sales. Of course inks for photo printers and the like are trade secrets. The performance gain from better oil is minimal, most people don’t keep cars long enough to find out about wear, and it takes an awful lot of R&D to develop new oils (this is a subject on which I do know something). If a car maker discovered a magical new lubricant which enabled them to get 20% more power out of an engine while making it lighter, you think they’d be going to the SAE and saying “publish this please?”
What I see here happening is that HP will soon suffer the “Telephone Game” effect of ever increasing claims, where all HP devices get caught in the rumours of being bricked. It’s also a violation of EU directives, which were specifically aimed against HP and Lexmark selling printers at a loss so that they could soak the consumer on ink costs and lock out competitors.We are going to see more “don’t buy HP” among the lesser tech inclined, as stories like this enter their (figurative) peripheral vision.
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Hey, thanks for teaching me a new word 
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