HP CEO: You're 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

Don’t buy HP printers. Buy Brothers instead. They’re a better product anyways.
- For now anyway. Enshittification strikes too many products eventually.
  
  Which is making me sad. 3d printing is so open atm, but I wouldn’t be surprised if enshittification will take place in this space in my lifetime.
- I'm just now having to replace my brother printer (HL-2170W) I bought in 06, because the NIC is toast.
  The printer still works great, but duplex printing sure would be nice.
  
  If it still has working USB you can hook it up to a $10 raspberry pi with wifi to act as a print server. I can understand if that's a more ambitious tech project than your ready to take on.
  
  Have you looked into printers that accept refillable containers of ink rather than cartridges? I haven't looked too closely, but I see Epson makes some too, and the prices are pretty reasonable.
  
  2170 crowd represent!!!
  Those things run forever and cost nothing to run.
- They’re about as bad. But a new set of ink cartridges and they immediately go “empty” within two months even if you’re not using them. Switch to a laser jet.
- Brother is just a little less greed than HP, nothing more

Excuse me - if I bought your product and paid for it, in what universe am I not investing into you, and instead you are investing into me??
HP is a steaming pile of shit.
- Because they sell the printers at loss, expecting you to buy their overpriced ink, continually earning them money for years.
  Sounds like a subscription to be honest.
  
  I know we assume they're following the "razor blade" model but I actually find it hard to believe the printers are sold at a loss given how cheap it is to produce at this point.
  Unless by "loss" we're saying "less than HP thought it could extract."
  
  They want to make it a subscription that starts automatically when you buy the printer. No payment or the linked credit card expires, no more printing. Keep on paying for that subscription each month even if you don't print a single page.
- The real question here is where are the Chinese printers?! I mean, it's a big market, why aren't they getting into it?
  
  Xiaomi makes a couple of expensive standard inkjets, but mostly they make photo printers. That's the only one I can think of.
  
  It's really hard to break into it. Being accurate enough to print at 300dpi is very difficult, and that's not particularly impressive. If it's color, then the problems are multiplied. You have to precisely align four different print heads (minimum), and the ink needs to be mixed just right for accurate colors.
  This is also why you don't see open source 2d printers like you do for 3d printers. On the surface, adding a third dimension seems like it'd make things more complicated, but 3d printers don't need the level of accuracy that 2d printers do.

A warning: if you've already bought an HP printer, never subscribe to the HP ink service. If you do, your printer will only be allowed to use certified HP cartridges, and it could lead to situations where you have ink in your printer but it will not print.
There is a lot of IP that we've built in the inks of the printers, in the printers themselves.
I call bullshit. I haven't delved into specific law, but plenty of companies have been around since, say, the 1860s and are still producing ink today. If you can't make ink people want to buy, that's a skill issue.
"We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network, so it can create many more problems for customers."
As the cool kids these days say, "what the fuck is blud waffling about?" If a printer cartridge can contain a virus, I think that's on you, not on the cartridge. A black cartridge and a color cartridge need only to conform to two unique shapes, and that should be all.
ETA: as the ashamed owner of an HP printer, I've learned how to fill my own cartridges, and while the process is messy and should be conducted over a kitchen sink, it is somewhere between a hundred and a thousand times cheaper than buying from HP.
ETA2: Don't buy HP though. Seriously.
- HP is intentionally getting this twisted in the hopes that we won't notice. But too bad; we noticed.
  The only possible way for a "virus" to be embedded in an ink cartridge is because there is software (or firmware, I guess) in that cartridge. The only reason there is software in an ink cartridge in the first place is because HP needs it to be there for their own nefarious purposes, to wit attempting to prevent you from using third party cartridges, and also to lock you out of using cartridges that may still be full of ink under their stupid "instant ink" scam.
  Without that, the cartridge would just be a box of ink which is all it actually needs to be. HP could have avoided this entire fiasco by... not putting dumbshit DRM firmware in their cartridges in the first place.
  
  I'm pretty sure the quantity of the ink is calculated through whatever's on the cartridge, but... If filling your own, the first thing you need to do is disable that.
  On the bright side, it can be done by holding a button on pretty much any HP printer. On the not so bright side, that's only because HP lost a lawsuit about it.
- Do yourself a favor and buy a Brother laser jet.
  
  I updated my original comment. Definitely don't want to give the impression anybody ever should.
- They could avoid the possibility of a virus by not having chips in them. Pretty simple fix.

I aspire to be a bad investment for every company
- I do not want to be measured as an investment but as a customer.
  
  I dont want to be measured as a customer either. I want to fall under the 'T' part of their SWOT analysis.
- I'm not really on Reddit much anymore but every time an article would get posted about how Redditors were the least valuable social media users for advertising purposes I was always like "Fuck yeah."
- Ah. The only good kind of investment!

We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network
Hey dipshits, this is possible because you built firmware into your printer cartridges to prevent 3rd party cartridges in the first place
- Headline should have been "HP CEO admits company's products are platform for malware attacks."

"We have seen that you can embed viruses into cartridges, through the cartridge go to the printer, from the printer go to the network, so it can create many more problems for customers."
If the cartidges didn't have drm chips you wouldn't have anything to load with malware to begin with.

Buying HP products is bad investment.
I only had the chance to two of their inkjet printers and one of their office laser printers, plus an elitebook laptop. In short, all of them suck.
Much better (to me, the best) alternatives, that I can safely say are good investments: Canon for inkjet printers, ThinkPad T and P series for laptops. Those are quality products. Unfortunately I don't have any experience with other office laser printers, so I cannot recommend one.
Edit: specified which series of ThankPads are still good.
- Inkjet printers as a whole are a bad investment.
  
  Well, I guess it depends on the use case. For me, mine was a damn good investment for sure.
- For those who don't want a Canon, a Brother is also great.
- ThinkPad is now Lenovo just FYI. They were acquired some years ago and now Lenovo makes and sells the ThinkPad line of hardware
  
  They were acquired some years ago
  Almost 20.
  
  I know. Still, that's the best hardware out there for laptops. I have to add though, only the T and P series are worth buying, the rest are trash.

- Because that interview is for investors. He's looking out for the shares price, not his customers. We can always buy other products, like Canon or Epson. It's too bad because HP printers are the best, but not enough to let us be robbed like other brands.
  
  HP printers and the software with them sucks ass. Never again. Bought a brother laser printer and shit just works without any bullshit.
  
  HP printers are the best
  No. Not by any metric.

And this is why I only buy Brother laser printers
- Can you give us more detail about how that solves the problem?
  
  Not OP but I only use a brother MFC black&white laser printer for printing documents at home. It addresses the HP issue in 2 ways. 1 - The genuine brother toner costs much less per page to the point that it's not terrible to have to buy it if necessary. And 2 - brother does not put DRM on their printer and there are tons of 3rd party toners available at about 1/3rd the price. Generally brother printers cost more up front, but basically last a lifetime, and the toner is pretty cheap. I've had the same printer for around 12 years now, and it still prints fine. I don't print a lot at home so I've only had to buy 4 3rd-party replacement toners, which have cost around $80 altogether. I think the printer was $200 when I originally bought it.
  Also I want to add that if you need color inkjet printing, the Canon Megatank and Epson Ecotank printers are an awesome option for most home printing. I use a Canon g6020 at home for photo printing and I love the photos that come out of it.
  
  For home usage, a later printer toner cartridge will last you years and won't go bad. Ink jet printer cartridges are way more expensive and dry out which is why they constantly need replacing. Brother is a much better brand than HP.
  
  Brother makes their money on printers and printer support (like really big offices that print thousands of documents a day, those printers have special techs). They don't make as much on ink sales so they don't really care about third party ink cartridges.
  
  You can buy 3rd party toner for Brother and they don't lock you out of your own printer for doing it.
  On brother printers, if the printer says toner is out and you can't print, you can press a key combo on the printer to reset the toner page counter and then continue printing until there is literally no toner left at all.
  
  It's funny how much worse Lemmy is at downvoting simple questions than Reddit. People on here treat every question as if it was asked with bad intentions.

Every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn't print enough or doesn't use our supplies, it's a bad investment.
Brother, for the love of anything holy, please do not follow HP's path.
- In other words: "Our business model is bad and I feel smug about it."
- I wonder if I can 3D print parts for and make a reliable 2D printer

Buying HP products are a very bad investment, period.
- I would never own a printer other than a Canon or an Ink Tank printer and I'm very reluctant to use the Canon Printer.
  
  If you laser brother printers are great

21st century business innovation seems to be make everything a perpetual subscription model, rather than providing better value with new products. It doesn't make you brilliant as a CEO, may as well just replace you with AI, right? That's what all the cool investors care about now, right?

Later in the interview, he added: "Every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn't print enough or doesn't use our supplies, it's a bad investment."
This makes me want to buy 10 million printers and then just sent them on fire...
- Don't worry, they'll destroy their printers for you, so you have to buy new ones.
  
  And next time buy a brother printer.

This just screams that it's a bad investment to buy HP stock at the moment. No company will insult their potential customers if they aren't desperate.

investors should be taken to a remote island and left to fend for themselves
- investors should be taken to a remote planet and left to fend for themselves.
  
  Yikes, I hope you don't have a pension.
- Not gonna lie, thought that said "inventors" and I was like, "I'd watch that."

Holy fuck, customers are not an investment!
- Not crazy at all. Not sure why there's a surprise. Advertising is everywhere. Design goes into making buying goods user friendly. The whole point of brands is to build loyalty to it. All of that has cost to acquire customers. So obviously customers are an investment because acquiring them has cost and labor involved.
  It's like selling an iPhone knowing you will eventually make money on app store sales percentage margins.

That's not how investments work. If I put my money into purchasing a printer, I invested in that purchase. Not the other way around. Ffs

Proud to be a bad investment here 😊

"Every time a customer buys a printer, it's an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn't print enough or doesn't use our supplies, it's a bad investment."
They literally can't help themselves. They've gone from treating their employees like an investment vehicle, where if it doesn't perform well enough, they stop investing in it, and they're fully onto doing that to their customers as well. (They aren't exactly actually investing in their employees either. They consider an employees low pay an "investment," in the employee. Nevermind the employee can't afford an apartment on their own on their pay.)
You know how little your boss thinks of you and how disposable they think you are?
Yeah, well, they think that about the customers now, too.
"You can easily be replaced with another customer who prints more," is what they are saying to themselves.
- The company I work for has a contract with HP to provide and service the printers. My department uses a printer everyday. In addition to internal use we print receipts and documents for clients who sometimes only have a few minutes to wait. We have been told that our printers are going to be removed because we don’t print enough. Our page count isn’t high enough to justify the cost from HP, despite the fact that we literally can’t do our jobs without them. The result of this is that we’ll have to walk the floor until we find an available cloud printer, no matter how far away or inconvenient it is. For corporations it’s all about the numbers. Metrics, budget, etc. How it affects their employees doesn’t matter to them.

drank too much koolaid, retarded now
- overdosed on stupid juice

Guess I'm fucking very proud to be some asshole corporation's "bad investment". I'll wear that title with a huge smile on my face if I ever buy one of their shitty products.
Brother laser printer for life*
*At least until they go full anti-consumer and my now almost decade old printer dies.
- Plus the work great with after market stuff.

In case anyone cares, I'm sitting next to a Brother MFC-J1205W. It cost a couple hundred bucks, came with all full ink cartridges, and makes absolutely gorgeous color prints in addition to obviously being fine for printing-type printing. I've bought more ink for it once and it was $47 for every color of color cartridge with tons of ink inside them (I was out of yellow; I still have the cyan and magenta cartridges, and I've never had to buy more black). I'm extremely happy with it so far.
Before that, I had an Epson Workforce 545. It was pricey but it lasted, no joke, about 15 years, and worked well for the first ten and acceptably after that (not producing beautiful documents any more but still perfectly functional for printing). It only died because someone spilled sauce into it. It was a little more greedy on the ink than the Brother is.
Edit: Oh, and to my knowledge neither of these printers ever tried to tell me that I needed to install their special ~~rootkit~~ software in order to get the full experience of their printer. I just plug them in and they print. I feel like that's a selling point in our blighted modern age.
- I care, and I’ve added this to my list for when it comes time to grab a new printer.
  I have my HP from about 15 years ago that has been trudging along for the two times a year that I need to print, but that thing was from another era and once it goes, there will not be another HP printer in my future.

Fuck HP, that simple. it's exhibit "a" for the proof of enshittification
- EnshAtification

In grad school I picked up a free used HP LaserJet. It had Ethernet, and could use generic/off brand cartridges. Yeah it was big and noisy but it was an awesome workhorse and it Just Worked (with out-of-the-box CUPS/Linux support too, IIRC).
How the mighty have fallen.
- Yeah, my first color inkjet was an HP and it was an absolute workhorse. I had a graphic design business and I remember printing 1500 4-page newsletters for a client who couldn't wait for a regular printing press due to a deadline. I stayed up all night feeding paper into that thing and had to change the black ink cartridge twice, for about $50 each, during the whole ordeal. I loved that printer. When it finally died after 15 years or so, I tried to find another HP that could do the job. What a mistake. Current models are hot garbage.
  So now I have an Epson Ecotank which I bought three years ago and literally have not yet had to purchase additional ink past the first set of bottles that came with it. Sadly, the photo printing quality is not as good as the old HP, but for my purposes it is perfect.

Imagine working high up in this company and not wanting to jump off a bridge every time you get off of work. Psychos.

Do not buy inkjet printers, it is a scam! I dumped mine long ago even with after market ink, it is just a hassle to upkeep it.
- They used to not be, in the early years of ink jet there were some fantastic ones.
  One of them accompanied me through school where I would print full color on 1 meter long heavy grain paper like it was nothing. It worked so good and never clogged even on not official ink

I have always had a conspiracy theory that the ink management requirements are set by national security input. All printers have a yellow dot pattern added to every print to identify the printer by a forensics team. I wonder if this is why the ink landscape is so shifty. They want to make sure those dots get printed. My thought on why you can't print black and white when you are only missing colored ink.
- Funny you'd mention that. I removed my color cartridge and haven't seen fit to reattach it. On HP printers, at least, you can override ink checking by long-pressing one of the buttons on it. (I assume people who have purchased a printer that doesn't suck will have a similar option)
- The conspiracy theory falls apart with black only printers. 🤷

I'm not an investment, I'm a single purchase customer. I buy a thing from you and then I get on with my life.

“My business model is making everyone else responsible to make my business successful”

HP is a bad investment

HP wants to pay employees in company scrip.

How has HP not gone out of business? Their products are overpriced pieces of trash.
- Other Businesses. They love the subscription models.

How small and shriveled this man’s soul must be. He should take a lesson from Ferdinand the Bull, and enjoy smelling the flowers for a while.

This is the best summary I could come up with:
The PC and print biz is currently facing a class-action lawsuit (from 2.42 in the video below) regarding allegations that the company deliberately prevented its hardware from accepting non-HP branded replacement cartridges via a firmware update.
When asked about the case in a CNBC interview, Lores said: "I think for us it is important for us to protect our IP.
And what we are doing is when we identify cartridges that are violating our IP, we stop the printers from work[ing]."
Lores said of customers who use a third-party cartridge: "In many cases, it can create all sorts of issues from the printer stopping working because the ink has not been designed to be used in our printer, to even creat[ing] security issues.
HP has long banged the drum [PDF] about the potential for malware to be introduced via print cartridges, and in 2022, its bug bounty program confirmed that third-party cartridges with reprogrammable chips could deliver malware into printers.
Sadly, Lores's protestations were somewhat undermined by the admission that the company's business model depends – at least in part – on customers selecting HP supplies for their devices.
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