Don't forget that your toner isn't going to dry out if you don't use it for a while
Although your hp chip time stamp may expire and thus render your full cartridge useless
HP gone too far with drm
- Thread starter johnloo
- Start date
Although your hp chip time stamp may expire and thus render your full cartridge useless
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errrrr thats not true and sounds like a marketing hype.
Printer will cost less than £1 to make (probably less). The cheapest printers will be the most popular sellers. So your implying their most popular model they make a loss on....thats just not business model that is usable. As far as i am concerned thats advertising spin to say they make them at a loss. Or a internet rumour told enough now its becomes fact.
Man of Honour
Such old news. Don't like it then buy another brand...
Soldato
Lol... The raw materials alone will cost more than £1, never mind the energy to process them, the hours of R&D, testing, software creation etc. Hell, the packaging the printer comes in probably costs more than £1
Of course it's a business model that's viable - the whole point is they make a killing on the ink (or do you really think it costs 2-3x as much to manufacture a genuine HP cartridge vs a 3rd party one?
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Soldato
Definitely not £1. Do you understand all the costs from start to finish on these printers?
Having worked with HP, i do enough to tell you that even their shipping per printer costs a a good fraction.
The cheapest printers are around £35 from a retailer including VAT. They make a small ish margin. Shipping, storage, design, marketing all cost something. Even the parts cost them more than you would think considering all the extras they now come with eg. wireless module, scanner, touch lcd screen, nfc chip.
This idea of super cheap costs to manufacturing, packaging and shipping only applies to companies who handle all that themselves, which very few do. HP would pay another company to package each printer and box it with a printed box that they paid the company extra for. The printers would be bulk delivered to their warehouse by the packaging company at HPs cost. From the warehouse it will get shipped and redelivered to distribution centres or retailers and by another third party company which i can tell you, still costs a pretty penny. Promoting the product as well costs a fortune. TBH even just the heat/power required to manufacture the product takes a small chunk out of the margins.
Plenty of retailers sell cheap items to draw customers into their more expensive range. Hell, even supermarkets like Tesco sell things like value bake beans at a loss, so they can claim to be the cheapest for every day items and build a reputation which gathers the customers to do their full shop there and pay the money back with a fair bit extra (whats a 5 p loss if that person ends up doing their £30 shop twice a week there?)
Even this very boring looking article from a boring looking magazine says so:
http://www.therecycler.com/posts/the-challenges-of-printers-discussed/
(Trade magazine for toners and inkjet industry)
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That idea will never work unfortunately. It's much easier to just prevent use of non-authorised cartridges and leave it at that.
I still can't believe there are some people who are failing to understand the concept behind this. It's basic business, HP Inc deal with a lot of low-margin products (they also own the consumer desktop/laptop range), so it's no wonder they want to secure some profit.
HP have always been known as producing the best printers, even ranging from the home user all the way up to large enterprise printing. I remember seeing some of the stuff in their labs, the R&D that goes into making ink is much more complex than people think.
Micro-USB isn't as capable as Lightning when it comes to AV out. If Apple had switched to micro-USB from the 30-pin connector, they would have had some seriously angry customers.
And then there's the issue of quality control. Just look at some of the issues with USB-C cables.
Take a look at the profit Apple has gained from this licensing... then you'll change your mind and realise it's only a for-profit scheme
I can't take a look as Apple doesn't split out its revenue for the MFI programme. However, I have been a developer at a company who was a member of the programme. The membership and licensing fees were high enough to keep hobbyists out but hardly the kind of money that would register on Apple's bank balance.
Soldato
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Hasn't every firmware update for a printer done this, ever? My epson's forever trying to download updates from their site but I blocked the bugger via firewall.
Soldato
looks like they are backtracking now
All they have done is guaranteed a vast number of people will never buy a HP printer again
I have already decided that if my current HP's pack up I will be looking for something like the Epson ecotank (or whatever they call it)
They are a bit expensive up front, but it would only take a couple of sets of HP cartridges to make up the difference.
Errr no, this is a big deal and they are backtracking now with a new firmware.
The problem herein is in the fact they issued a firmware update in March that was designed to disable 3rd party cartridges from September. This dynamic security 'feature' was not directly mentioned in any of the release notes (or may have been craftily worded).
It is shoddy behavior from a shoddy company. I've had to deal with HP (enterprise mind you) for years and they have been absolutely useless, progressively getting worse and worse. Their company is in complete turmoil. I refuse to put any of their kit in our datacentres.
All they have done is guaranteed a vast number of people will never buy a HP printer again
Speak for yourself. We're a $50+ billion company, and you may not like our kit, but several million other customers are perfectly satisfied with our kit
Soldato
This is what a big corporation looks like with Egg all over its face.
However, I wonder if the damage has been done. Might this end up being HP's "Ratner Moment" with sales permanently damaged.
Man of Honour
This is the issue which no-one wants to address. Desktop printers are sold at cost. Big free-standing printers are different, but if you bought a printer outright for under £1000 then the company producing the printer made no money from the sale. No-one - not Epson, Samsung or anyone - is making a profit purely from making printers. But to survive they have to make a profit somewhere otherwise they will stop making anything - including printers. So they try to make the money from the cartridges. It's called a Walled Garden, and everyone is trying to play as Apple.
This attempt may be rolled back, but it will happen again. It's not the first time and won't be the last. It won't be H-P next time either, but one of the other big players. It will continue to happen unless either a) people are prepared to pay a lot more money for printers which are DRM-free, or b) everyone but H-P goes out of business with the same result. It's basic economics.
Soldato
Err no I think you will find a vast slice of the enterprise absolutely abhor HP, just go to Reddit / Ars / The Register and see for yourself. The problem why they can't move willy nilly is simple, vendor lock in. And this exact smugness from your comment is what has caused you to be overtaken technically by practically every other vendor in the server / storage space. If you did not have the existing user base you would sink like a ship
Case in point. Company I work for has just ditched HP in favour of Dell computers and Ricoh printers.
The new printers are awesome. They just work and no one ever has to order ink or paper, it just knows and orders itself. We never got that with HP. Had them about 8 months now I think.
Can't say on the Dell hardware. It was installed last week and I've been off, not on till Monday.
If printer manufacturers didn't sell 'official' ink at a 300% markup and then have the audacity to install a microchip which limits the number of printed pages meaning that most of said ink goes wasted people wouldn't feel the need to buy unofficial ink.
They need to just stop selling printers for peanuts and then robbing people on ink, everyone knows it's a big scam but it's become an industry norm.
It would be like car manufacturers only allowing petrol from their own personal service stations and charging 3 times more than normal petrol, the only reason it won't work is that people will just boycott their cars... they'd need the whole car industry working in collusion doing the same (which is now the printer industry in a nutshell).
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Soldato
While true, i think that the standards for consumer price and quality have reached a low that making quality printers at fair prices would be seen as unprofitable by the company and expensive by consumers.
Soldato
Its very difficult to put pricing back up once you've got your customers used to low prices. This is why Apple's prices never go down and they remain highly profitable and sustainable but other smartphone manufacturers prices and profits tank.