@da_667 I have a whole rant about this but TL;DR the printer industry fucked itself over by ruining consumer price expectations on the hardware during that myopic post-innovation period where they all raced to the bottom on loss-leader printers in the hopes of generating a captive market for consumables, and now they're broadly unprofitable unless they shave every last penny from their product development processes.

@da_667 the suits at the top will always try to chase the continuous revenue streams over actual printer sales because the theoretical profit margins are colossal. ink is so cheap to produce that it's functionally free (~all the costs are in logistics and staff) so they easily make 10000% margins per cartridge sold.

of course it's a pipe dream because the market is saturated with third party ink sellers who will always offer a superior product at a lower price, and consumers generally know it.

@da_667 yup. I worked for an ink cartridge recycling company for a bit. thing is, it doesn't last long. for any of the major printer brands the one-off cost to pay an RE team to find a bypass is roughly a month's profit for a mid-sized ink recycler, so it's always worth the capital investment.

@da_667 Brother cottoned on to this for a while, and figured out that they could market to customers' eco-friendly sentiments, and started offering new product designs like refillable ink hoppers. but ultimately the structure of these companies will always cause them to revert to chasing unattainable ROI through continuous revenue streams, leading to crashing customer confidence and slumping profits, in a never-ending cycle.

@da_667 it's an interesting market. I don't know the complete ins and outs of the business operations in China doing the RE, but I got the feeling that it's the same folks who are contracting for Eastern-market IC clone manufacturers. it's cheaper than you'd expect because they're really really fast at it.

@da_667
I think many win11 print drivers don't use spoolss any more, fyi.

@da_667 and honestly, I'm *so* glad that the economics of it works out, because printer manufacturers are genuinely evil.

I won't get into the full details of it because every time I do I spend the rest of the day super pissed off, but they're anti-consumer, they cut corners on worker safety all over the place, they get away with literal murder when it comes to ecological damage around their factories, and all just to extort money from people on a product that is neither costly nor special.

@da_667 ink is just a suspension of super tiny pigment nanoparticles so you can imagine what happens when that shit gets on people or gets dumped into the nearby environment (e.g. groundwater)

@da_667
No, ms is replacing it with something that runs as a user and wasn't written in 1987. Print drivers are still stupid.

@da_667 Nothing we have done to replace manual processes with stupid electrified sand has improved matters over the long-term.

@da_667 you know, i literally had the same bullshit also on windows 11 the other day: https://mastodon.social/@Viss/115096028687089744

@Viss
Listen guys Windows 11 is awesome I love it blinks coordinates in morse code
@da_667

@cR0w
I didn't know... my god... I am so sorry for your loss
@Viss @da_667

@da_667 @Viss Evergreen: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers

@da_667 @0xamit im surprised nobody had jailbroken printer firmware

@cR0w @chillybot @da_667

@Viss @da_667 at one point I was paid to do that.

@da_667 I agree. sadly we'll need to build up our tolerance for it, because win 10 is gonna lose support fairly soon.

@da_667

1. avoid HP printers like plague
2. if you have a HP printer, use the universal driver if your printer supports PCL6 or PostScript, it'll avoid a ton of problems

@da_667 never heard of them. I usually just do get, post put, get. Mostly to get MVP out the door lol.