As many techies will probably always say anytime inkjet product shenanigans come up: just buy a laser printer.
And I now add: and don't let it connect to the Internet, and don't install proprietary drivers or software for it on your computers.
Also, remember the names of companies doing sketchy things, and do your part to provide negative feedback when you can, and to give positive feedback to better companies. (Example: I've just moved away from the Apple product ecosystem, because Apple did one too many obnoxious things, and I'll also be pointing friends who ask to alternative solutions.)
> As many techies will probably always say anytime inkjet product shenanigans come up: just buy a laser printer
It's Canon/HP/$MANUFATURER shenanigans - nothing inherent to inkjets. I think the better solution is to buy from more ethical printer companies, like Brother.
Personal story about a sister-in-law that worked for Brother for 5+ years, all her stories made it seem like a employee focused and ethical company.
She got really sick really fast, Brother fired her as suddenly the "position no longe existed", cancelled her health insurance, and - speaking with their lawyers - they knew that she might very well not live to see the end of a civil case trying to reinstate her position/insurance. She did not get to see a day in court, had to fight to get subpar health care for the short duration of the rest of her life.
Just one story, and I'm sure there are many cases where they treated their sick employees better, and there are always two sides of every story, "would have increased the total cost of everyone's insurance" etc... that said no Brother product will enter my abode again.
I almost never comment on anything, but seeing ethical and Brother in the same sentence just got me. Apparently that story is still raw after 4 years.
I had a Xerox laser printer for about 12 years, and it worked pretty well. No special drivers needed, just uses a standard pcl6 or postscript. The problem with it was toner cost. Official toner was stupid expensive, but there was decent aftermarket toner on Amazon that mostly worked.
I have since gone to a smarter printer with an Epson ecotank. Their ink is decent price and it works fairly well. Sadly The model I got requires custom drivers. Though they do have models that support PCL6/ postscript. The model I got also allows for larger paper sizes, but it does not handle it very well in the firmware.
Laser printers, at least in my experience, suck for photos. Not that people print photos any more but if you're using your printer for any kind of small framed photos or crafts than a laser printer really isn't a solution
> Laser printers, at least in my experience, suck for photos.
They do... Though if your use case is only photos, look at a completely different technology.
For a number of years, for printing photos I used an Olympus dyesub printer - it was a P-400. It prints an 8x10 (and you had best use the 8x10... or make 4x 4x5s). The problem was that it cost about $3/page to do that print.
I'm not sure about the current lineups and price points. Looking around, there's a Kodak one for $130 for the printer that appears to be at $0.50/4x6.
Now days, for printing photos - for those that I want printed, I go to smugmug or similar.
When you get down to it, I haven't been pleased by the photo printing quality of any of the other technologies.
I bought the cheapest (Samsung) personal color laser printer I could find, and I would have to say it is, at worst, mediocre for photos. They come out a bit darker than one would like, and some of the colors can sometimes be shifted to a slightly different tint. Very bright/vivid photos generally come out looking great on plain paper... better than inkjet as they don't saturate the paper.
You should look around for current reviews on the quality of photo printing on color lasers, as I'm sure you'll find reasonably priced models which do a very good job.
If you do need the drivers often you can unzip the installer and look for the .INF file. Installing from that will save you from the crappier parts of the software.
Among all the printers in our household the Canon model broke in the least amount of time, only fixable with a spare part which was "coincidentally" the same price as the whole printer. And the official scanning tool was just named "ij utility", which meant it was impossible to find with related search terms.
It was entertaining, but not in a good way.
Honestly I've never been satisfied with any printer, inkjet or laser. I eagerly await the day I just don't need one.
Even Brother is dodgy, depending on the model. I have a low-midrange Brother B&W laser printer that worked great until one day it decided to stop accepting print jobs, both via network and USB… it just stalls at “processing” and never proceeds. Googling around it seems like people with various Brother models have seen this behavior.
We have a bunch of different Kyoceras at the office. The software is buggy as hell, yet they hide their security updates behind a super-expensive support contract with an “authorized” reseller.
Thats criminal in my opinion. Never buy again. Sharp does the same thing for their larger “enterprise” MFPs.
Indeed. I've alwaya found the Canon Pixma Inkjets pretty good because they are basic and print OK and don't muck you about with these kinds of shenanigans. Dispointed.
Re: Printer drivers, you mostly don't need them any more, because almost all printers will now ingest pdf directly. You can bypass cups and your driver and talk directly to the printer using nc:
Most of the budget printers won't support that, they don't have enough processing power to render PDF directly. Even with the typical enterprise printer it's not as reliable as you might expect.
I also don't let it connect to the internet as it has a fixed IP and no gateway.
Also none of this cartridge subscription business and I've always been able to buy the cheap unbranded cartridges on Amazon or Ebay for a fraction of the HP ones that must be made from solid Platinum or something...
New or used, business-class printers are better than any consumer grade printers. The twisted business model of consumer printers guarantees that you'll have a bad time at some point.
> I've just moved away from the Apple product ecosystem, because Apple did one too many obnoxious things, and I'll also be pointing friends who ask to alternative solutions
Good to hear I have more companions on the same boat.
Seconding that. If you mean Apple's scanning of photos for CP when they're not required to by law, that is absurdly anti-customer for sure. But using any Google/Android device other than Lineage, eSolutions, etc is way, way worse. Just so we're on the same page, on Monday or so we were discussing Samsung's keyboard app selling your keyboard presses to third parties, and Samsung is even considered premium.
It's a choice between two evils. Unless you use some de-googled Android and but then you enter another world of pain. The truth is, there's no alternative to Apple or Google and that's the real problem.
Would help if you could be more specific here but aside from hardware (macbook/iPhone) there's alternatives (not just competitive but also plain better ones) to just about every service Apple provides.
Dumb question: How do I stop my wireless HP Printer from connecting to the internet? I have an Asus RT-N16 router and I can't see any settings that will restrict an IP from having WAN access.
The "boomer mom-level consumer" will pay more than $500 over year in replacing dried out ink cartridges and possibly printers (broken due to ink dry-out). And they're better off with a black&white laser printer, with the occasional color job done in a print shop.
> The thing about laser is it's not a great answer for your typical boomer mom-level consumer.
I'm not sure how someone's age matters, but the elderly appreciate "it just works" peripherals just as much as you little whipper-snappers. One of the best things we did for my mom-in-law was replace her ink-jet printer with a laser printer. B&W MFCs start around $200.
For some reason I enabled the ‘auto refill’ on my new canon printer because that is what our office did (somehow).
Don’t do that: it kept making purchases because it didn’t receive the ink as fast as it expected due to supply chain issues. It took a long time for Canon to cancel the orders that had never left the factory and give our hundreds of dollars back.
There's an onion article in there somewhere. Honestly, giving a money grubbing printer a credit card and ordering powers might make a decent analogy to parts of the supply chain issues at large.
Yup. I mean, I've heard HP has some silly "ink as a service" program, but honestly, giving credit card details to a printer? That sounds extremely unwise (and the fact it's even possible says something about the world we live in, and not nice things).
Realistically, it's highly unlikely that the device itself received and is storing the CC details. Most likely the device pings Canons servers when ordering should be done, and then the backend servers handles the actual order and payment.
But, never say never, it wouldn't even be the worst thing i've seen in the IoT world.
Last month, my friend's HP Laserjet Pro printer started flashing "SUPPLY PROBLEM" error message and wouldn't print anything. Apparently, all he did was update the firmware after a message popped up on the printer urging him to do so.
Well, that firmware update included new DRM checks for non-HP toners. The printer would just refuse to work with 3rd party toner cartridges.
I had to help him and had to find an old firmware and downgrade to an older one which didn't contain the DRM. The firmware didn't come from HP's website because they deleted all old versions so I downloaded the version off someone's Google Drive. Who knows if that FW contains something malicious. Also, I had to install Windows because old firmware update is a Windows program. You're SOL if you use macOS or Linux.
This incident didn't make my friend go and buy $200+ worth of original toners like HP intended. All it did was make him anxious of updating anything and of using HP products and has wasted a lot of his and my time. He said he won't buy another HP printer again.
If you want to learn more, search for "HP supply problem" with your fav search engine. Or see this link on HP support forums [1]. And don't update your printer's firmware if it's working fine... because who knows when they'll disable FW downgrade option and you'll be stuck with a DRMed printer.
Edit: Just in case you found this comment through a search engine or this has affected you, I recommend downloading FW from this page [2]. It also has a list of affected HP Color LaserJet Pro printers (there's quite a few models.. the page lists 11 models). That blog also has a full saga of HP's shenanigans and their attempts to block aftermarket cartridges [3].
Why aren't companies being found criminally negligent with the CFAA when they force poison-pill "upgrades" that remove stated features from the original device?
How is this functionally different than the crypt-ransomware we see in the news?
Someone should start an ethical product company that does not take on investors so they cannot lose control and have s** like this happen. It seems like there are a lot of opportunities in the printer and tractor worlds.
Brother sells overpriced refills but there are off brand replacements about half the price. They also report ink run out on starter cartridges when it hasn’t. I think the only ethical printers are 3D ones.
I have a Brother MFC that has been working for ~10 years now. No problems using third party toner.
One thing I did notice, though, is that it will start complaining and bugging you about replacing the toner before it actually runs out. There's a well-known way to reset that check, though, allowing you to print until it actually runs out.
> Brothers LaserJet. No malware, no adware, no funky drivers; just colored, WiFi, LP-protocol, multi-tray PCL and PS support.
This is all true, but it seems lasers have had their day for the occasional use printer. We have an Epson EcoTank, and all manufacturers have equivalents. The hardware has been absolutely flawless - 12k pages of ink in the box, not a single jam after 10k pages, ink is something like $20 for 10k pages and child could refill the think without making a mess. They make you pay for the privilege of not nickel and diming you after buying it by charging at least $200 more upfront, but I'd take that any day.
But, for Epson at least, the simplicity of pcl6 / ps isn't there. You have to use their drivers, which often only exist for Windows. That shouldn't happen because they support "driverless printing", which is really just another printing format that supplants pcl6 / ps. They all support "driverless printing" because they need to check the "print from mobile" tick box, and they can only get it by supporting this new format.
In theory, this should be great for open source because this new format started life as the internal format used by CUPS called "CUPS Raster" [0]. It was then taken up by some mob called the "Printer Working Group", made more device independent, and renamed "PWG Raster", which CUPS supports. In practice, so far, I've never had the joy of seeing a driverless printer to work with CUPS - despite the fact that phones do work with the printers. It needs more time in the oven, I guess.
Mindboggling. Here we are, after 30 years of trying to come up with standard way of doing the apparently simple job of telling a printer how to put ink on paper, and we still need more time in the oven. Unbelievable.
Brother printers, from my experience, will just work automatically -- depending on your distro. If you need drivers, they do have a Linux installer as well. I've used the installer before and definitely not even a fraction as scummy as Canon/HP driver installs.
My printer works on a framework laptop with Fedora 35 with absolutely no configuration, or any installations of any kind (beyond having connected to the wifi).
Ironically, my windows desktop won’t print to it though. It just reports an opaque error sending to the print queue with no diagnostic information. No idea if it’s a windows problem or a printer problem, because I just use my linux laptop to print with no issues, so I haven’t bothered to resolve the windows printing issues.
I had trouble geting a dirt cheap Brother running with CUPS and FreeBSD. Their official Linux PPD did some funky ghostscript+custom scripts thing that didn't translate to FreeBSD. I got it working with a OpenPrinting PPD instead.
TBH this… Not one of these consumer printer businesses is going to survive commoditization of their now-primary source of consumer revenue - ink (the printer is just a loss-leading on-ramp to that business). These suicide-pills are the last gasps of a dying business model. Businesses don’t tolerate such shenanigans, but you and I will pay the price for doing so.
To me it is a reminder that all cornerstones of society are entangled in this battle for rights and freedoms, others include
Sideloading on iOS, alternative app stores etc
Farmers getting access to diagnostics for their tractors
Not having to buy subscription-ink (looking at HP here...)
Standardized charging systems (USB-C) over proprietary cables like Lightning.
Amazon fighting the definition of a library - they mostly stock books and have a weaker digital loaning system, Amazon has a vested interest here.
I'm not sure why - as a global species - there's not more effort to tighten up the rules in this regard. We know business are user-hostile when considering greater profits and we see this daily, yet only now does the EU consider, in another 3 years, that a single cable might be a good idea to reduce waste.
We really need more open access to the hardware and software of products on the market, and certain behaviors should not just be illegal, but require a maximum month-long turnaround to producing a commit that fixes the problem or face automatic daily fines until it is fixed and rolled out to all customers.
Seriously, I suspect this could be fixed by most people on this forum very quickly.
> I'm not sure why - as a global species - there's not more effort to tighten up the rules in this regard.
Lobbying. These industries are worth billions of dollars. They can afford lobbyists who will go to politicians and influence the law making process. They essentially buy the laws that they want. Copyright duration is essentially infinite now thanks to these guys. Also illegal to reverse engineer thanks to these guys.
Billion dollar corporations protecting their own interests at the expense of the public's interests. Such a nice democracy we live under.
Not just now - EU has pushed for a common phone charger previously and most manufacturers went with Micro-USB at the time, except Apple. Now, EU is just pushing that further with less loopholes.
As for the time between adoption and enforcement - there has to be reasonable time given between for everybody to adjust to the new regulation.
This is actually about software more than hardware.
Richard Stallman's spark for founding the free software movement was being unable to modify his lab printer's source code to do what he wanted it to do.
A lot of us have been conditioned to think you "just can't" modify things like firmware, or OSes, (or increasingly in phones/tablets, user-space). But for Stallman's generation, hardware devices were 100% owned, repairable and hackable by their owners. Only software and the abuse of it could so comprehensively change a hardware device from something you obviously own, to something which in a real sense you don't control or even realistically own anymore. Apple is leading the charge in this as other companies itch to pile in.
You're late to that particular party. This has been a trend that started somewhere in the mid-90's and it's getting worse every day.
Every manufacturer the world over is right now wondering how they can turn their one-time sales into a recurring revenue stream.
Case in point: the Bosch e-bikes now offer a 'Bosch account' to supposedly access premium features on the bikes which in a sane world would be included in the purchase price and which really do not require an online account or service to begin with.
It's not just a feeling. You really don't own or control the hardware. It's controlled by the proprietary firmware running in the computer embedded in it. This firmware controlled by the corporation. It will prevent you from doing anything that harms their business interests.
So this morning I noticed that the LEDs were on on the computer I built even after I shut it down. That's how it works by default, but I didn't like it, so changed the setting in the BIOS. I have to think that something reset back to the defaults, and I'm guessing Windows 10? I built it so I know it, but I guess I still don't own it. And don't get me started on how Windows 10 never goes to sleep like it should.
Maybe I'm curmudgeonly, but I'm tired of things I choose being changed on me, things I own be used to profit on me, things I use to spy on me. And its not just software and hardware. For example, I bank at X, but they've merged with another bank and are becoming Y. So now different website, different checks, different name, etc. and for what? for a line on some CEOs resume. Similar when I make a loan and the loan is sold to someone else, and my payment processing routine has to change to accommodate someone else's profit-making deal.
have you tried fixing your i-devices? I would not call it complete control if seemingly unrelated parts stop working after replacing some part yourself
I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but when can we get some momentum behind repealing or ruling unconstitutional anti-subversion laws from the DMCA? It would be nice if this sort of thing goes to court and starts to challenge that law, but I don't think that's a likely outcome here, since the nominal case is about fraudulent advertising and no subversion attempt was really made. But it's exactly the kind of problem that the law creates and perpetuates indefinitely. It's been barely over 20 years and exploiting them has become the business model of giant swaths of our economy. The harm done to innovation, consumers, and probably honestly the productivity of the US as a whole has so massively dwarfed that of even the most pessimistic models of "piracy" and has reshaped our way of life for a generation. It's a bad law and it needs to die
I personally believe that we need far better consumer protection laws in the U.S., in general.
I'm certain that laws attempting to curb specific abuses such as with these printers will be like playing whack-a-mole, but perhaps after enough moles get whacked hard enough, the culture might start to change course. One can wish anyway.
They're the same guts as HP printers and it'd be easier to interface to one of those with a Jetdirect Ethernet card. Anything built before Fiorina tanked the company will be reliable. The later models will also have faster warm up times for the fuser.
Readit News
And I now add: and don't let it connect to the Internet, and don't install proprietary drivers or software for it on your computers.
Also, remember the names of companies doing sketchy things, and do your part to provide negative feedback when you can, and to give positive feedback to better companies. (Example: I've just moved away from the Apple product ecosystem, because Apple did one too many obnoxious things, and I'll also be pointing friends who ask to alternative solutions.)
It's Canon/HP/$MANUFATURER shenanigans - nothing inherent to inkjets. I think the better solution is to buy from more ethical printer companies, like Brother.
She got really sick really fast, Brother fired her as suddenly the "position no longe existed", cancelled her health insurance, and - speaking with their lawyers - they knew that she might very well not live to see the end of a civil case trying to reinstate her position/insurance. She did not get to see a day in court, had to fight to get subpar health care for the short duration of the rest of her life.
Just one story, and I'm sure there are many cases where they treated their sick employees better, and there are always two sides of every story, "would have increased the total cost of everyone's insurance" etc... that said no Brother product will enter my abode again.
I almost never comment on anything, but seeing ethical and Brother in the same sentence just got me. Apparently that story is still raw after 4 years.
I have since gone to a smarter printer with an Epson ecotank. Their ink is decent price and it works fairly well. Sadly The model I got requires custom drivers. Though they do have models that support PCL6/ postscript. The model I got also allows for larger paper sizes, but it does not handle it very well in the firmware.
They do... Though if your use case is only photos, look at a completely different technology.
For a number of years, for printing photos I used an Olympus dyesub printer - it was a P-400. It prints an 8x10 (and you had best use the 8x10... or make 4x 4x5s). The problem was that it cost about $3/page to do that print.
I'm not sure about the current lineups and price points. Looking around, there's a Kodak one for $130 for the printer that appears to be at $0.50/4x6.
Now days, for printing photos - for those that I want printed, I go to smugmug or similar.
When you get down to it, I haven't been pleased by the photo printing quality of any of the other technologies.
if you want a decent photo print that won't deteriorate, projection onto real silver or archival color process is the way to go.
You should look around for current reviews on the quality of photo printing on color lasers, as I'm sure you'll find reasonably priced models which do a very good job.
If you do need the drivers often you can unzip the installer and look for the .INF file. Installing from that will save you from the crappier parts of the software.
It was entertaining, but not in a good way.
Honestly I've never been satisfied with any printer, inkjet or laser. I eagerly await the day I just don't need one.
Thats criminal in my opinion. Never buy again. Sharp does the same thing for their larger “enterprise” MFPs.
cat myfile.pdf |nc printername 9100
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28058184
They've always worked for me.
I also don't let it connect to the internet as it has a fixed IP and no gateway.
Also none of this cartridge subscription business and I've always been able to buy the cheap unbranded cartridges on Amazon or Ebay for a fraction of the HP ones that must be made from solid Platinum or something...
Good to hear I have more companions on the same boat.
I'm not sure how someone's age matters, but the elderly appreciate "it just works" peripherals just as much as you little whipper-snappers. One of the best things we did for my mom-in-law was replace her ink-jet printer with a laser printer. B&W MFCs start around $200.
Don’t do that: it kept making purchases because it didn’t receive the ink as fast as it expected due to supply chain issues. It took a long time for Canon to cancel the orders that had never left the factory and give our hundreds of dollars back.
It’s a fun story at least!
But, never say never, it wouldn't even be the worst thing i've seen in the IoT world.
Well, that firmware update included new DRM checks for non-HP toners. The printer would just refuse to work with 3rd party toner cartridges.
I had to help him and had to find an old firmware and downgrade to an older one which didn't contain the DRM. The firmware didn't come from HP's website because they deleted all old versions so I downloaded the version off someone's Google Drive. Who knows if that FW contains something malicious. Also, I had to install Windows because old firmware update is a Windows program. You're SOL if you use macOS or Linux.
This incident didn't make my friend go and buy $200+ worth of original toners like HP intended. All it did was make him anxious of updating anything and of using HP products and has wasted a lot of his and my time. He said he won't buy another HP printer again.
If you want to learn more, search for "HP supply problem" with your fav search engine. Or see this link on HP support forums [1]. And don't update your printer's firmware if it's working fine... because who knows when they'll disable FW downgrade option and you'll be stuck with a DRMed printer.
Edit: Just in case you found this comment through a search engine or this has affected you, I recommend downloading FW from this page [2]. It also has a list of affected HP Color LaserJet Pro printers (there's quite a few models.. the page lists 11 models). That blog also has a full saga of HP's shenanigans and their attempts to block aftermarket cartridges [3].
[1] https://h30434.www3.hp.com/t5/Printing-Errors-or-Lights-Stuc...
[2] https://borncity.com/win/2021/02/02/firmware-downgrade-for-h...
[3] https://borncity.com/win/2020/11/08/hp-firmware-update-for-i...
Why aren't companies being found criminally negligent with the CFAA when they force poison-pill "upgrades" that remove stated features from the original device?
How is this functionally different than the crypt-ransomware we see in the news?
No malware, no adware, no funky drivers; just colored, WiFi, LP-protocol, multi-tray PCL and PS support.
Best thing since sliced bread.
They only tend to be a bit picky about the WiFi networks, so better to use with a cable.
Vigorously shaking the cartridge might also help sometimes.
And regarding starter cartridges, you might need a reset gear: https://cartridgeamerica.com/ctg/brother-toner-chips.php
One thing I did notice, though, is that it will start complaining and bugging you about replacing the toner before it actually runs out. There's a well-known way to reset that check, though, allowing you to print until it actually runs out.
This is all true, but it seems lasers have had their day for the occasional use printer. We have an Epson EcoTank, and all manufacturers have equivalents. The hardware has been absolutely flawless - 12k pages of ink in the box, not a single jam after 10k pages, ink is something like $20 for 10k pages and child could refill the think without making a mess. They make you pay for the privilege of not nickel and diming you after buying it by charging at least $200 more upfront, but I'd take that any day.
But, for Epson at least, the simplicity of pcl6 / ps isn't there. You have to use their drivers, which often only exist for Windows. That shouldn't happen because they support "driverless printing", which is really just another printing format that supplants pcl6 / ps. They all support "driverless printing" because they need to check the "print from mobile" tick box, and they can only get it by supporting this new format.
In theory, this should be great for open source because this new format started life as the internal format used by CUPS called "CUPS Raster" [0]. It was then taken up by some mob called the "Printer Working Group", made more device independent, and renamed "PWG Raster", which CUPS supports. In practice, so far, I've never had the joy of seeing a driverless printer to work with CUPS - despite the fact that phones do work with the printers. It needs more time in the oven, I guess.
Mindboggling. Here we are, after 30 years of trying to come up with standard way of doing the apparently simple job of telling a printer how to put ink on paper, and we still need more time in the oven. Unbelievable.
[0] https://www.cups.org/doc/api-raster.html
Even on Linux?
Ironically, my windows desktop won’t print to it though. It just reports an opaque error sending to the print queue with no diagnostic information. No idea if it’s a windows problem or a printer problem, because I just use my linux laptop to print with no issues, so I haven’t bothered to resolve the windows printing issues.
Deleted Comment
Sideloading on iOS, alternative app stores etc
Farmers getting access to diagnostics for their tractors
Not having to buy subscription-ink (looking at HP here...)
Standardized charging systems (USB-C) over proprietary cables like Lightning.
Amazon fighting the definition of a library - they mostly stock books and have a weaker digital loaning system, Amazon has a vested interest here.
I'm not sure why - as a global species - there's not more effort to tighten up the rules in this regard. We know business are user-hostile when considering greater profits and we see this daily, yet only now does the EU consider, in another 3 years, that a single cable might be a good idea to reduce waste.
We really need more open access to the hardware and software of products on the market, and certain behaviors should not just be illegal, but require a maximum month-long turnaround to producing a commit that fixes the problem or face automatic daily fines until it is fixed and rolled out to all customers.
Seriously, I suspect this could be fixed by most people on this forum very quickly.
Lobbying. These industries are worth billions of dollars. They can afford lobbyists who will go to politicians and influence the law making process. They essentially buy the laws that they want. Copyright duration is essentially infinite now thanks to these guys. Also illegal to reverse engineer thanks to these guys.
Billion dollar corporations protecting their own interests at the expense of the public's interests. Such a nice democracy we live under.
As for the time between adoption and enforcement - there has to be reasonable time given between for everybody to adjust to the new regulation.
A lot of us have been conditioned to think you "just can't" modify things like firmware, or OSes, (or increasingly in phones/tablets, user-space). But for Stallman's generation, hardware devices were 100% owned, repairable and hackable by their owners. Only software and the abuse of it could so comprehensively change a hardware device from something you obviously own, to something which in a real sense you don't control or even realistically own anymore. Apple is leading the charge in this as other companies itch to pile in.
Every manufacturer the world over is right now wondering how they can turn their one-time sales into a recurring revenue stream.
Case in point: the Bosch e-bikes now offer a 'Bosch account' to supposedly access premium features on the bikes which in a sane world would be included in the purchase price and which really do not require an online account or service to begin with.
Maybe I'm curmudgeonly, but I'm tired of things I choose being changed on me, things I own be used to profit on me, things I use to spy on me. And its not just software and hardware. For example, I bank at X, but they've merged with another bank and are becoming Y. So now different website, different checks, different name, etc. and for what? for a line on some CEOs resume. Similar when I make a loan and the loan is sold to someone else, and my payment processing routine has to change to accommodate someone else's profit-making deal.
I'm certain that laws attempting to curb specific abuses such as with these printers will be like playing whack-a-mole, but perhaps after enough moles get whacked hard enough, the culture might start to change course. One can wish anyway.
Back then companies were still short sighted enough¹ to build them to last.
It's an Apple Laserwiter 12/640PS.
It's still chugging along today, with 64Mb of memory no less!
[1]: Recurring revenue wise that is.