Voting with your wallet is also a good thing to do, but if you expect to send some signal to a company that way to imply that they should change their behaviour, you have to realize that you're communicating over a very noisy channel. All they'll notice -- if they notice -- is that sales have decreased, and they won't know the reason.

EG. you: "I hate smart TVs! I'll keep my old dumb TV!" --> them: "Our smart TVs aren't doing well, maybe we should make them smarter?"

Hand wringing has a good chance of at least delivering your message.

That's where entrepreneurs and innovators come in - it's literally the whole idea of industry disruption.

That's an even noisier channel! It has its place, but don't expect it to solve all such problems. Unless they're disgruntled HP employees, they don't even have access to the declining sales figures, just their own frustration with printers to motivate a story for investors. And most people who have the know-how to launch a new printer company know that they'll get a better return on their time by doing something else.

Lastly, "barriers to entry" are real things. It's not impossible to overcome them (eg. SpaceX) but you need to make an exceptional case to try.

How many people do you know who buy their office equipment off of Kickstarter? Or do you want to try pitching a VC on outcompeting Samsung at flat-panel televisions, and see what they tell you?

Businesses also track competitor sales, and love to copy what successful competitors are doing, so it does show up.

What capitalists seem to love more is buying the good business and making it crap too so one has no choice but to buy a product that will break sooner.

When the business model changes after you buy the printer, how are you supposed to know about it?

Instead of calling it "hand wringing" think of it as "educating potential buyers of HP's past abuses so they don't make the mistake of buying one"

Look, I'm not against going after HP for loss of use as here, and I'm all for the end users hacking the hardware they purchased to suit their desires, but where a lot of these activist groups loose me is when they try to force their ideas of how these business relationships should be structured upon everyone else.

And at the end of the day there is a reason why brands and trademarks exist. The reputation of a business has value.

Caveat emptor.

It's not complaints about how their business relationships should be structured. It's complaints about how the business relationships are structured and then changed out from underneath the consumer.

And at the end of the day there is a reason why articles like this exist. To destroy the reputation of businesses that do this.

Also, don't be foolish enough to buy a printer from a company that'll be sold to HP within the next 15-20 years.

People shouldn't be buying inkjet printers unless they're printing photos all the time. Laser printers are simply unbeatable for occasional document printing because toner never dries out and the printer never clogs.

If you want to get the most out of an inkjet printer, the best thing to do with it is to load fresh cartridges into the printer and then print continuously until it runs out. Leaving it sit around with partial ink cartridges causes the printer to repeatedly waste ink on cleaning cycles in order to prevent the nozzles from clogging up with dried out ink.

Personally, I think inkjet printers are really only viable for people who do volume photo and other graphics printing, as you would in a commercial printing business.

I'm I've had a couple relatively cheap Canon's in the last 10 years hooked up tp my ac at home, and I've found them generally reliable

I'm going to push back a little regarding Epson, although I'm hoping someone with direct experience will reply with useful feedback.

The 'ultra-high capacity' black ink bottle (T542) used by many of these printers is only 127ml. Further, from the user guide it appears that Epson recommends using the entire bottle to refill the printer (truthfully, I have not been able to find specs on the actual ink capacity of any of the ecotank or supertank printers) and does not recommend storing the bottle after having been opened. This doesn't really seem like bulk ink to me.

Yeah I bought one of the first gen Ecotanks for a college clubs when it came out. IIRC the bottles and the reservoirs come in two sizes, the normal ones and the double sized ones like the T542. One bottle is enough to refill up to the line so the use case is just to refill when the tank is almost empty.

So I don't think we ran into this because someone ended up breaking it a few years later but looks like it still has some counter bullshit for the waste ink pad but it looks like you can work around that fairly easily.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDi4YdzXkD8

Also newer ecotanks have user replaceable waste ink waste pad boxes for $10 now.

Except HP scammed its customers by promising free ink for life and delivering $0.99/month ink until the next price increase. It's hard to vote with your wallet if companies make false promises.

People can vote with their dollars, but we could also have laws protecting customers from powerful companies blatantly defrauding people. This “just vote with your dollars” hand waving of an increasing anti-consumer situation strikes me as naïve. Voting with your dollar doesn’t really work for corporations doing 10s of billions of dollars of sales through 50 different subsidiary companies, in 80 different countries.

Open discourse is an important part of voting.

Brother and Epsom are more expensive though.

Turns out quality actually isn't free.