Comment on [Louis Rossmann] Brother turns heel & becomes anti-consumer printer company

gofsckyourself@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

• tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  Background from me: Basically, a number of printers are sold using a razor-and-blades model The printer is cheap. The ink is expensive. This is done because for a number of products, humans have a bias towards a low up-front cost, don’t weight ongoing costs as much – happens with phone plans that come with an inexpensive phone but make up the money over time by being locked to a service that cost more, for example. So if a manufacturer can put a printer on a shelf that has a lower up-front cost, uses the razor-and-blades model, they get the sales, not the one next to them that has a high up-front cost but lower costs for consumables. Inkjet printers manufacturers had been increasingly-widely doing this for some years, with printers getting cheaper and ink being sold at increasingly-higher prices. Third-party ink manufacturers picked up on this and started selling ink at a much cheaper price. This dicked up the business model that printer manufacturers have, and printer manufacturers fired back by building authentication chips into their ink cartridges and similar.

  For some time, this was pretty much entirely the province of inkjet printers. Getting a laser printer tended to avoid that. Brother is a prominent laser printer manufacturer that made printers that didn’t have restrictions being placed on them, so was often recommended as a way to avoid all this.

  What Rossman’s saying is that Brother has started doing this as well now. He gives some examples of firmware updates being pushed out to Internet-connected laser printers to cause them to stop accepting third-party ink cartridges, as well as some other behavior that he considers anti-consumer. He had previously recommended Brother monotone laser printers as a way to avoid this [I had as well]. He says that he doesn’t know of a type of printer to recommend now.

  He then spent a while being licked by his cat, who he says likes the taste of his skin cream.

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  • krashmo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Am I just jaded about the whole internet or does this read like an AI summary? It feels too specific to be written by a human.

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    • tal@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      If we reach a point where an AI can summarize a video to that degree and provide background summaries, I’d happily use it. I mean, I’d mark it the origin, but nah, this is just me.

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    • kilgore_trout@feddit.it ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Humans are still able to watch a video and understand what is being said in the video

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    • isolatedscotch@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

      Image

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  • catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    He gives some examples of firmware updates being pushed out to Internet-connected Brother printers to cause them to stop accepting third-party ink cartridges

    This is not supported by the references in the linked article. They only talk about the printers refusing to do automatic registration with third-party cartridges.

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