Framework printer.
Make it happen.
[Louis Rossmann] Brother turns heel & becomes anti-consumer printer company
Submitted 21 hours ago by hal_5700X@sh.itjust.works to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
CriticalMiss@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
isolatedscotch@discuss.tchncs.de 6 hours ago
dude I would pay gold for that
turmacar@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Not saying they couldn’t/shouldn’t but printers are a nightmare hellscape and it’s a miracle, mostly of HP’s marketing department, that they’re a household object.
fishy@lemmy.today 4 hours ago
Back before everyone had maps on their phone, printing MapQuest maps was fantastic. This was the early 00’s though and we all had money to burn still.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Brother sucks now!?
Truly, this is the canary in the coal mine moment.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 6 hours ago
It’s just capitalism. Don’t make it more then what it is.
ivanafterall@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I don’t think I’m making it more than it is. Just can’t believe the God-damned Russians got to Brother, too.
drmoose@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
It’s funny how far ahead 3d printers are in terms of consumer experience, everything is open, everything works and the tech is like 300 times more complex.
2D printer companies should be shamed to death.
TheGrandNagus@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Over time as 3D printers go from tinkerer’s toy to household staple, I’d expect them to become more locked down and anti-consumer.
CandleTiger@programming.dev 13 hours ago
Bambu is working on it already — can’t print unless you’re connected to the internet and send your files through their server, can’t connect to the printer with other slicers besides their slicer.
They had to walk that back some; there is now a “developer mode” where old standard functionality is still exposed, but they’re clearly working as hard as they can to turn it shitty.
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
By my count, it’s been tried twice.
echodot@feddit.uk 14 hours ago
They would have to become sci-fi level capable before they would be considered household staple items.
paf@jlai.lu 15 hours ago
This is mainly because consumer 3d printer have been developped by 3d printing enthusiast first and not a company, Prusa which was leader for some time used a lot of open sources project to build their printers. As it’s getting mainstream as time goes by more and more companies shows up with closed sources project sadly.
xnx@slrpnk.net 14 hours ago
Isn’t prusa now doing anti consumer / closed source stuff?
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 6 hours ago
3d print a 2d printer shell and sell the internals separately?
superkret@feddit.org 10 hours ago
2D printers used to be like this.
They all worked with open, universal drivers, no additional software, and any ink cartridge that fit inside the bay.
But then companies figured out that people will just buy the cheapest printer on offer, regardless of everything else.tal@lemmy.today 2 hours ago
I think that if one wants to change this, it probably involves some kind of regulation that affects how people shop, or at least a shift in social norms, so that some kind of metric of over-time cost is prominently featured next to the up-front price on goods.
We’ve seen shifts like that before.
There was a point in time where it was normal, in the United States, to haggle over the prices of goods. It really wasn’t all that long ago. Today, that virtually doesn’t exist at all, except for over a very few big-ticket items, like cars and houses.
The change started when some people…I think Quakers…decided to start selling their goods with a no-haggle policy. NPR Planet Money did an episode on it some time back…lemme see if I can go dig it up.
Yeah, here we are:
www.npr.org/transcripts/415287577
:::spoiler Relevant snippet
Episode 633: The Birth And Death Of The Price Tag
JIANG: The whole world I’ve known is in this price-tag world. Everything has a price, one price.
GOLDSTEIN: But when you take the long view of the historical world, this price-tag world is like a bizarre aberration. You know, for almost all of the history of human commerce - for thousands of years - you walk into a store, and you point to something. And you say, how much does that cost? The guy at the store is going to say, how much you got? You know, everything was a negotiation. And there were good reasons the world was this way.
JIANG: Say I have a store and - I don’t know - I’m selling eggs. And a guy walks in, and he looks like he has all day to haggle. And he’s really been scouting out the best place to buy eggs. So I sell him a dozen eggs for a buck 50.
GOLDSTEIN: So then, a few minutes later, somebody else comes in. This guy’s wearing fancy shoes, clearly does not have a lot of time to haggle. So you sell him eggs for twice as much. You sell him eggs for 3 bucks.
JIANG: Each customer pays what they think is a fair price. I make a profit. We all win.
GOLDSTEIN: This was just the way things were, and almost everybody accepted it, everybody except this one religious group, the Quakers. Robert Phillips, the consultant we talked about the Coke thing, he said the Quakers did this really fringy, radical thing.
PHILLIPS: They would have a fixed price. The Quaker would - the merchant would say what the price is, and that price would be the same for everybody.
GOLDSTEIN: That’s it. Having one price for each item, that was the Quakers’ radical thing. They thought haggling was just fundamentally unfair. They thought charging different people different prices for the same thing was morally wrong.
JIANG: You can imagine walking into a store and pointing to a dozen eggs and getting all fired up to do an egg haggle.
GOLDSTEIN: Let’s go. Let’s do this.
JIANG: And then your friend, like, kind of elbows you and says, no, no, this is a Quaker store.
GOLDSTEIN: No haggling. No haggling here.
JIANG: What are you doing?
GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, the Quakers were definitely, definitely in a real minority with this no-haggle thing.
JIANG: But as the modern economy got going in the 1800s and businesses starting getting bigger and bigger, haggle worlds got to be a hassle.
GOLDSTEIN: You know, if you are running a store, if you’re working at a store, you need to know a lot to haggle. You need to know how much you paid for the stuff, how much your competitors are selling it for. You need to know how much different customers are willing to pay. Robert Phillips says you couldn’t just hire some kid on summer vacation to come and sell stuff at your store.
PHILLIPS: Clerks usually had long apprenticeships before they could actually be allowed behind the counter. So they had to spend a couple of years learning the business.
GOLDSTEIN: Years?
PHILLIPS: Yeah, typically. Learning how to haggle before you would let them be left alone.
JIANG: Haggling is a pain for customers, too. Imagine you’re at some store and there are five people in front of you in line. And you have to wait for them to all go through that haggling process before you can buy your shirts or whatever.
GOLDSTEIN: So finally around 1870, a few people decided to take a big risk. They decided to break with haggle world. They invented the price tag, this actual piece of paper stuck on each thing that tells you the price - not some starting offer subject to negotiation, but the price. And inventing the price tag was not just about fairness or what was morally right; it was about building really big stores.
PHILLIPS: Two stores here in New York, Macy’s. And Macy was a Quaker. And he featured fixed prices. The most famous one was Wanamaker’s in Philadelphia.
JIANG: Wanamaker and Macy’s, they’re building these new things, these department stores. And they’re trying to hire all of these clerks, but they don’t want to train them for years and have them become master hagglers. So the price tag solves this problem. It makes it easy for them to hire the clerks.
PHILLIPS: All they had to do was be essentially what clerks are today, you know, knowledgeable about the fabric. Oh, madam, this would look wonderful on you. They didn’t have to do pricing. They didn’t have to haggle. They didn’t have to know the cost of items.
JIANG: Wanamaker becomes this kind of evangelist for the price tag. He says, look, the price tag, it means you, the customer, you don’t have to arm wrestle with the clerk anymore when you buy things.
PHILLIPS: There’s no longer a war between the seller and the buyer, which is what he called the higgling and the haggling. Everyone can come into Wanamaker’s and know they will be treated the same.
JIANG: Customers loved it. The price tag spread. It was everywhere.
:::
That wasn’t driven by regulation, but by consumer preference. Consumers (usually, outside maybe upscale restaurants) demand to see the up-front cost of something they buy before buying it. So it’s possible that if costs keep shifting from the up-front cost that we can readily see at the time of purchase into over-time costs that we cannot as readily see, we might see consumers just refuse to buy items from retailers that don’t also show some kind of a reasonable over-time cost also visible.
Or maybe the government could require some level of disclosure of over-time costs to be shown when selling an item, they way they standardized display of credit card interest rates.
Ulrich@feddit.org 6 hours ago
They’re actually behind. 3D printers are a much newer industry. Most industries start out super open, competitive and collaborative. This speeds up development to consumer-grade products. Eventually one or two companies gain sufficient marketshare to start enforcing anti-consumer shitfuckery. Look at the recent drama with Bambu printers and you’ll find that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s a tale as old as time.
drmoose@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Enshitification is the word of this century
JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 14 hours ago
Don’t worry. Companies like Bambu and others are trying to lock down shift their printer business in the style of 2d printer companies. I hope it at least happens very slowly, but the enshittification is happening…
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 5 hours ago
It’s not that hard to convert a cheap 3D printer into a pen plotter is you want to do some 2D printing.
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
Has anyone figured out how to 3d print a 2d printer yet?
frezik@midwest.social 6 hours ago
There are some projects out there that do the entire frame. Steppers, hotend, and control boards are out of reach. There’s some hypothetical ways you could do it, but it’d be far more expensive than buying off the shelf stuff and probably get worse results. Even the frames tend to take a lot of filament.
It’s more of a nice idea than something practical.
echodot@feddit.uk 14 hours ago
There is a piece of software which will take a word document and convert it into an embossed 3D print file. So you could always just skip the middleman and 3D print yourself a plaque version of your document instead.
AdrianTheFrog@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
Idk if the tech for 3d printers is really more complex. All of the parts are readily available, basically nothing needs to be specially made except the hot end (one single metal part)
The consumer experience for 2d printers worse IMO but that’s probably because I’m stuck on Windows with its terrible printing system
Dirk@lemmy.ml 14 hours ago
Except those who aren’t.
Deceptichum@quokk.au 20 hours ago
Damn, Brother was the only company left I was happy to blind purchase from by name alone.
nyandere@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
Brother’s been anti-consumer for at least 5 years now. Not sure why people are just learning about it now.
Brother blocking 3rd party toner was the primary reason why I went with Canon back in 2020.
AA5B@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I rarely use a printer now that my kids are in college. When it dies, I had a choice between laser printer, Brother inkjet, or none. “None” is now my first choice
kent_eh@lemmy.ca 5 hours ago
That’s what we did.
For the few pages we need to print, I can use the machine at the library for $0.10/page.
MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
Now i had to put on the in-ears, hook up to phone to… listen to a guy talking.
Xanza@lemm.ee 14 hours ago
Do we really need to crowd fund a FOSS printer? Really?
PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
You sctuallly can’t sell third-party printers legally, because all printers will include an ink fingerprint which can be traced back to that specific printer. So if someone prints a ransom note, the FBI will be knocking on their door by the end of the day.
There’s literally a certification process to be allowed to sell printers, and one of the biggest criteria for that certification is agreeing to maintain that fingerprint database. The issue is that this certification process also ensures there’s a de facto near monopoly on printers, which leads to BS like HP making it increasingly difficult to use affordable ink. They can be blatantly anti-consumer, because they’re protected from any competition.
There’s a reason HP hasn’t already been priced out by some cheap Chinese competitor who is able to undercut the competition. And it’s not because of the difficulty in manufacturing or the price of components. It’s because no other companies are allowed to sell printers.
e8d79@discuss.tchncs.de 12 hours ago
You make it sound like a huge conspiracy but there are laws and regulations around everything you try to sell, especially for electronics.
You also have to do EMF radiation testing, ensure that your printer doesn’t produce toxic aerosols or fumes, and probably a bunch of other things to prove that your product is safe. I don’t see why the fingerprinting isn’t just another thing on the list of things you have to do to be in compliance with the rules. If your company is capable of producing something as complex as a printer, encoding the device’ serial number into a bunch of yellow microdots that you add to the printout shouldn’t be an issue.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 10 hours ago
Inside the US, sure. That just means you don’t get the cool FOSS printer.
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
You actually can’t sell third-party printers legally, because all printers will include an ink fingerprint which can be traced back to that specific printer.
All color printers.
AA5B@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
We have great examples of things sold as parts or kits to be assembled
Take handguns as an example. If a murder weapon can be assembled from parts with only the frame 3d printed, and avoid similar laws for traceability, surely a printer is an easier task
umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml 11 hours ago
May I have the legal text, of any country, requiring a certification to sell any printers, or have EURion contellation dection implemented, or legally required to implement tracking dots?
Imgonnatrythis@sh.itjust.works 16 hours ago
I no longer have any corporate relationships that aren’t either apprehensive, strained, or downright antagonistic.
It’s us versus them now and they’ve give their last shits. It’s feeling like every company is a cable company now.
Dirk@lemmy.ml 14 hours ago
Always has been like that.
Not one single corporation is your friend or wants to be. All they want is your money. No exceptions.
tiramichu@lemm.ee 12 hours ago
Companies were never our friends, but it used to be the case that companies sold products. They sold a product and you got to use it and that was the end of it.
Now instead, thanks largely to the Internet, companies barely care about ‘product’ at all and instead are all trying to get in on that gravy train of monetised data slurping, subscription models, DRM on every consumable, firmware updates that change the terms on you after the fact, and so on. Every electronic thing in your home is now super hostile to you.
TVs, printers, fridges. These products used to be just products, but now they are trojan horses.
frank@sopuli.xyz 9 hours ago
I have VERY few and I cherish them.
Fairphone feels great to me. I think My coffee stuff is the same (Profitec, Eureka Mignon); no app or wifi or anything, fairly available spare parts.
BuckenBerry@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Didn’t fairphone start selling Bluetooth headphones after getting rid of the headphone jack
tyrant@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Are there no good guys left?
PlasticExistence@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Ironic username, but no, there are none righteous
Ulrich@feddit.org 7 hours ago
I’ve had an Epson Ecotank for the last couple years and I have no complaints. I just refilled my black ink and it was $11 for 9 oz., which should last me years (but I don’t print that often).
Pieisawesome@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 hours ago
Ink dries out, probably better to fill it part way and refill more often.
I don’t know this for a fact, but I would assume dried ink could clog up your cartridge or the printer
Noedel@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Just buy an ink tank printer, it fixes 90 percent of your printer grief
singletona@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
…I remember Brother intnetionally making their stuff VERY user servicable.
Wha happen
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 11 hours ago
This kinda shit makes me glad I don’t own a printer.
Allero@lemmy.today 10 hours ago
That gives a whole new twist to “you’ll own nothing and be happy”
frezik@midwest.social 7 hours ago
Honestly, more people should probably do that. If you have a low printing volume, you’ll save a lot of money by going to a store to get prints.
Yes, you can argue that you need the convenience of having a printer right there. Just realize you’re spending a lot of extra money for that convenience.
Korhaka@sopuli.xyz 10 hours ago
Fucking hell that sums up my life surprisingly well actually.
Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 10 hours ago
I’ve decided that just going to a copy shop a few times a year is less hassle.
ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
“Bröther, please dö nöt becöme anti-cönsümer!”
“I töö yearn för the cöntrölled mönöpöly, thë ensittificätiön, the röt ecönömy!”
“Brother…”
“I’m leäving töö müch möney on thë täblë! We also hävë öür men Ëlön Müsk as thë shädöw prësidënt, Trümp ïs jüst hïs, ör räthër - öür püppët. Hë wïll dïsmänlë äll cönsümër prötëctïons, as thëy’re in thë wäy öf öür pröfits.”
“Bröthër… Plëäsë rëcönsïdër!”
“Änd whät ärë yöü gönnä dö if not? Go tö thë cönsümer prötection agencies Ëlön Müsk’s DÖGË jüst dïsmäntlëd? Üse an öld HP LaserJet until yöü cän get repläcemënt rollers för it? You know öther parts öf it cän brëäk töö.”
“Bröther… You became… ËVÏL! You betrayed EVERYTHING you previously stood for!”
“And Ï wïll dö it as mäny tïmes as nëëded. Ëvil? It’s jüst büsïnëss. Mäybë yöü shöüld hävë rëcönsïdërëd yöür vötë för Trümp.”
“Bröther… Büt thë tränsës hävë cäncëlled Pikamëë för thë wïzärd gämë! The wökenëss häve been deströying the gäme ïndüstry! I nëëded tö vötë för Dönäld Trümp! Why isn’t it wörkïng äs ït wäs süppösëd tö!”
“Yöü vötëd ägäïnst yöür cläss interest öut öf püre hatred. I like ït vërÿ müch! Yöü knöw önë rëäsön she wäs älsö cäncelled wäs düë tö lölï? Ï dön’t think Pröjëct 2025 wïll ällöw it för sö löng düë tö tötäl pörn ban!”
“PLEÄSE BRÖTHËR, NÖT THE LÖLÏ! PLEÄSE LET ME KEEP THË CÜTË ÄND FÜNNŸ!”
“Yöü vöted against yöür class interest, yöür personal interest… hahahahahaHAAHAHAHAHAAAA! Yöür sö fünny! Ÿöü’rë thë përfëct vötër för më! Ÿöü’rë thë përfëct cönsümër ëvën! Töö dümb tö rëälïzë äll thë pöliticäl wörkings aröünd yöürself. Änd when anything göes wröng, yöü bläme the minörities öf this söciety. Nöw get exited för Bröther AI, a sübscriptiön service which is essentiäl för öperating the printer! Get ready för price hikes! Get ready för shörter lasting printers!”
“You’re truly despicable bröther!”
YungOnions@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
kilgore_trout@feddit.it 13 hours ago
You are crazy, but good crazy.
RichardDegenne@lemm.ee 13 hours ago
Wake up babe, new copy pasta just dropped.
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 6 hours ago
Viri4thus@feddit.org 14 hours ago
Capitalism is the breeding ground of parasitism. The incentive structures needs to change. Good corporate governance and long term sustainability need to trump short term turnover and fiduciary role to always go up. As it exists, corporate incentive structures promote leadership by psychopaths that will go to the utmost consequence to drive the last cent out of their customers. This is especially true in the US, which by virtue of competition, metastasises to the entire western world.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 13 hours ago
Its been doing that for 50+ years. But just like how capitalism expects growth, the trend is exponential.
catloaf@lemm.ee 20 hours ago
Okay, so after reading this, they’re not specifically degrading print quality, they’re just making you do the alignment manually. This is probably legal, but still scummy.
BombOmOm@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
O, damnit. Not the last bastion of hope!
Opisek@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Not sure if I got the update yet, but I’m banning my printer from accessing the internet right now.
Ensign_Crab@lemmy.world 21 hours ago
Oh, this one stings.
St0ner@lemmy.wtf 12 hours ago
enshitification of technological things continues…
Zink@programming.dev 16 hours ago
It looks like the latest firmware on their website for my old-ass black & white brother laser was released in 2019.
Hopefully that thing lasts another few decades on top of the ~15 years I’ve already had it, because it sounds like it’s the last printer I’m going to buy.
gofsckyourself@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Summary for those who can’t watch at the moment?
tal@lemmy.today 18 hours 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.
krashmo@lemmy.world 16 hours 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.
catloaf@lemm.ee 16 hours 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.
baggachipz@sh.itjust.works 9 hours ago
I have a Canon color laser printer which works pretty well and doesn’t pull any of this shit. They’re probably the last one standing now.
sxan@midwest.social 20 hours ago
Epson Ecotanks. Liquid ink in, prints out. There’s nothing to lock out.
ApollosArrow@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
Old printers on ebay are going to be the new game, until we start seeing kickstarter flooded with new printer companies.
wesker@lemmy.sdf.org 20 hours ago
ninjaturtle@lemmy.today 20 hours ago
Have to keep things offline and outdated nowadays 🫤
finitebanjo@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
I’ve always promoted commercial inktank printers for people who do a lot of printing, and people always mentioned Brother as a response, but tbh I’ve never really hopped on the bandwagon to shill for any particular company.
Just a good commercial inktank printer. A regular printer with all the bells and whistles is going to cost you like $100 and $45 for each ink pack you buy, you might as well just spend $450 on a printer, write it off as home office expense, and call it good.
echodot@feddit.uk 14 hours ago
I didn’t even know he had a brother.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 21 hours ago
I’ve been saying that for a couple of years now. They started fucking with third party ink at least a year ago
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
Sad to hear Louis is having family issues