[kaonashi]

The purpose behind the engineering of the printers is to drive the sales of as many ink cartridges as possible while being as cheap as possible to produce.

From this perspective, offering many additional features which turn off when the ink rent hasn't been paid makes much more sense.

[chrischen]

Makes sense until people stop buying them for laser printers.

[Grishnakh]

There's a problem with that theory: they're simply not going to stop buying them and switch to lasers.

We've had this dynamic for at least 15 years now, and people still are buying cheap-o inkjets and getting ripped off on ink cartridges. If people haven't learned after a decade and a half, they're never going to learn. Just look at the other comments on this discussion (including the blog posting that started it all): even on "hacker news", which is full of technologists rather than regular people, tons of people here have fallen for the inkjet scam. If a bunch of nerds don't know any better, than you certainly can't expect the regular public to figure it out.

[chrischen]

People don't really print anymore. If you do print, you're an office or business that runs laser printers.

[takeda]

It's so infuriating though that laser printers seem like much cheaper alternative.

In reality inkjet are cheap, many companies (from top of my head I see BofA) use them to print bills, because it saves them cost.

It sucks that prices are so artificially manipulated.