[barrkel]

There are two halves to price: supply and demand. The investment is a sunk cost. Competition in an efficient market should reduce the price to the marginal cost of production. And if the marginal cost of production was genuinely so high, why would printer manufacturers be putting in all kinds of validation electronics? Why not leave it at caveat emptor?

[mattmaroon]

The investment required keeps the supply relatively low. It's not fair to call it a sunk cost when it's an annual $1b. Keeping up with the state of the art in printers (note the disparity in quality even over the last few years) is a significant ongoing expense.

And the reason not to leave it caveat emptor is obvious: your brand suffers. When someone's printer goes bad they don't blame the manufacturer of the ink, they blame the manufacturer of the printer. This is part of why Steve Jobs doesn't want Flash on the iPad. He spent enough years denigrating Windows for crashing due to third party programs to not want the same thing done to him.

[barrkel]

Are you saying that producing inks of the same quality as (say) 2006 requires a continual investment of $1B per year? Or that the quality of printing in 2006 was so bad that it would be completely unacceptable by the mass of consumers today? I don't find either of these even remotely credible.

As to brand: I don't buy it, not for a moment. In fact, I have difficulty believing that you're serious. Anyone can go online now and buy generic inks for their printer if they care to look, for less cost (often with hacked refurbished containers). When this generic ink gets worse results than the original stock ink (which came with the printer), do you believe that people will blame the printer? Seriously?

As to iPad / iPhone crashing, that wouldn't be very new, would it? Safari on my iPod Touch crashed (silently, to the home screen) maybe 8 times a day back when I still used it. My iPod Nano regularly crashes (hard lock, needs resetting) after adding and removing mp3s in iTunes, when playback was paused at the time of device insertion on an mp3 that was removed. My estimation of the quality of Apple software, from my experience, is not high. But this is all besides the point.

[mattmaroon]

Yes, people definitely blame the printer, not the ink. The printer is what is broken and has a big logo on the front of it. Anyone buying generic ink in the first place probably doesn't think it could harm their machine. If you think people are logical enough to know that generic ink could harm their machine, use generic ink anyway, have their machine harmed, and then blame it on the ink, you don't know very many people.

Print quality clearly improves annually. I'm assuming people who use ink do so for the quality. Anyone printing things in bulk where quality is not an issue (like businesses) is using toner, which is far cheaper. Other than photos, I'm not sure why anyone who printed enough that the extra price of brand name ink vs generic would amount to a dollar figure they cared about would use ink.

I wasn't claiming Apple products don't crash. Far from it. I was pointing out that Steve Jobs said he didn't want Flash on the iPad or iPhone because it causes crashes. He knows that the user will always assume responsibility lies with the company whose logo is on the device. How many snide remarks have you heard about the Blue Screen of Death, which was always caused by third party applications yet is used as evidence of Windows' suckiness.

If you don't understand that, don't take up a career in marketing.