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by pedrozieg 186 days ago
The wild part is that this isn’t really a pricing mistake, it’s the business model. That $65 Canon isn’t “a printer”, it’s a subsidized acquisition channel for a customer who will buy OEM ink at a huge margin or sign up for some kind of recurring refill program later. Accounting is fine eating some or all of the printer cost if the average buyer turns into years of cartridge revenue.

If you buy a new printer every time you run low on ink, you’re basically arbitraging that CAC line item. On paper it can be a “life hack” as long as only a few people do it and you ignore the e-waste and friction. If it ever became common, the easy knobs for the manufacturer are obvious: even smaller starter carts, more lock-in, more activation hoops, and less of the subsidy that makes this trick work in the first place.
1 comments
euroderf 186 days ago
This is where Brother laser printers are/were supposed to be superior. Affordable ink cartridges, refillable, good capacity, no DRM.

But I upgraded the printer driver some months ago (on macOS) and Hey, Presto! No more functioning printer.

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ycombinatrix 186 days ago
Why do you need to use a proprietary software driver? Brother printers support CUPS.
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stockresearcher 186 days ago
I had a Brother laser printer for a very long time and printed a TON of paper with it. But it finally gave up the ghost during the COVID supply-chain meltdown and when looking at new Brother laser printers I discovered that they now have a much wider range of offerings and some are clearly not friendly. So the generic advice no longer applies - you have to be careful which one you buy.

Now, because of those supply chain issues they were all marked up to exorbitant prices; I ended up getting an Epson EcoTank thing from Costco with no markup and a bonus extra (quite large) pack of ink. We’ve been very happy with it and the ink isn’t actually very expensive at all. Given the electricity usage difference between laser and inkjet, it might even be cheaper per page.

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ycombinatrix 185 days ago
Do you have an example of an unfriendly model from Brother?
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