[Louis Rossmann] Brother turns heel & becomes anti-consumer printer company
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Old printers on ebay are going to be the new game, until we start seeing kickstarter flooded with new printer companies.
I want to agree, but has there ever been a case of the free market saving itself?
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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.
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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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.
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I have a Brother MFC-9340CDW that I salvaged from work last year, we replaced it because it kept getting a ghost "paper jam" every time you tried to print something. Turns out the cause is an $18 board that's known to fail.
Now to figure out how to disable automatic firmware updates
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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.
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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.
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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.
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 the origin, but nah, this is just me.
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Shit. I didn't even think of that. I'm using fedora. Tomorrow I'll be blocking firmware updates for the printer. Thank you for pointing that out.
I should qualify that -- I don't know for sure whether and which distros enable updates to run non-interactively.
fwupdhas the ability to do so and it's billed as doing so on its github page, but that doesn't mean that a distro has to actually take advantage of that. Could be that in a default configuration on a given distro, it only updates stuff next time you invoke it. -
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.
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.
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I heard Brother was good, then I spent way too long formatting different USB sticks in different cluster sizes and formats, and never got ours to work with any of them. Don't buy Brother if you want that feature, either.
FYI an MBR table with a fat32 partition is probably what it was looking for. If that doesn't work odds are the port is broken
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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.
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.
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Can't watch right now, but is there a list of affected devices?
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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.
Except those who aren't.
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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.
Always has been like that.
Not one single corporation is your friend or wants to be. All they want is your money. No exceptions.
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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.
Has anyone figured out how to 3d print a 2d printer yet?
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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.
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...
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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.
By my count, it's been tried twice.
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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.
Isn’t prusa now doing anti consumer / closed source stuff?
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I didn't even know he had a brother.
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Do we really need to crowd fund a FOSS printer? Really?
