[this is something of a continuation to a previous rant, but you don't really need to read it for context, unless you really want to see a photo of a printout of someone flipping off a printer]
the Hewlett-Packard MFP M234sdwe has a MSRP of 229 USD, and the Hewlett-Packard MFP M234sdw has a MSRP of 289 USD, but that's somewhat misleading, the M234sdwe is on sale for 149 at the time of writing, and it looks like it's on sale pretty regularly. anyways, let's put a pin in this and get back to it in a minute.
in a purely technical sense, the Hewlett-Packard MFP M234sdwe is something of a technical marvel – a gem that's been polished and faceted to near-perfection, it's well built and thoughtfully engineered, in some parts you can see that it's definitely been made to a price point but it's also clearly designed to take a bit of abuse. there's material where it's needed and none where it isn't, it's a beautiful piece of precision engineering and technology. when they use a white LED it's a pleasing warm white. the engineers and designers clearly gave a shit when they made this. they clearly cared and put a not-insignificant amount of thought behind all of the fun little flappy bits and doo-dads and gew-gaws.
in another time, in another place, in another world, perhaps maybe one where i haven't gazed into the abyss for long enough that i became part of it, i could like and enjoy it. i could print out lovely little poems and pirated technical manuéls on it. i most likely wouldn't even give things a second thought! it would be just a nice little printer doing its job, living its best life, making beeps and ejecting out its prints with such force that they tumble down to the ground in a manner both amusing and endearing. we could go out to the park and look out upon the lake, just me and my printer. it could toss change to a street performer using its automatic document feeder cover as a trebuchet. i could almost recommend it as a Legitimately Good Printer, but it's not really a printer, that part is secondary, incidental to its True Purpose, even – it's actually an insidious piece of spyware masquerading as a printer. spyware might be a bit too polite, let's just call it shitware instead.
you see, dear reader, this is not a standard, lame printer, this is a HP+, smart printer! you see, that little 'e' means that it has a 2 year warranty instead of just 1, and you get some FREE additional premium features for [INSANELY LOUD SLOT MACHINE NOISES] 24! whole!! months!!! why would you ever pay more to get that lame standard printer when you have 24 FREE MONTHS of PREMIUM FEATURES awaiting you?
perhaps my romantic prospects with my laser printer were never meant to land on fertile soil – that it was a truly fruitless endeavor; it will only print 15 pages unless it's constantly hooked up to the internet and allowed to phone home to HP through some smart shitware. what does it send to HP? not sure, honestly, but casually thumbing through the builtin web server reveals that it has USB 2.0, ethernet (only 10/100; for shame, hewlett-packard, you couldn't spring for the finest in inexpensive GbE chips for my girl?), wifi (2.4 and 5ghz), bluetooth (well ok), and gps. why does it have gps?! why does the printer need to know where it is because it knows where it isn't???? this is somewhat of a rhetorical question, because the answer is pretty obvious when you think about it for more than a few minutes: HP can then go on to sell that data to places like retail stores and ad companies. there's this many printers in your city and they take these cartridges. better have some in stock or they'll go Elsewhere.
this hateful nonsense absolutely guarantees that this printer will become an absolute brick in a couple years and relegated to the ewaste piles when hewlett-packard no longer feels that it's quite profitable enough to keep these working, if they haven't bricked them already through their own incompetence, like what happened literally two months ago. (this isn't even a freak one off, since this also happened in 2019) they can just snap their fingers and your printer's a brick. even if there wasn't this particular issue, hewlett-packard brand HP+ 'smart' printers are locked down such that they'll only take genuine official hewlett-packard brand hewlett-packard toner cartridges. want to save a buck with a third party cartridge or DIY up a refill? maybe you want to test out some sort of weird formulation you hacked together in your garage, just for the sake of fun and experimentation? ah well unfortunately for you, Corporate has decided that you can geeeet ffffffucked, buddy!
the sad part about it is that this has worked quite well for HP, seeing as their stocks are up 40% from where they were 5 years ago.
... ultimately, nobody deserves anything, but you deserve better nonetheless.
