The detail that people forget is that printers are mechanical and therefore suffer from mechanical wear. With laser printers that go on forever the toner cartr

The detail that people forget is that printers are mechanical and therefore suffer from mechanical wear. With laser printers that go on forever the toner cartridge includes a fair heft of the parts that would wear out. With ink jet printers this is not the same. Also, are you changing just the ink or the nozzles too? Regulation could have rigged this market to have avoided the race to the bottom that went on. The razor blade sales model is okay for razor blades, you are spending tops $10 on the razor and it is clear in the box that you are not getting the full complement of replacement blades that cost $20 and are next to it in the store. With inkjet printers it was a deceptive practice. Only after you were back buying ink did you clock the start pack inks. Some of the printers did not include a black ink. In the EU the regulation of USB power charging worked out well for everyone, we no longer have drawers full of 'wall warts'. Had printers been regulated so that there was a minimum amount of pages that a new printer would print without running out of ink with the ink not running dry during the 2 year warranty period then the market would have been more sensible. Oh, and no proprietary replacement inks. The price of a new printer would have been higher however there would have also been a secondary market in second hand printers. With the razor model there is no secondary market, at best you are giving a printer away rather than charging for it because it costs more to put ink in it than it costs for someone to just buy a new one. The original inkjet printers were a wonder of fine engineering. I particularly liked the way the original ones held the freshly printed page to dry before dropping it into the tray. In 1990 you needed an expensive dye sublimation printer with mega expensive consumables to print colour. The inkjets came along and made colour something to take for granted. This was wonderful. But the razor model made it impossible for the inkjet to keep the awe it truly deserved. In time the printers got nastier and nastier, e.g. the Lexmark efforts that are landfilled rather than cherished. Had there been just the smallest bit of regulation in the EU then that would have affected how these things were sold globally and there wouldn't have been such a wasteful race to the bottom.