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HP is literally the only company that I never heard anyone praise. Facebook is hated by the internet but plenty of people offline love it. Many hate Amazon but

HP is literally the only company that I never heard anyone praise. Facebook is hated by the internet but plenty of people offline love it. Many hate Amazon but some can't stop loving the convenience. HP, though? Everybody hates them and it's always because of their predatory practices. The company is essentially running its name into the ground for no reason.

apexalpha 6y ago
Their business notebooks are well built, so there's that. I can imagine HP printing to have 0 fans, though.
hollandheese 6y ago
They used to make really great calculators, but that stopped basically a decade ago.
NikolaNovak 6y ago
I have heard (and experienced) OK things about their enterprise laptops, FWIW. And I've certainly heard good things about their Laserjets back in the day :) The current budget consumer inkjets seem to be pretty awful; though I wonder how much that's the fault/state of entire category - I notice that whenever we talk about HP Inkjets being awful, the counter-recommendation is not e.g. Epson or Canon budget Inkjet, but a laser printer. Specifically, almost exclusively, a Brother laser :). Which is a different category. There are professional photographers who are happy with Epson & Canon fancy Inkjets; but the loss-leader el-cheapo printers do indeed seem to be generating ill-will.
- nn3 6y ago
  As far as I understand consumer inkjets are designed as loss leaders. They make the majority of product revenue with the ink. Pretty much everything that people hate about them comes from this business model. I personally print very rarely, but I found laser printers are much better for rare printing. When I had an Inkjet the Ink was always dried up when I tried to use it occasionally, so when I actually needed it it didn't work. So now I buy the cheapest laser printer that can do duplex, and that works when I need it. Probably the only reason to have an Inkjet is if you need color printing
  - lostcolony 6y ago
    Yeah - I have a cheap laser printer at home for those rare times I need to print something (since if I ever needed color I'd need a really good print job and so would do it at a print center). But even with that...I intentionally avoided HP.
Nursie 6y ago
Their business printers and small offic colour, laser PSC units are pretty good. Never had an issue with them. Always been *nix friendly too. But their consumer inkjet people are awful.
bluedino 6y ago
>> HP is literally the only company that I never heard anyone praise. The old HP made great printers. Before that, they made great test equipment, calculators, etc. They still make pretty good servers and networking equipment, but their storage is a mixed bag.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  I think the servers and networking equipment are HPE, which was spun off in 2016[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett_Packard_Enterprise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett_Packard_Enterprise
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Test equipment was spun out as Agilent and then became Keysight. Great test equipment.
regularfry 6y ago
Heh. I've got a case open with their customer relations team right now. They've had money off me for a laptop that doesn't work. The funny thing about the customer relations team is that they don't have an inbound phone number. If they aren't answering your emails, not only can you not get anything that way, but even if you phone the customer support team, they're internally segregated so they can't see what's going on either. I've been trying to get a working laptop out of HP since the third week of September, and as far as I can tell that's just not something they're capable of.
- entangledqubit 6y ago
  Hang in there but return it if you can. I had a bad experience with my laptop purchase as well. (Issue wasn't discovered until after the return window.) Hopefully, you've already been escalated to their "real" customer support tier by now. I had to send mine in three times. One of those times they returned the laptop with a downgraded mainboard. In the end I'm pretty happy with the laptop but I will never buy from them again.
  - regularfry 6y ago
    Oh, they've got the laptop. They've acknowleged a fault, but the replacement part wasn't going to be available until January so they asked me to confirm whether a replacement unit would be ok, subject to availability. I said fine. I have had no communication in the two weeks since. I have no idea if they got the confirmation, whether they have stock to give me, whether they've ordered it and it's being delivered and I should expect it to arrive tomorrow, or whether they also can't get the new unit to me any sooner than January. And I can't get anyone to tell me, because the set of people I can speak to is disjoint from the set of people with visibility into the system that actually matters. I'm left with the sinking realisation that the only option I've got left is to pursue a refund, hope that doesn't take an age to sort out, and start the whole process over again with either Dell or Lenovo. Then deal with whatever mess I get left with if I do get a delivery. Ironically I went with HP because I'd heard Dell was having delivery issues and I wanted to avoid that hassle. More fool me.
pmlnr 6y ago
> HP is literally the only company that I never heard anyone praise. compaq bought DEC, HP bought compaq. The things "left" from those veins in the company have been praised, but they have been drying out for a long time by now.
rjsw 6y ago
I have several HP products that I'm very happy with. A MicroServer, a convertable tablet/laptop and a PostScript lazer printer. Windows 10 managed to break itself so that the tablet wouldn't boot within a couple of weeks of getting it and HP reinstalled it under warranty.
ValentineC 6y ago
I have a HP OfficeJet Pro 8710 (released ~2016 or so) that has a great automatic document feeder (ADF — with duplex!) for scanning, but is too expensive for non-urgent printing.
sokoloff 6y ago
> HP is literally the only company that I never heard anyone praise. The part of HP that was widely considered praise-worthy is their test equipment branch. Which, naturally, isn't HP anymore but is now Keysight after HP spun them out as Agilent in the late 90s.
anigbrowl 6y ago
Their older laser printers were just great, but I'm talking 20 years ago.
dang 6y ago
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25037310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25037310.
forgotmypw17 6y ago
I bought an HP-branded keyboard in Best Buy a number of years ago, and it was the best small form factor bluetooth keyboard I've ever used to date. Sadly, it was lost, and they don't sell it anymore.
JoshTriplett 6y ago
I can't vouch for their current ones, but HP printers generally have great Linux support. Anything you can do with the printer under Windows, you can do under Linux, and sometimes you have more capabilities under Linux (such as scanning over the network). The whole "ink as a service" debacle is ridiculous, but their normal printers with normal ink cartridges work perfectly.
- slim 6y ago
  you "just" need to install their proprietary driver
  - cesarb 6y ago
    Not always. The list at https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing/supported_devices/index https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing/supp... shows which ones need the proprietary driver plugin and which ones don't.
  - JoshTriplett 6y ago
    Nope. There's an Open Source driver that works perfectly with CUPS, and a set of Open Source tools that give you things like ink level.

apexalpha 6y ago

Their business notebooks are well built, so there's that. I can imagine HP printing to have 0 fans, though.

hollandheese 6y ago

They used to make really great calculators, but that stopped basically a decade ago.

NikolaNovak 6y ago

I have heard (and experienced) OK things about their enterprise laptops, FWIW. And I've certainly heard good things about their Laserjets back in the day :) The current budget consumer inkjets seem to be pretty awful; though I wonder how much that's the fault/state of entire category - I notice that whenever we talk about HP Inkjets being awful, the counter-recommendation is not e.g. Epson or Canon budget Inkjet, but a laser printer. Specifically, almost exclusively, a Brother laser :). Which is a different category. There are professional photographers who are happy with Epson & Canon fancy Inkjets; but the loss-leader el-cheapo printers do indeed seem to be generating ill-will.

nn3 6y ago
As far as I understand consumer inkjets are designed as loss leaders. They make the majority of product revenue with the ink. Pretty much everything that people hate about them comes from this business model. I personally print very rarely, but I found laser printers are much better for rare printing. When I had an Inkjet the Ink was always dried up when I tried to use it occasionally, so when I actually needed it it didn't work. So now I buy the cheapest laser printer that can do duplex, and that works when I need it. Probably the only reason to have an Inkjet is if you need color printing
- lostcolony 6y ago
  Yeah - I have a cheap laser printer at home for those rare times I need to print something (since if I ever needed color I'd need a really good print job and so would do it at a print center). But even with that...I intentionally avoided HP.

Nursie 6y ago

Their business printers and small offic colour, laser PSC units are pretty good. Never had an issue with them. Always been *nix friendly too. But their consumer inkjet people are awful.

bluedino 6y ago

>> HP is literally the only company that I never heard anyone praise. The old HP made great printers. Before that, they made great test equipment, calculators, etc. They still make pretty good servers and networking equipment, but their storage is a mixed bag.

AlexandrB 6y ago
I think the servers and networking equipment are HPE, which was spun off in 2016[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett_Packard_Enterprise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hewlett_Packard_Enterprise
- sokoloff 6y ago
  Test equipment was spun out as Agilent and then became Keysight. Great test equipment.

regularfry 6y ago

Heh. I've got a case open with their customer relations team right now. They've had money off me for a laptop that doesn't work. The funny thing about the customer relations team is that they don't have an inbound phone number. If they aren't answering your emails, not only can you not get anything that way, but even if you phone the customer support team, they're internally segregated so they can't see what's going on either. I've been trying to get a working laptop out of HP since the third week of September, and as far as I can tell that's just not something they're capable of.

entangledqubit 6y ago
Hang in there but return it if you can. I had a bad experience with my laptop purchase as well. (Issue wasn't discovered until after the return window.) Hopefully, you've already been escalated to their "real" customer support tier by now. I had to send mine in three times. One of those times they returned the laptop with a downgraded mainboard. In the end I'm pretty happy with the laptop but I will never buy from them again.
- regularfry 6y ago
  Oh, they've got the laptop. They've acknowleged a fault, but the replacement part wasn't going to be available until January so they asked me to confirm whether a replacement unit would be ok, subject to availability. I said fine. I have had no communication in the two weeks since. I have no idea if they got the confirmation, whether they have stock to give me, whether they've ordered it and it's being delivered and I should expect it to arrive tomorrow, or whether they also can't get the new unit to me any sooner than January. And I can't get anyone to tell me, because the set of people I can speak to is disjoint from the set of people with visibility into the system that actually matters. I'm left with the sinking realisation that the only option I've got left is to pursue a refund, hope that doesn't take an age to sort out, and start the whole process over again with either Dell or Lenovo. Then deal with whatever mess I get left with if I do get a delivery. Ironically I went with HP because I'd heard Dell was having delivery issues and I wanted to avoid that hassle. More fool me.

pmlnr 6y ago

> HP is literally the only company that I never heard anyone praise. compaq bought DEC, HP bought compaq. The things "left" from those veins in the company have been praised, but they have been drying out for a long time by now.

rjsw 6y ago

I have several HP products that I'm very happy with. A MicroServer, a convertable tablet/laptop and a PostScript lazer printer. Windows 10 managed to break itself so that the tablet wouldn't boot within a couple of weeks of getting it and HP reinstalled it under warranty.

ValentineC 6y ago

I have a HP OfficeJet Pro 8710 (released ~2016 or so) that has a great automatic document feeder (ADF — with duplex!) for scanning, but is too expensive for non-urgent printing.

sokoloff 6y ago

> HP is literally the only company that I never heard anyone praise. The part of HP that was widely considered praise-worthy is their test equipment branch. Which, naturally, isn't HP anymore but is now Keysight after HP spun them out as Agilent in the late 90s.

anigbrowl 6y ago

Their older laser printers were just great, but I'm talking 20 years ago.

dang 6y ago

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25037310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25037310.

forgotmypw17 6y ago

I bought an HP-branded keyboard in Best Buy a number of years ago, and it was the best small form factor bluetooth keyboard I've ever used to date. Sadly, it was lost, and they don't sell it anymore.

JoshTriplett 6y ago

I can't vouch for their current ones, but HP printers generally have great Linux support. Anything you can do with the printer under Windows, you can do under Linux, and sometimes you have more capabilities under Linux (such as scanning over the network). The whole "ink as a service" debacle is ridiculous, but their normal printers with normal ink cartridges work perfectly.

slim 6y ago
you "just" need to install their proprietary driver
- cesarb 6y ago
  Not always. The list at https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing/supported_devices/index https://developers.hp.com/hp-linux-imaging-and-printing/supp... shows which ones need the proprietary driver plugin and which ones don't.
- JoshTriplett 6y ago
  Nope. There's an Open Source driver that works perfectly with CUPS, and a set of Open Source tools that give you things like ink level.