I think the main issue is consumer education, psychology and behavior. Basically, people don't know how much it actually costs to make a printer and don't know

I think the main issue is consumer education, psychology and behavior. Basically, people don't know how much it actually costs to make a printer and don't know enough about it (not a judgement, they probably have better things to do than spend hours researching printers) to choose based on overall quality and such metrics. They basically just choose based on price. So manufacturers competed on price until they got to well below the all-in cost of the printer (including R&D, etc) hoping to make it up in the cost of consumables. So now they HAVE to make whatever money they are going to make on the consumables side. If a company came out with a printer that was expensive enough that they could make money on the printer and not on consumables. How many would they sell? My guess is very, very few, as consumers would just buy the cheaper-up-front option. Note that this mostly applies to ink-jet and not laser, as the latter have historically been purchased more by businesses which are more likely to know about and focus on overall quality and economics, and take consumable cost over years into account during purchase. I guess now that laser printers are entering the consumer market more and more, and consumers are still they same as they have been, we're going to see this issue pushed into lasers as well (as noted in this tweet).