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> I feel this is hyperbolic, because in my head, why would you ever buy a defective-by-design piece of junk? Because manufacturers will not mention their produ
by II2II 4y ago
> I feel this is hyperbolic, because in my head, why would you ever buy a defective-by-design piece of junk?
Because manufacturers will not mention their product is defective by design. Until I heard of the HP ink subscription scheme a year or two ago, I would not think twice if they advertised such a feature since the expectation is that I could still buy ink independently. I would not expect the printer to stop functioning if I did not subscribe.
That's not to say that I would have bought HP. I already knew that they were not upfront about a lot of things and I already had a company that I trusted. (Ironically, a company that people claimed produced cheap junk back in the 90's.) That said, there are a lot of people buying their first printer and who have little concept of what the pitfalls are. Certain types of pitfalls are rarely mentioned in reviews and, when they are, they may come off as hyperbolic. That said, even commercial products have their pitfalls. I had to deal with a Xerox printer a while back that refused to work with a toner purchased under a support contract since the printer was not covered by the support contract. (The printer was purchased separately since the Internet connection wasn't reliable at that site.)
- ridgered4 4y agoAnd thanks to automatic updates, the deal can be turned sour on you at any time. For security reasons!
- mindslight 4y agoOf course manufacturers will never mention that their product is defective by design. The change I'm referring to is when consumers will stop relying on nonsense advertising / placement to comparison shop, actually care about how something functions, and reject products that are built with backdoor control. And yeah the same crapification is happening to commercial markets, at slower or faster paces. The point is that most of this gimmicky consumer shit is just advertising skins on functionality that was already solved 20 years ago, and buying a new old stock or refurbished products would meet the need while avoiding backdoors. It just feels like so many of the headlines these days about Internet of Trash and subscription service rugpulls are like the old doctor joke - "Doc, it hurts when I do this" ... "Well, stop doing that".