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Pay no attention to the USB port behind the “no USB” sticker
- lapetitejort 3y agoTheir mistake was to make the sticker distinguishable from the background plastic. Inquisitive people will always remove the sticker to reveal the tempting secrets behind.
- missblit 3y agoI just remove stickers because I hate all manner of visual distractions. If I could find a way to remove etched in / painted on logos from from computer hardware I'd do that too. Got a (pretty good) apron from William Sonoma but it had the logo sewed on with a huge patch, had to painstakingly unstitch it to get a pretty apron without any branding emblazoned across the front.
- JohnFen 3y agoI thought that I was the only weirdo that did this sort of thing, but I'm reassured to find a kindred spirit.
- dylan604 3y agoMy personal pet peeve is the branding car dealerships place on the cars they sell. I asked one sales person if I was going to get a monthly check from them for the advertising services I was providing for them. He thought I was joking. While I've never used a seam ripper to remove a logo from an article of clothing (kuddos to them), I have removed the license plate covers and decals from my car in front of the sales person that assumed I was joking before accepting the car.
- jacquesm 3y agoHehe, same here. I asked for a discount if they wanted to put their branded license plate holders on the car. No discount? Ok, I'll bring my own (they're like $5 each so no problem there). It's kind of weird that a dealer gets to use your vehicle to advertise, it's not like they built the car or something, they're just a middle man.
- astura 3y agoI won't accept delivery of the car without the logos removed.
- dismalpedigree 3y agoI forced them to agree to not apply the sticker to the car I ordered for delivery to the dealer. I got in in writing from the sales rep. When I went to pick up the car and it had their stupid sticker on it. They had to remove it and redo the clear coat at their expense.
- _ah 3y agoSome car dealers have installed private car washes. Come in for a free wash, any time, as long as you own the car and are displaying the dealer plate. So at least in that case they're "paying" for the advertising.
- quickthrower2 3y agoLol good way to get someone who buys cars from dealers to come back.
- folmar 3y agoThis I wouldn't mind - a car wash is a high markup item just like advertising, and both sides would get something out from the deal.
- c0nsumer 3y agoLast time I purchased a car, I told the salesperson that if there's any dealer logos or whatnot on it, I will not accept delivery. There was a license plate frame, it was very quickly removed.
- wildzzz 3y agoIt's been awhile but I've always taken the logos off the front of the optical drives in my desktop builds. Takes like three wipes with some acetone and now you have a very clean look. Very few companies are willing to spend money on robust branding for whitebox goods so it's often very easy to remove logos from stuff like conference swag. I bought a pencil case for work off Amazon and it had a bright red patch with the company name on it, just some sort of absolute nonsense combination of consonants and vowels. One minute with an xacto blade cut the stitches and I was left with an acceptable quality pencil case.
- matheusmoreira 3y agoThat's awesome and I want to start doing this too. How do I learn which substances and tools to use for which materials?
- jacquesm 3y agoMy stitch cutter is my favorite tool. I got mine from a surgeon in the hospital, before that I used one that is used for sewing, but the big one is a lot quicker.
- Marsymars 3y agoI should really get one of those… I’ve been using the little scissors in my swiss army knife for years.
- catchnear4321 3y agothe little arrow on the bottom left also looks strikingly like a “peel here” indicator. pretty easy to peel, too, given how much larger the sticker is from the little port extrusion thing. for that matter, it isn’t even centered. assuming it would even remain stuck given how little it would be sticking to. almost like someone placed a sticker over a usb port. would someone do that?
- krackers 3y agoEven with the sticker, there's also a USB logo visible. It seems like this is not HP trying to trick the user into using wifi by hiding usb, but just letting them know that this thing supports wifi.
- catchnear4321 3y agoexactly. that isn’t to say their app isn’t nefarious or supported by alphabet agencies. it could be. or not. but this sticker isn’t there to hide anything.
- Marsymars 3y agoMy cable modem has a sticker that looks very much like the surrounding plastic. I’d never have noticed if reviews hadn’t pointed it out. Apparently hides three extra ethernet ports for situations with multiple static IPs or with link aggregation. (Things that aren’t needed for the typical residential modem user.)
- asynchronous 3y agoObligatory “screw HP”
- tenebrisalietum 3y agoThis reminded me of the following (from 2010): https://www.engadget.com/2010-11-17-windows-phone-7s-microsd-mess-the-full-story-and-how-nokia-ca.html#:~:text=Sure%20enough%2C%20Windows%20Phone%207%27s%20card%20security%20situation,of%20formatting%2C%20it%27s%20a%20lower-level%20operation%20than%20that https://www.engadget.com/2010-11-17-windows-phone-7s-microsd.... A removeable SD card you're ... not supposed to remove.
- userbinator 3y agoThat article reads painfully like a "how can we screw over our customers" discussion was exposed. On a more positive note, it used to be somewhat common for cheap no-name Android phones, mainly based on Mediatek SoCs, to boot from an internal removable microSD card, along with the "official" external removable one next to the then-standard removable battery and dual SIM slots. They disappeared rather quickly once eMMC became the norm, likely in a next revision of a reference design.
- dismalpedigree 3y agoI bought a NAS a fee years back. Was a fully functional computer complete with 4x usb, hdmi, and Ethernet. Only the ethernet was exposed until you cut the case away. Cut the case, installed truenas, never looked back.
- SturgeonsLaw 3y agoMugging pensioners is a line of work that people get into when they're too ethical for the printer industry. HP is one of the worst offenders, but the others aren't much better. I bought a dirt cheap (~$100 AUD) Fuji Xerox CP105b colour laser printer about 10 years ago and it still works fine. No crapware in the drivers, no cartridge lockouts, no bullshit. Super crisp print jobs. I fear that when it breaks, I won't find another deal like that.
- dylan604 3y agookay, i LOL on that one. so tell us how you really feel about the printer industry.
- greenyoda 3y agoI bought a cheap Brother laser printer 20 years ago, and it works great today. Just plug in the USB cable, and it works on a modern machine with no extra drivers or software. (It's old enough that it still also has a parallel port on it.) I recently replaced the toner and drum with third-party ones, and they work fine - no vendor lock-in.
- cam_l 3y agoI got to the point where I actually buy brother ink for my old brother printers, because it is not that expensive and I really don't want them to go out of business.
- Nifty3929 3y agoRight! I’ve got an ancient Brother myself and I feel like paying for it again, for the same reason. I recently upgraded to windows 11, downloaded the official driver and everything worked perfectly within a few minutes. They’re holding the line against BS. No, I do not want to connect to your cloud thing to print a file from my computer, thanks.
- crooked-v 3y agoSadly, apparently new Brother printers have moved to the crapware model.
- hobotime 3y agoHP sucks, but that sticker has instructions on where to start to peal it away. They're obviously trying to get the whole family to wirelessly print with all their devices via WiFi to use up ink. And not just connected to dad's boring household accounting desktop.
- sliken 3y agoYes, and get the printer on the network where it can download new DRM behaviors to screw the users out of more ink. So far they retroactively added banning 3rd party ink, disabling ink once it gets too old, and of course not letting you print black if one of the other colors is out.
- quickthrower2 3y agoNext step: SaaS subscription or 60 second pause before printing
- sliken 3y agoShhh, don't give them ideas. What gets me is large parts of HP was cut (calculators, test instruments, laser printers, etc), not because they weren't profitable, but instead because they weren't as profitable as selling ink.
- quickthrower2 3y agoSomeone needs to tell them about diversifying investments lol! They are one disruption away from being a Kodak
- themindfield 3y agoIs anyone familiar with a solid open source printer hardware project? Given all of the issues with printers over the years (driver compatibility, ink cartridge drm, things like the above post), I’m curious if there is a reason open source printer hardware is not more common. My assumption would be the complexity of the print mechanism / tolerances / balancing.
- askvictor 3y agoPrinting is hard. Printing fast is harder. The main reason printers still suck, 40-odd years later, is because it's really hard, at least in the consumer market, where you don't expect regular service, and there's a race to the bottom in terms of price.
- mdaniel 3y agothis question comes up on a lot of the "printer rage" threads <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22open%20source%22%20%22printer%22&sort=byPopularity&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal...> and my recollection of the majority of the substantial discussions seem to imply that there are patents which are a major obstacle to any such effort, above and beyond the general "hardware development is its own specialization" problem Now, what I don't know (and don't recall seeing) is whether that's true of every jurisdiction or if it's just a US-centric problem and the EU could have their revenge by having an open printer that US consumers couldn't buy :-/
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoI thought patents were 20 years. At the time, in the early 2000s, I thought the HP Laserjet 4000 was a tank. Is there any reason someone would be prevented from replicating a circa 2003 model printer?
- userbinator 3y agoThere are plenty of open-source 3D printers but doesn't seem to be any 2D ones. That said, I think open-source firmware for existing 2D printers would be a better idea, perhaps with a controller board to retrofit into existing mechanisms since I suspect they've heavily used crypto to lock out alternative firmware. Driving the two axes is relatively simple, but RE'ing printhead signals and driving those are probably going to be the most difficult part.
- __jonas 3y agoBut the sticker has an icon in the lower left corner that suggests it should be pulled off? Here is a reply from the Mastodon thread that seems more plausible: > @steeph @netspooky They're not hiding it, they're getting you to set up the printer over wifi, and only use the USB port after that. It seems if you use the USB port straight away it'll only print up to 20 pages then stop. They do this to get you to opt into hp+ and lock the printer in to use official toner. That's why the printer is so cheap
- canadianfella 3y ago[dead]
- greazy 3y agoThat's even worse. Wow.
- circuit10 3y agoI have a similar printer and I think it was just for setup, I remember it saying you can use USB after the initial setup but you need to keep it connected to WiFi as well or something
- userbinator 3y agoThe phrase "opt into" implies there's a choice, but the rest of that paragraph implies there isn't.
- edvinbesic 3y agoMandatory opt-in.
- marcus0x62 3y agoEnshit-in
- myself248 3y ago
- oh_sigh 3y agoMaybe the sticker is just there for people who might want to use wifi (ie most) but don't know it is an option
- dylan604 3y agoIsn't that one of the primary selling points they print on the boxes and plaster on the websites?
- dylan604 3y agoI'm guessing the removal of the sticker voids some warranty, or violates some ToC/EULA/etc. It also wouldn't surprise me if some court agreed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- sliken 3y agoFriends don't let friend buy HP printers. My pick so far is a cheap (under $200) brother lasers for home use.
- turok 3y agoThe Brother grey box is exactly what a printer needs to be, totally anonymous until it is needed circa 3 times a year and then just works.
- foobarian 3y agoDo you have a recommendation for color photo printers? For when grandma is visiting and so on?
- squarefoot 3y agoAlthough Epson doesn't quite have a stellar reputation wrt user friendliness, my WP4515 has worked great for like 7-8 years so far. It's also perfectly supported by Linux. Not sure if the above can be still relevant as that model has been superseded by newer ones.
- graton 3y agoPrint them at your local pharmacy or somewhere else that will do color photo prints. Not worth the hassle, in my opinion, to have a color printer (ink or laser).
- FireBeyond 3y agoCanon. A whole range from 'enthusiast' to 'professional' (I love my Image Pro 1000, but I make a sideline hustle from photography - it's entirely overkill for most - but there are more budget friendly models).
- xeromal 3y agoBrother printers have went this way too. Mine incessantly complains about low toner even when I use brand new ones because they aren't brother branded.
- charonn0 3y agoIs this just a tweet or something? Or am I missing the associated article?
- baz00 3y agoHP are scum but I have to say the most reliable laser I've had is an HP LaserJet Pro M148 and it wasn't expensive. No jams, everything works, no crapware. Done 7000 sheets on it. The only thing you have to do is ignore the low toner warning as it'll do a few hundred pages after that kicks off. This is a vast contrast to the cheap inkjet I got from them before which was drop kicked all the way to the trash after it died replacing the first cartridge. I had a Brother laser before them and the thing used to jam all the time and ate drums.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoCostco requires that all HP printers they sell are fully functional even if you don't subscribe to any of HP's services. That's why the Costco HP printers are often models exclusive to Costco. (They require a similar thing of Sony televisions, which is why Sony TVs have slightly different model numbers at Costco.)
- neilv 3y agoIf Costco would ban all electronics products that phone home, gratuitously depend on servers (which is now most IoT products), and/or spy on the user... I might have to become a lifetime citizen of Costco.
- trurl 3y agohttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdNmOOq6T8Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sdNmOOq6T8Y
- jwells89 3y agoOut of curiosity, do you happen to know the differences for the Costco Sony TVs? It may have changed recently but last I knew Sony TVs had few if any ties to Sony services, come loaded with basically unchanged Google TV, and are perfectly happy to be used as fully offline "dumb" TVs. If that holds true for current Sony TVs it's hard to imagine what would be different in Costco versions.
- LeoPanthera 3y agoCurrently, I'm not convinced there is a difference. There used to be, in that some Sony TVs would require an out-of-the-box firmware update in order to enable all features, but the Costco models didn't. But I don't think that's true with the current generation.
- spywaregorilla 3y agoI feel like people get hung up on silly things. What does "enable all features" mean? Does it mean using the smart tv features? I feel like that's pretty reasonable. I say as someone who just bought a sony tv, declined all features, and just use an hdmi input from an actual computer. Very pleasant experience. Can't say I've ever seen a TV that doesn't actually allow you to do this.
- zapkyeskrill 3y agoThink of the children! There are hordes of bad men out there printing illegal material, sharing it hand to hand, and doing unimaginable things with it. It must be stopped!
- biugbkifcjk 3y agoI bought one of these because it was like $30 and needed it to print off some stuff with color. I had immediately taken the sticker off even realizing until after the fact that they try and limit it to WiFi only. It worked immediately plugging it in to USB on my Linux laptop, so yea.. I guess its only there for people that don't know better?
- mbreese 3y ago> plugging it in to USB on my Linux laptop I think this is the key part... I haven't installed a printer driver from the manufacturer in years. Using CUPS through my Mac or Linux machines "just works". The crazy bloatware drivers are almost always associated with Windows, so if you're using Linux or a Mac, there isn't much of a risk here, is there? Linux even more so...
- quickthrower2 3y agoDidn’t a closed and unfixable printer driver kick off the free software revolution?
- userbinator 3y agoI still wish printers continued to have parallel ports and something relatively standard and simple like ASCII+ESC/P2 compatibility. Instead we got a morass of complexity with proprietary protocols over USB and extremely user-hostile printer firmware.
- judge2020 3y agoDisregarding the anti-consumer part of this, HP instant ink is a pretty good deal. The 910 3-pack on Best Buy is $36 for me, and claims a 315 page yield. Instant ink, on the other hand, offers 100 pages for $6/month, making it about $20 to achieve the same yield of pages. And with the rise of digital records, most people could probably live on the $1/month plan where you get 10 pages and can rollover up to 30 pages with every extra 10 pages costing $1 when you need it. It'd take 3 years of not printing a total of 315 pages to lose money on Instant Ink compared to the price of the new cartridge (I'm on the grandfathered $1 15 pages/month plan).
- isykt 3y agoIf you have the patience / time / energy to track this, god bless. I don't. I want to buy a thing once and forget about it. It's the same reason why I'm subscribed to exactly one digital service.
- zlg_codes 3y agoYes! There are few things as pleasant as having no subscription services to worry about. Bills are plentiful enough as it is, I'm in no hurry to add to them. I love one-time purchases.
- quickthrower2 3y ago3rd party ink ftw. 6c a sheet is obnoxious. It is a good deal like service stations “2 cokes for $5” type deals are.
- kuschku 3y agoMy brother color laser does 3000 pages for 100€.
- Dalewyn 3y agoThere's something oddly apt about a media outlet coloring themselves BSOD blue.
- deepsun 3y agoDo they upload my printed PDFs to their cloud?
- Cloudef 3y agoI'm glad I can just step out and print at the konbini next street.
- qingcharles 3y agoI just typed コンビニ into Google. I'm in Chicago, and bless, it understood exactly what I wanted and gave me a map of all the local convenience stores (and handily translated their names to Japanese to boot).
- kalleboo 3y agoYeah I print so rarely that owning a printer is a waste of space. Plus the convenience store printers have neat tricks like being able to print A3 sheets or stickers.
- millsstanley 3y ago[flagged]
- worewood 3y agoIf corporations are people, HP deserves the death penalty
- goodrichthomas 3y ago[dead]
- goodrichthomas 3y ago[dead]
- dreamcompiler 3y agoNow I want to buy an HP printer, use it in wireless mode with a bogus account, and print 1000 pages a day of 4chan screen shots and posters that say "HP SUCKS."
- 7373737373 3y agoI'd love to see a website where, if you are a verified buyer of a product, you can throw a virtual brick through a corporation's window, and there is a "brick count" top list
- happytiger 3y agoFriends don’t let friends use HP.
- alfiedotwtf 3y agoBack in the day, my primary school paid the printer company (I think it was Epson at the time) $400 (which was a lot of money back then) to "upgrade" the school's (we only had 2 printers for the whole school) printers from black and white to colour. Lo and behold, he opened it up and flipped a single dip switch.
- 7373737373 3y agoIs there a list of corporation shaming websites/projects/organisations somewhere? Edit: I suppose https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_organization is a good start In Germany we have "Mogelpackung des Jahres" ("Cheat packaging of the year") by the consumer center/protection organisation for example that points out companies that abuse shrinkflation https://www.vzhh.de/themen/mogelpackungen/mogelpackung-des-jahres/rama-ist-mogelpackung-des-jahres-2022 https://www.vzhh.de/themen/mogelpackungen/mogelpackung-des-j... Shame is a big driver of achieving cultural/behavioral alignment, the same has to be done with corporations if they misbehave. While legal entities do not care, their employees and customers can be capable of that. Make every such infraction public so the companies' reputation, brand and profits correspond to the morality of its actions. Systemic failures like these need systemic fixes. Maybe it would be a good idea to force companies to publicize product return rates, so managerial brainfarts like these get rewarded accordingly.
- fodkodrasz 3y agoYou'd need no hardware redesign, just not install the connectors during manufacturing. You might need to adjust the automated QA actually. There are lots of parts not installed in electronics if you disassemble something and examine it. The reasons can be multiple, cost saving, using the same PCB for different similar products, etc.
- littlestymaar 3y agoI fins it fascinating that the verge is litterally just embedding a single toot and call that a presse article on which they put ads… How is that not a blatant copyright infringement of the OP? It's not like it's a short citation for illustration, the embeded toot is the entire content here!
- tacker2000 3y agoWhy do people even buy HP printers? I gave up on them a decade ago when I had to download some 300MB “driver” on a clients PC, which of course installed a crapload of other stuff on it.
- iforgotpassword 3y agoReminds me I still need to fix my laserjet 1020. No-nonsense laser printer for those two or three sheets I print each quarter, without having 90% of your ink just evaporate or dry up. It's paper jamming when I insert more than one sheet at a time. I ordered a new pickup stamp and roller already. Unfortunately the pickup stamp was the wrong type and didn't fit, and the roller alone didn't fix it. I just don't print often enough for it to be annoying, but one day this thing will go again. One day....
- memsom 3y agoWe have a very similar printer and I wondered if we had the same sticker. We do, but I obviously peeled it off ages ago because it was stuck randomly to the back of the printer and the USB port is already accessible. I seem to recall having to really mess about with the printer at some point as it stopped functioning with whatever HP online ink scam software it was originally running with. It now just AirPrints.
- p0w3n3d 3y ago"Cooking the frog" "To cook the frog one need to slowly increase the temperature so the frog will not feel stress but relaxation, and when the temperature exceeds some point, the frog will not have strength to jump out" As apparently this cruel recipe probably even does not work in case of this amphibian, it is really great metaphor and it really works in case of people. People can get accustomed to every inconvenience one can imagine, as long as it is accompanied by additional "convenience" attached to it. No cash - you don't need to take money with you. No cable printing - you can print without cables. Ink subscription - you can always have any amount of ink you want (as long as it does not exceed certain amount of pages)
- DougN7 3y agoI had 4 off-brand ink cartridges that suddenly wouldn’t work in my HP inkjet printer. Pissed me off so much I went out and bought a $350 Epson printer. Never again HP. Why did you turn evil :’(