32 ms·

Brother have gotten to where they are now by not innovating

• willvarfar 3y ago
  from osmosifying printer recommendations on HN the last few years, aren't brother printers becoming enshittened too? Nowadays they might try to lock out third party ink and toner cartridges, for example?
  • josephcsible 3y ago
    Yes they are. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
• stevage 3y ago
  Has anyone built a list tracking when each manufacturer reached its peak before starting the decline of enshittification?
• ryankshaw 3y ago
  I'm still using an HP LaserJet 5m that I got used from the local university's surplus sales department for $6 twenty years ago. It was made in 1995, so was 10 years old then and almost 30 years old now. I've had to replace the toner once. Works like a champ! nothing else to add, other than "they don't make 'em like they used to"
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • EternalUsenet 3y ago
    That’s incredible. Does your printer offer SCSI?
    • ryankshaw 3y ago
      I don't know, if that's one of these ports than it does https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pOcfLm3yjtwB-uIJ_v8Un6afZmXl4rDX/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pOcfLm3yjtwB-uIJ_v8Un6afZmX... oh and here's a bonus pic showing the $6 price tag from when I bought it 20 years ago https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oAFemqYAfiHp2lWLqjwYCTI4WW0UMq7-/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oAFemqYAfiHp2lWLqjwYCTI4WW0...
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• benrapscallion 3y ago
  Can someone please recommend a specific Brother color laser model, if I were to purchase it brand new today?
• starttoaster 3y ago
  In the case of simple appliances like the printer, there is just no actual need to innovate. It's like saying the hammer is an imperfect tool for hitting nails. There is nothing about the hammer that requires innovation because its intended purpose is extremely well defined and exceedingly simple. The same is true for printers, at least for generic home use. Your kid needs to print out their research paper before they turn it into their teacher tomorrow, there is no point between hitting the Print icon in MS Word and the paper exiting the machine with content on it that needs streamlining anymore. However, if you're thinking I missed the point, that it's sometimes better to just... not innovate, you're mistaken. I agree with it, but there are absolutely areas where the intended purpose is not well defined or simplistic. Innovation is needed, it just takes experience to know where and when to innovate.
• kazinator 3y ago
  Brother printers are not good at all, in terms of image quality and such. Brother products are roundly recommended because they don't put asshole chips in the cartridges. Brother printers do have fake counters that indicate out of toner/ink, but those can be reset easily and they are not tied to cartridge chips. In spite of this, the devices are cheap, comparable to their competitors whose low prices are subsidized by the ink racket.
• RecycledEle 3y ago
  There is a market for simple, reliable, inexpensive, maintainable equipment. I do not want my car to run its own OS or to get over-the-air updates. Any update for my car should be installed with a socket set. The fact that we still have not standardized on a (very) few kinds of CMYK toners for laser printers and CMYK print heads for inkjets is an indictment of the people at the top of every printer company. Ryobi promised to use one battery on their 18V cordless power tools many years ago. They stayed with it through the switch from NiCd to LiIon. I still buy ONLY Ryobi One+ cordless power tools. Will someone please standardize on one or two 9" wide toners (for 8.5x11 and A4 paper,) and one or two 12" wide toners (for 11x17 and A3 paper?) Make the toners standard and every business that hates stocking dozens of models of toners will flock to your company. They do not have to the world's bet toners. They just have to work. I suggest the use of a common and freely-copied toners from a laser printer whose patents have expired. The printers do not have to be tiny. Leave an extra few inches of height to allow for extra capacity toners that only business customers will buy.
  • RecycledEle 3y ago
    I think I remember a light hearted Sci-Fi story from when I was growing up where the machine spoke with the repairman to guide him on repairing it. That could seriously happen with LLM AIs. Imagine a hardware switch that activates a single board computer (SBC) with a mic, a speaker, a connection to the printer or copier to read status messages, and a LLM that cam answer questions about the device. Companies (and secretaries) would love the one brand of printer or copier that helped you fix their machine.
• davidthewatson 3y ago
  I have a Brother business-class (whatever that means) color laser printer sitting in my wife's home office. It's so perfect, it's beyond even the legendary HP Laserjet 4 it replaced when the old reliable fell over six feet from a shelf and went "ouch". Brother deserves credit for its practice of stealth postmodern retrocomputing, for lack of a better phrase, if you will. Cheap components are durable and scale, whether hardware, software, or SoC blurring the lines between the two. Sadly, what this demonstrates is just how much the cloud dreams of Brother's competitors have diminishing returns because they are so tied up with authoritarian control regimes that have nothing to do with users' experience with their respective devices. Quite the converse.
• m463 3y ago
  I think the newer brother printers might be ... different now. I looked at color lasers and they seem to take TN229 cartridges. There are 3rd party replacements, but they seem to cost more than the brother ones. also, in a twist, most printers on amazon have been strongarmed into doing "amazon dash replacement" stuff bolted on. brother also has added a toner subscription service. And reviews complain that when the printer decides the toner runs out (by numerical count), you can't do a "keep printing anyway". I can't tell without buying a newer printer first, but I think you need to just check reviews first.
• wiseleo 3y ago
  I like Canon ImageCLASS series printers. They are not expensive, reliable, and some of them are software supported through Windows 9x.
• caycep 3y ago
  trying to jam in a Coen Brothers reference I see
• lloydatkinson 3y ago
  What modern laser Brother printer do people recommend? A scanner built in is nice but not essential.
• j45 3y ago
  I'm not sure if there is much more innovation left in printers. Innovation in printers usually means in favour of the manufacturer's profits for too many vendors. Maybe Brother has gotten where they are by being dependable and reliable for what their brand offers and delivers to those who care about it. Their devices often do a lot more out of the box than advertised too. They don't seem to cripple their devices either, you typically get the full suite of software to go with the functionality at any price point. Even their higher end label printers have features to print to them programatically that is often only in higher end printers. Brother has swung above it's weight. Generally third party inks work with them well enough. My most recent printer is an Epson, but otherwise, there's a fair bit of Brother in my life to set, and forget.
• vineetsinha 3y ago
  Planned obsolescence is horrible, no doubt. It's what keeps consumers in debt and military spending higher than it should be, all while hurting the planet. The landline in my grandmother's house is 40 years old and still works. We keep it for when the power goes out, which happens more times than we'd like in California. One of the problems with repairability in the US is cost of labor. It's why there's a casual attitude among many South Asian families to take it back to India etc and have someone fix it. On a larger scale, it's what they do with Toyotas - buy well built but heavily used Toyotas in the west, and ship them to East Asia and Africa where they can be repaired and last another 100,000 miles. I think there's a YC company working on a recyclables marketplace.
• egberts1 3y ago
  Spoke too soon: Brother's new market add-on printer trick called "Refresh": some Brother models now dial home to their centralized server. TL;DR: buy "Refresh"-free Brother printers.
• Woshiwuja 3y ago
  The brother in the office never broke, cant say the same about the HP ones
• ongytenes 3y ago
  If it isn't broke don't fix it... I use to use Canon printers and in the 90s, as computers were becoming more powerful, they moved the "smarts" into the drivers inside the computer reducing cost. The printer no longer accepted anything but dot by dot instructions from the driver. Being strictly windows driver, my new printer was a paperweight with my Linux os. Since then, the Linux Community has developed support from the printers but I moved on to Brother. Canon has lost me for good. I've been a loyal user of Brother printers for decades. They just work, reliably and more economically.
• michaelcampbell 3y ago
  I have one. It works, it's fine, it prints, and replacement toner and parts are cheap. That seems to be too much to ask these days.
• petrusnonius 3y ago
  I’m more surprised there are actually people on Mastodon
• ramraj07 3y ago
  A comparison would be to a kitchenaid stand mixer. Once you’ve perfected a gadget best to stop there and not try and add useless value.
  • ansc 3y ago
    KitchenAid used their advantage into cutting costs, changing pieces into plastic though.
    • legitster 3y ago
      What pieces? If you mean the gearbox, contrary to amateur opinion, nylon is probably a superior material to the cheap metal ones they replaced. Because their mixers are still made in the US, labor saving cuts are much more worthwhile to them than materials. (Their non-mixer offshored lineup is overpriced crap though).
      • crote 3y ago
        They have been cheaping out on a lot of parts. A good example is the removal of the spring & washer used to secure the attachments: they are only a few cents of material, but they greatly increase the life expectancy of the mixer. Now you'll have to get those for $10-$20 from a 3rd party...
        • legitster 3y ago
          > they greatly increase the life expectancy of the mixer Oops. Do they? I ripped mine off years ago. It makes a bit more clatter at low speeds but I haven't noticed any damage.
    • ceejayoz 3y ago
      The plastic gear is intended to function like a fuse. It saves other more expensive parts by failing under too much load.
• seeknotfind 3y ago
  I have a Brother printer. Sometimes it just doesn't print, cancels the job with an error. Very annoying
  • alex_duf 3y ago
    I don't think the bar is very high to be a good printing company. Brother is at the top, but that doesn't mean they're excelling, they're maybe not as visibly trying to actively screw their user base.
    • mnd999 3y ago
      That’s literally what the article says.
  • varjag 3y ago
    Our requires its Windows drivers re-installed every while to even print anything (not an issue with Macs tho). Also, Brother is naturally on with the locked down cartridge, can't-print-bw-cause-you-low-on-magenta bandwagon with all other manufacturers.
• thewisenerd 3y ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20231127074421/https://retro.social/@ifixcoinops/111480744130939877 https://web.archive.org/web/20231127074421/https://retro.soc...
• billpg 3y ago
  Innovation.... I saw a fridge that had an app so you could control it from anywhere. My requirements for a fridge are remarkably simple, to the point the only practical use I could think of an app was alarm that I'd left the door open or something. (If this particular app did have a door-open alarm, it wasn't on the list of features. It did say you could adjust the temperature from your office. A location I'm often worrying about the fridge.)
  • jesterson 3y ago
    Exactly this. Who decided to call useless ideas an "innovation" is beyond my understanding.
    • hef19898 3y ago
      I need a printer to print. Ideally at acceptable prices (I know, ink cartrigaes are like razor blades and that won't change ever). Plus points if it can be connected to a network (which is a given today). I don't have to print when not at home (why would I fax something to myself when I am not at home?). Ideally, as I print photos mainly, I get more then 4 colors and decent color management. Added bonus for scanning (with or without document feeder). Not much else there. Pay-per-page subscriptions are ok, by the way, price wise for home office use. Then it comes down to innovation in the fields of color management, ink mixing and print heads and paper handling. And inks, of course. Anything else is just pointless, and nothing I would call innovation.
      • garethrowlands 3y ago
        Epson make EcoTank inkjet printers ink tanks that you refill from a bottle, not cartridges. It's vastly better than ink cartridges, there's no comparison on price, convenience or environmental impact. The tanks and bottles hold vastly more ink than a cartridge does. The printers are roughly the same price as any inkjet printer. I do not work for Epson.
        • hef19898 3y ago
• Aardwolf 3y ago
  I have a Brother printer, which supports plugging in a USB stick with a PDF to print the PDF. Its PDF parser doesn't seem to support all PDFs, and for some PDFs it will PRINT, on paper, an error message from the PDF parser. So not only did it not print a perfectly valid PDF, it also wasted paper and ink for it. You can't know beforehand which PDFs it'll support or not from looking at them, any computer / phone PDF viewer supports those. It could be as simple as a PDF sent by an airline. They should: 1) use a proper PDF library, not some half baked one 2) if something is wrong with the PDF, show the error on screen, not waste paper for it
  • hellweaver666 3y ago
    This feels like the workflow for a 3dprinter without Octoprint. I get the feature is there, but why on earth would you use it?
  • serf 3y ago
    i've had a lot of Japanese made printers stumble on PDFs for some reason. My Brother and Epson have both have trouble with printing old out-of-print machine manuals that used ancient PDF versions. They'd happily accept the job, and then proceed to crash the print spooler and more-or-less break explorer on more than one machine with the same set of drivers. The problem would go away if I converted the pdf to a newer version or into an entirely different format.
  • recursivecaveat 3y ago
    Heh, I would have preferred that to one of my recent experiences with an HP printer. It would simply silently drop the job only for that specific pdf (an ordinary shipping label of which I had printed many on that machine before). I dug around so many menus trying to figure out where my job was going until I by chance clicked print on a different document. At least with the paper error message I would have known right away to apply the hack of screenshot + print png.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
• waihtis 3y ago
  This article made me think - I haven't printed anything in about 5 years now for personal use (for business, its still mandatory.) Contrast to 10-15 years ago, feels like I would've been needing a printer on a weekly basis, at least.
  • atemerev 3y ago
    You don’t have children, do you? With kids, printer is a necessity.
    • waihtis 3y ago
      I have 4 kids :)
    • AlfeG 3y ago
      2 kids, no reason to but printer. Living without it for 6 years already. If I need to print something - there is a bunch of places where I can do it.
    • Mashimo 3y ago
      Why is that?
      • chongli 3y ago
        Because kids have to print things for school. Lots and lots of things! And schools generally don’t have the budget to let every kid print everything they need, so they push this cost onto the families.
        • atemerev 3y ago
          This, and also you print coloring books, math quizzes, puzzles, and everything else. Yes, these things are available on tablets too, but I think working with pencils and paper is also important.
    • master-lincoln 3y ago
• artemonster 3y ago
  I have some basic laser printer (I think its 5500D) from them and it works like a charm. also added rpi with printer server so that I can print wirelessly from all macs, iphones, windows pc and from my toaster and I couldnt be more happy.
  • theanonymousone 3y ago
    May I ask how the cartridge replacement works with Brother, and Laser printers in General? I am quite annoyed after "breaking" two Inkjet printers in 5-6 years and want to buy a laser one this time, but am not sure how is the cartridge issue different between laser and inkjet. Do laser cartridges last longer? Is it less problematic to use non-original cartridges?
    • torstenvl 3y ago
      I have a HL-L2340DW I bought in 2017. I've replaced the toner drum once, in 2021, for $55. You can get cheaper off-brand replacements pretty easily but I didn't bother. The amortized cost of the genuine thing worked fine for me.
    • artemonster 3y ago
      I use off brand from amazon, also replacing drum unit occasionally (I think it happened like 2 times in last 7 years?). The whole procedure is 5 minutes long. Its dirt cheap, compared to inkjet
    • extrapickles 3y ago
      Toner cartridges generally last a few thousand pages and are much more tolerant of infrequent use than ink cartridges. Unlike Ink cartridges, laser cartridges don’t dry out or need to waste ink priming. The image drum does need to be occasionally replaced (not often, 10k+ pages), though if you tolerate defects in prints it can last longer. How well non-original cartridges work is highly dependent on the printer model. Some have more complex authentication of the cartridges and others it’s a simple page counter. The main downside is color is a significant increase in cost of the printer as fairly expensive pieces need to be duplicated for each color.
• hellweaver666 3y ago
  I have a Dell 1350cnw, which is a rebranded Brother CMYK laser. I bought it in 2009 and it still works perfectly today (except for the fact I have to keep an old computer around as a print server because Dell refuse to release 64 bit drivers for it). I will almost certainly replace it with another Brother printer. I mostly only use it these days to print colouring pages for my kids and the very rare physical letter.
  • actionfromafar 3y ago
    You can likely select another (compatible) driver in MacOS and have it work without the original Dell drivers.
    • airtonix 3y ago
      [dead]
• ekianjo 3y ago
  Brother printers also happen to have pretty good Linux support which is amazingly rare for Japanese manufacturers (Epson and Canon never do that)
  • hef19898 3y ago
    Epson and HP work fine under Linux for basic stuff, for anything more fancy, well, yes, there doesn't seem to be much Linuy support around.
    • ekianjo 3y ago
      HP is not a Japanese manufacturer
      • hef19898 3y ago
        True.
  • deng 3y ago
    I have an Epson and it works under Linux with their ESC/P drivers: https://www.openprinting.org/driver/epson-escpr/ https://www.openprinting.org/driver/epson-escpr/ It is true that they don't officially provide support for these drivers, but they work fine for me and are even GPL-licensed so that they can be (and are) packaged with Debian. Printer was immediately recognized via Avahi and worked pretty much out of the box. I must also say that I really like the new "EcoTank supertank" concept, it's way cheaper and ink lasts a long time. So it's not like all innovation is bad. I had a Brother before and it actually had quite a few issues (leaked ink like crazy, and very poor photo print quality) but admittedly, it lasted a long time.
  • ndiddy 3y ago
    Epson's Linux support for both their printers and scanners is great in my experience, although they don't provide tech support if you can't get it working. They even open sourced the Linux port of Epson Scan 2 (their scanning client software).
• cookiengineer 3y ago
  Some could argue that Brother printers adhere to the POSIX / UNIX philosophy: Solve one problem only, and solve it well. In the end it somewhat boils down to pure greed. Instead of stabilizing production costs and/or reusing generic components to ease up manufacturing and repair - HP, Epson, Canon, Dell, Samsung, Kyocera and others try to hype their products with whatever tech stack is currently in trend. "growth hacking" is literally their job description. There eventually will be a ChatGPT printer on the market. It's inevitable due to what kind of people manage a printer business: It's not the type of people that know how to build printers anymore.
  • antod 3y ago
    I haven't actually had any printer at all for a while, but we had a cheap networked double sided Brother laser that lasted for ages. One of the best bits was the no nonsense Windows drivers and easy Linux Postscript compatibility that just worked out of the box. I was willing to forgive a whole lot of flaws due to it's low price, but it turned out have very few.
    • jacobgorm 3y ago
      I never got actual Postscript to we work on Linux and my Brother. It looks like the ripping runs on the host side, and what gets printed is bitmaps. Works fine on Mac and windows though.
  • waveBidder 3y ago
    thanks I hate it. definitely wouldn't bet against you on that.
  • vidarh 3y ago
    "As a language model I don't think this is the tone you should take in a letter to your printer manufacturer. Instead of the long string of expletives, here is a suggested letter of praise for your printers reliability, and an order for more toner instead: ..."
    • 3y ago
• ansc 3y ago
  My Brother printer is one of my better purchases to be honest. I sound like a complete shill, but it's connected to wifi (and it just happily connects even if it's been off for a month or two), and all devices can just connect to it and print. Never need to reconnect or do anything with it. It's a printer that prints. I love it.
  • philistine 3y ago
    I bought a Brother printer with a scanner at the top. No drivers, just works with the scanning software that's on macOS with zero zetup. They've made the best scanner by refusing to innovate in that area as well.
  • PennRobotics 3y ago
    printing from a smartphone over Wi-Fi with no extra drivers :)
    • LeanderK 3y ago
      still feels like magic and it's 2023. I am regularly surprised it just works
    • markdown 3y ago
      model # please.
      • speed_spread 3y ago
        Brother HL-L5200DW.
      • PennRobotics 3y ago
        DCP-L3550CDW
      • dv35z 3y ago
        This is the one I’ve got - pleased with it. Brother Compact Monochrome Laser Printer, HLL2390DW, Flatbed Copy & Scan, Wireless Printing, Duplex Two-Sided Printing, https://a.co/d/8vMWJCK https://a.co/d/8vMWJCK
• rmoriz 3y ago
  Brother (printers and sewing machines) feels like Zoom (audio recorders): a bit conservative but they are very well made and long lasting. And consistent. A USP in today's world of crap-loaded, buggy short living throw away products.
  • mxmbrb 3y ago
    We could use an international magazine or media channel that focuses solely on tools that have prooven to be robust and reliable. And on trustworthy companies with good value for money ratio. I'd love to spend double for some things, if I'd be able to know it lasts way longer and works better.
    • Doctor_Fegg 3y ago
      That's kind of what the Wirecutter was until (irony of ironies) they started "innovating" too.
  • KennyBlanken 3y ago
    They're not well made. The Zoom recorder's DACs are incredibly noisy.
  • octacat 3y ago
    TBH, flaky sewing machine would be a disaster, you cannot just go and restart it. Apps working like a sewing machine is something from the imagination nowadays.
• causi 3y ago
  Have people forgotten that Brother, too, has become enshittified? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
  • mjevans 3y ago
    I had forgotten. Is there anyone left that isn't BS though?
  • misja111 3y ago
    I'm amazed that there is still no legislation to control this. E.g. consumers should have the option to choose between a cheap printer with vendor ink lock-in, or a more expensive one but with free choice of ink. It seems like something that the EU could make itself useful with, for instance.
  • erremerre 3y ago
    The most interesting comment and there is absolutely nobody commenting on it. :(
  • Ambroos 3y ago
    And just like the other printer manufacturers Brother now offers an "EcoPro" ink/toner subscription, a copy of HP's Instant Ink model.
• snvzz 3y ago
  An Open Source Hardware printer is sorely needed. It would force companies that make printers to be honest, as otherwise we'd just get the open hardware one that doesn't force bullshit upon us.
  • _ugfj 3y ago
    Yes, much like Framework has completely upended the laptop industry. /s
    • yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
      The laptop market was never as bad as printers.
  • mstngl 3y ago
    I‘m asking this obvious question as well from time to time, and indeed some insights were given here: Ask HN: Why are there no open source 2d printers? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721
• legitster 3y ago
  I have a 14 year old Brother hl-2140 that still prints (like crap) but I am still nostalgic for since it got me through college. Always works with no fancy drivers and aftermarket toner is cheap. Part of the reason though is selection bias. I prefer the simplicity of a B&W laser printer and don't mind the "lo-fi" aesthetic.
  • vlovich123 3y ago
    Yeah that printer model is my favorite for home printing needs. In the rare case I want to print photos, I’d rather pay a little markup and have them printed at a local pharmacy where I won’t have to deal with the BS that consumer inkjet printers do (+ maintenance is someone else’s problem). It’s like $50 now and the toner lasts for soooo many pages it’s basically free. In other words, for the price of an inkjet cartridge that lasts maybe a year, this thing lasts forever.
• yalok 3y ago
  I have 2 Brother laser printers - BW and Color. BW works like charm, always. The Color one can’t print multiple copies of the same page without re-uploading it from MacBook for every copy. This gets aggravated that the data transfer speed looks slower for the Color printer (it may be the same speed, but maybe Color printer has to send more data) - so the effective print speed is many times lower than the max speed.
• niemandhier 3y ago
  Buying a black/white only brother laser printer solved all my printing problems. Cartridges last for thousand of pages; no strange cloud requirements; the FritzBox registers the printer immediately and all devices in the local net can print. Non of this was the case for my previous HP or Epson printers…
  • hef19898 3y ago
    It worked surprisingly well for my Epson so. Connect to WiFi, all devices find it, including Linux ones, without additional drivers or software. Additional software is needed for photo prints (color management and stuff like that) and (maybe?) scanning. I didn't try scanning without additional software, as I installed it with the photo print software. And since that software inly works under Windows anyway, I never bothered with scanning under Linux. Printing works just fine so.
    • amluto 3y ago
      GNOME ships a scanner app that can scan from many (newish) networked scanners without a driver. The UI is, ahem, about as minimal as you would expect from a GNOME app, but it works. (Seriously, GNOME, whether to scan one side or two sides is actually important and the desired mode changes all the time. Would it kill you to dedicate some screen real estate to it, instead of filling everything with empty post-modern white space?)
  • jen729w 3y ago
    Cartridges that you can get from cheapinkcartridges.ru and they work just fine.
  • chongli 3y ago
    I think people forget that ink is a liquid which dries up and leaves a sticky mess. They think of the printer as a magic technology box that somehow is supposed to deal with that mess perfectly, without issues or waste. Well it doesn’t work! Ink needs to be flushed to keep the lines clear. Inkjet printers need to print regularly for optimal performance and low waste. If you need a printer to sit on the shelf for 4 months between print jobs, laser is the only game in town. Toner is a solid powder and it lasts forever without issues. No clogging, no mess.
• poisonborz 3y ago
  Among all the praises, well, there are still things they could fix/upgrade. Some of my printers don't wake up from sleep in certain networks and clients report them as offline (a widespread problem if you search for it). Also it'd be nice if they'd support wifi beyond N (this is sadly common among wifi devices in general).
  • pontifier 3y ago
    I've bought at least five brother laser printers because I wanted one everywhere I go. They've all worked great except for the last one (HL-L2390DW). That sleep problem has caused me to consider other brands instead of just buying my default. I'm betting lots of people haven't experienced this, because their old printers are still working great.
• aljgz 3y ago
  The growth mindset is incredible for expanding when your product is in its early ages. But there should be a "sustain" mindset at some point. First you push to grow the market, or your market share. When returns on your efforts become diminishing, you push to improve how much you earn of each customer/each sale. At some point there should be a mindset that our company is worth X dollars, and we should sustain that. What happens instead is companies keep rewarding executives by increases in revenue, they keep rewarding product managers similarly, and product managers selectively choose metrics that optimize immediate revenue, at the expense of brand loyalty. This is happening to almost every tech company, and the exceptions are rare gems. In android, if I click on a link in facebook messenger that takes me to facebook, the back button takes me "back" to facebook's home screen instead of to the messenger app. Tapping back button again does nothing. I have to switch back to messenger manually. That's 5-6 taps/swipes instead of 1, because a product manager's bonus in FB depends on how well they beg for more engagement. As a result, I rarely use any of these products. I used to spend some time in Instagram/FB. I close LinkedIn immediately after an important interaction for similar reasons. I made a mistake of buying another Samsung product after years. Never again. I made a mistake of buying another HP product, never again. I might still consider Dell only because of how well they supported me with their monitor flicker. None of these products have a defect that's caused by poor design, programming, or manufacturing. They all suffer from growth-obsessed mindset. Brother is what it is, not because of lack of innovation, but because of deliberate evasion of short-sighted greed.
  • gofreddygo 3y ago
    > At some point there should be a mindset that our company is worth X dollars, and we should sustain that Yes! What I see instead is a shoot-yourself-in-the-foot mindset. Its everywhere I see. I wish there was a way to see and fix this before its too late. The right way to treat your loyal customers is also micro-intangible, hard to show clear numbers and so does not bear any rewards for a manager taking this approach. Instead, the opposite of screwing loyal customers for new ones is rampant, easy to cook up numbers and so amply rewarded not just limited to tech companies. Unless the same management chain is responsible for new customers and leaving ones, this is an internal conflict of interest and its effects only show at the macro level. I've seen many once-popular restaurants go this route, losing long time repeat customers who prefer well priced, familiar drinks and dishes over hit or miss exotic overpriced ones. They don't complain, they just stop coming back. Car manufacturers, Appliance manufacturers, Food chains, Internet Service Providers, Telcos, tech startups are all guilty of this. Factions at MS, Goog, AAPL too are guilty. Exceptions here are really really rare. I've never bought a brother printer, but it will be my next.
• shimonabi 3y ago
  I bought a Brother laser printer a while back but it set itself up by default using the WSD protocol. After some time it stopped responding to the network and I could use it only after reinstalling the driver every time I wanted to print. Only after I set it up with the TCP/IP protocol, it works fine and is available every time.
  • maratc 3y ago
    TIL protocols other than TCP/IP exist and are used for connecting printers.
• yair99dd 3y ago
  Another their Linux supported thermal printers. https://github.com/pklaus/brother_ql https://github.com/pklaus/brother_ql It did take Time to stabilize the design, anything before the ql700 is clunky. But the ones I tried after have been Great
  • RobotToaster 3y ago
    Wish I'd seen the web interface when setting mine up for remote printing, the first party drivers come as a x86 only rpm binary that worked terribly. I ended up buying a thin client and installing full windows 10 as a print server.
• dazc 3y ago
  Is there a best version, say as replacement for a basic ink jet printer doing an average of 2 pages a day? I have a basic Canon which, to be fair, has worked well for ten years or more but I want to be ready for when it eventually stops working.
  • chx 3y ago
    you should be able to get a not much used Brother color laser from eBay for less than 150 bucks...
  • CrlNvl 3y ago
    I have a Brother DCP L2530DW: black and white laster, wi-fi, with scanner. Works perfectly for my use case (scanning invoices, printing tickets and mail), no need for a specific app be it on Android, Windows or Linux. I'm only using the Brother Windows app for scanning purposes, as the OCR works well for my needs. It's been 2.5 years, no issues whatsoever, just needed one toner change after a while.
    • cubefox 3y ago
      I've recently bought the same one. Only thing that surprised me was the double-line dot-matrix LCD from ~30 years ago. In terms of usability this isn't great (entering the WiFi password was no fun), but most of the time it's used with a second device anyway.
  • hef19898 3y ago
    I might be one of the very few ro see it like that, but for low print volume withoutbany speciap needa regarding print quality and size, I'd propably go for one Canons or Epsons pay-per-page subscription models. Costs oer page are dirt cheap, printers aren't very expensive neither and there models with decent document scanning. There is a reason laser printers usually have their own room or remote corner in offices, they aren't really great for air quality.
    • vlovich123 3y ago
      I don’t think 2 pages a day is going to be base for most rooms in the home with decent ventilation. Like if you live in a city I suspect you breathe in more particulates from tire wear in the air. As for price, a hl-2140 is $50 and will last you for 10k pages if not more. I don’t think inkjet pricing economics ever win here even with the pay per use the latest “pricing innovation” the inkjet companies have invented. I love that my laser printer has 0 maintenance aside from filling the paper tray and I never have to think about it. It ran out toner after like 7 years of very occasional printing and there was lots of advance warning. The printer itself just works with no issues.
• inamberclad 3y ago
  Eh. My Canon G3060 ink tank printer is great. No cartridges, no DRM, CUPS and scanner support on Linux out of the box. Only downsides are no document feeder for scanning and no double-sided printing (really Canon?). Other good printers do still exist.
• zelphirkalt 3y ago
  Had a Brother printer once ... never again. I will just say "Cleaning". 'nough said.
• wodenokoto 3y ago
  But where are brother printers though? TFA basically just say “they are what tech people recommend for printers”, and while becoming a favorite amongst tech people isn’t a bad goal, I’m not sure it’s a great yard stick for business success.
  • criddell 3y ago
    I wonder what their yard sticks are because their sales process sucks. I was just on Brother’s website thinking I would get a printer and 20 minutes later I’ve given up. Their website is really bad. In my first five minutes I think I closed the pop up advertising their Refresh ink program five times. They have a soooo many models but thankfully there’s a help-me-choose button. I went through that and at the end it recommended something that had everything I need. But there’s no buy button at the end. The more information button says I need to contact a dealer for pricing. I think checking duplex-copying pushed me into their business line (even though I chose home at the start). So I started over and skipped that option and at the end I got a different recommendation but again, no buy button and the only listed retailer was Walmart. I searched for it on Google and I think it might be a discontinued model. Their help—me-choose function didn’t help much because my number one feature is that it not have DRM’d cartridges (ie accepts third party cartridges) and that’s not something you can filter by.
• tmikaeld 3y ago
  Here in Sweden, there's the same feel about the OKI printers. I've had a lot of clients with office and I do remote support, always recommended OKI because they just work. This is all that's needed from a printer: - 1 day delivery to the door (yes, from OKI). - Register and get 1 free large black cartridge. - Print mono-tone or single color, don't need all of them. - Windows and MacOS installs drivers OOB, no need to download or install anything. - It connects to WIFI, everyone can connect and print. - Only 1 e-mail from OKI in a year! (From registration)
  • dade_ 3y ago
    OKI printers are excellent, I never see them on the consumer market in Canada. There were 2 brands in the 90’s that caught my attention as extraordinarily reliable when I worked at a computer store in the 90’s, Brother and OKI. OKI performs very well in terrible environments such as woodworking shops (over a decade with sawdust everywhere). HP and Lexmark were awesome for service contract work.
• Joel_Mckay 3y ago
  Most models are reliable, compatible with *nix network drivers, and don't pull shenanigans when you need them to work. The only issue I saw is the toner color match on laser models could be a bit better. Still highly recommended for anything except photos. "Innovating" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk
  • hef19898 3y ago
    A laser printer that can print good quality photos would be a real innovation so, wouldn't it?
    • Joel_Mckay 3y ago
      Yeah, but it would likely cost more than a car. =) The high-speed inkjet-bar systems and Dye-sublimation printing kind of specialized in photographic printing. Patents do expire eventually. I think most people mistake 23 year old ideas as "innovative" when they enter the high-volume consumer markets. Derivative and opportunistic is a different business model.
      • hef19898 3y ago
        If I pay that much, car prices, for a printer I'll propably take a a1 pigment photo printer or some such. One, propably accidental, innovation was Epsons ET-8550 / ET-8500: Dye ink based tank printers in A3+ and A4 respectively with two blacks and grey. They produce very decent photo prints, even B/W, decent color management and incredibly low cost per page for inks. They are somewhat pricey so, but can double as a home office printer. Something a, say, Canon Pro-200 cannot. And I am not sure if print quality is so much different, both being dye ink printers (the Epson ones have a second pigment ink which is used for certain media settings, works reasonably well on normal photo paper but not great, results are supposed to be very good on some fine art papers which I haven't tried yet). I say accidental, because Epson never marketed those two as photo printers. There is a reason so why no decent photo printer is included in any pay-per-page service, otherwise those would be great!
  • 3y ago
• tragomaskhalos 3y ago
  see also: microwaves A microwave needs two dials - one for power level, and one for time. Not a calculator keypad, not buttons with +1 and +10 on them or any of that nonsense - dials please. And start/stop buttons if you insist. That's it. It does not need a 'defrost chicken drumsticks' programme cluttering up the ui, because that function is far better fulfilled by a human repeatedly running the thing at low power for a few mins then poking the food with a finger
  • katbyte 3y ago
    I hate dials on microwaves, it’s annoying to enter an exact time. Keypad and start/stop buttons please. If we are going to get fancy wifi/Ethernet just for ntp so the time is always right.
    • layer8 3y ago
      Digital dials with a pseudo-log scale are the best and fastest to enter and adjust precise times.
    • maratc 3y ago
      I don't have current time display on my microwave, it doesn't hinder my microwave performance in any way, so that problem doesn't exist for me.
      • bitsandboots 3y ago
        Sure the performance isnt hindered. The microwaves will keep microwaving. The food will just be blasted into an inedible state. Dealing with this right now; At someone's place with such a dial microwave and they work around its incredible lack of precision at the consequence of burned or frozen food.
• makach 3y ago
  I've had my fair share of printers over the years. They've always caused me significant rage and frustration (not necessarily in that order) Last 4 years, I've owned a brother b/w laser printer. I replaced the original cartridge with a long life cartridge after the original was depleted. It just works, it prints from my work pc, mobile phones, iPad, private computer, and even guests needing to print can connect and print. Previous frustration of low quality, special paper, engine failures etc. is nothing but a faint memory.
• hlandau 3y ago
  Here are my complaints about a Brother LED printer (HL-3170CDW): Rasterisation: - It supports PostScript, but the rasteriser is so slow it's a problem. If you print a PDF without any transparency in it it's fine. If you print a PDF with the slightest bit of transparency in it, expect a 30 second delay of the "Data" light blinking per page. This destroys the print speed and probably wastes toner due to not having the next page ready in time. - Its official print driver isn't just a PPD but has some binary blob Linux executable configured as a filter. This is obviously completely unusable on non-x86 platforms. I assume the object here is to rasterise stuff on the host before sending it to the printer to avoid the above issue, but it is a proprietary solution. - Even using the official drivers on Windows, plenty of documents take noticable time to rasterise per page (e.g. heavy PDFs containing high-DPI scans taking tens of seconds per page), and you still don't get the rated print speed. So the above doesn't fix rasterisation time anyway. The consumables game: - The toner cartridges for this printer are NOT chipped. This is good. It's actually incredible how it works; there is a 1 bit mechanical 'register' on each toner cartridge which comes set from the factory, and when the printer senses it, it clears it mechanically and resets some settings such as page count since last cartridge change. - However, after accidentally buying the wrong cartridges for a newer kind of Brother printer, which had a very obvious set of electric contacts added, it's become clear that Brother is now chipping its newer toner. This cannot bode well IMO. - Furthermore, the printer will refuse to print after a certain amount of time with a given toner cartridge. Sometimes it will detect there doesn't seem to be toner in it and you can fix this by taking out and shaking it. But, as per the service manual, there is also a hard cutoff after which it just won't print (unless you use the service mode to make it pretend you've inserted a new cartridge). According to the service manual, this is because there is a 'bias voltage' which needs to be adjusted over time as a cartridge is used, and this is reset when you insert a new cartridge. Hence why they have the 1-bit mechanical register. The problem is that their bias voltage lookup table with respect to page count so far seems to run out after the rated number of pages, so it just refuses to print after that even if you have toner in there. You can use service mode to reset this and make it act like there's a new cartridge in there, thereby resetting the bias voltage to the initial value, but I assume this is done for a reason and would lead to suboptimal results(?). So the effective result is that Brother LED printers will automatically demand a new cartridge after a certain number of pages, even if toner is remaining. I'm currently substantially more happy with a Canon G650 tank-fed inkjet. It's been about a year now and I still haven't had to refill it, which means it consumes consumables even more slowly than the Brother. Of course one of the great things about tank-based designs are they can't be chipped and the ink level monitoring is open-loop. I will also say the Brother is now unusable for colour printing, as it comes out all garbled. Unclear why this is, perhaps it is due to some bad third-party toner (I never buy genuine), so I'm not really holding this against Brother, but it is another downside in practical terms. IMO printer manufacturers should be banned from selling print cartridges, and should be required to publish specifications for their manufacture instead.
• znpy 3y ago
  I got the hp laserjet mfp118dw and it's been just fine. it's black and white, it does front/back and it works off the built-in drivers, over the network. I was in doubt exactly between this printer and a brother printer (similar features) but for the brother printer just wasn't sure it would have worked, and during the pandemic I didn't want to risk it.
• rmm 3y ago
  I got one of the brother mono laser printers. Man it just works. I set it up once many moons ago and it has never once not worked. I think I got half my office and most of my family onto it. It’s fast enough, duplex prints and yeah just legendary products
• Aeolun 3y ago
  The nice thing about Brother is that their products have so far lasted forever, so even if they go bad I can enjoy my current printer for at least the next 10 years.
• nicman23 3y ago
  honestly i had had fewer problems with the custom (meaning bad) ender 3 i have than HP, espon, whatever inkjet printers. Laser printers are only marginally better. Friday i wasted 3 hours because windows decided it did not want to print anything.
• cammikebrown 3y ago
  Brother has always been a very good brand of printer. I used to be a printer repair person. To me, the article reads like, "Every printer brand got way worse, except for Brother!"
• lqet 3y ago
  I would argue that what other manufacturers are doing is not innovation. It's cargo-cult innovation, adding something that looks modern and innovative, but in reality is just a regression. This is now commonly called enshittification.
• T3RMINATED 3y ago
  [dead]
• netchkin 3y ago
  I worked at a company famous for making printers on a highly secretive and innovative project 8 years ago. You all know the fainting goats that get stun because their nervous system shuts down when flood with overexcitement? An innovative idea appears and suddenly, every single person wants a stake in it so much that no movement forward is possible. On top of that, no one knows what they are supposed to build anymore. Large and inflexible, these corporations are great at hiding the stagnation until the budget eventually runs out.
  • brazzy 3y ago
    Was is the Blockchain printer someone else in this thread joked about?
    • netchkin 3y ago
      It was more like a jump from a dumb phone to today's smartphone, but instead of a phone, imagine... A printer, and instead of apps, imagine enterprise features and services.
• RantyDave 3y ago
  Ahhh. Now you've made me all wistful thinking about HP LaserJet 4's.
  • timbit42 3y ago
    I have a client still running one. I replaced the drum with the only one I could find online about 12 years ago. It probably won't last much longer though.
• vidarh 3y ago
  I'll add to the voices of praise for Brother. I got mine after an Epson multi-function device stopped allowing me to scan without first figuring out how to unclog the print head became the final straw. I'm not buying another Epson device again.
• pitdicker 3y ago
  My Brother HL2240D (ca. €100) started to see some wear on the wheel that picks up pages after ca 80.000 prints. I combined some parts with another HL2250 that had some wear, and was good to go for a few more years. Rock-solid devices! I finally picked up a new HL-L2375DW (and passed on the trusty old printer) and have to admit Brother made excellent innovations. As far as there were any annoyances, they are fixed. I no longer turn it off, it remains in standby sipping <<1W of power. And driverless printing is just great.
• oliwarner 3y ago
  I agree —we all have a HL20xx on a shelf that still works perfectly, right?— but their SMB colour laser printers are just as bulletproof. These have had some mild innovation and software nonsense which I'm sure will age like soft cheese, but you cannot overstate how amazing driverless printing is. Linux, Android, iOS all print, scan, no setup, full feature-set no questions asked. Blew my mind. Three years and thousands of prints later, and I'm certain it's the best £400 spent on a printer. Wish they made a large format model at similar specs and price.
• TheChaplain 3y ago
  Preaching to the choir here, but yes, my Brother L2357 mono laser printer is a really good purchase. Windows, Linux or Android, all of them connects wireless and prints, and no funny stuff with toner cassettes. Perhaps not financially smart, but I buy my toner from Brother just to support them as a thank you for this piece of hardware.
• can3p 3y ago
  Their main innovation is the lack of greed. No cartridge lock-in, no subscription business, none of this nonesense. Just this fact makes them a no-brainer
  • hashtag-til 3y ago
    This mindset is more like starting from a real problem and solving it. Many companies today start from the solution (yes, LLM, I'm looking you) and then looking for the problem.
  • MostlyStable 3y ago
    New brother printers have cartridge drm chips
    • Astronaut3315 3y ago
      The lower end models do, but my "new" (refurbished) HL-L8360CDW does not.
• Arnt 3y ago
  I've printed on Brothers most of the time since 2003, and… not innovating? Each new model adds a feature or two and changes something about the innards. (HL-1450, MFC-8880, MFC-8890, MFC-L3770, some of those at the same time.)
• Brajeshwar 3y ago
  In India, Brother is not a known brand. They don’t advertise at all. Almost all stores have also shut down. So, by default, everyone almost buys the usual HP, Canon, Epson, etc. I purchased an Ink-Tank Printer in 2018 and have been using it with no issues. I have refilled the printer only once in the last 5-years. I live in a close-gated but large community. During the pandemic, I help with printing -- a lot, from documents to photos to whatnot. It survived. My daughters use it for school work, printing stickers, taking photos, etc. Now, my suggestion is -- Brother. Three of my friends have bought them and are all very happy. Brother works.
  • Aeolun 3y ago
    > Brother works. It is both sad and fantastic that they could use this as the slogan for their company and it’d just be an accurate statement (as opposed to their competitors that do not work).
• rwaksmunski 3y ago
  The ones before chipped toners were great. I keep on refilling the original starter cartridge with $10 toner powder, no need to reset or anything like that. It just works. Spectacular price/performance ratio.
  • criddell 3y ago
    It’s kind of a bummer that Brother are going down the DRM’d cartridge route too. Maybe enshittification is inevitable for Brother too, they are just taking longer to get there.
    • rwaksmunski 3y ago
      Funny thing is, once the original toner is due for replacement I'm going to replace it with an original one. My fear with DRMed cartridge is not that I can't use aftermarket one, it's me buying original that might not work reliably due to complexity of the DRM.
• pembrook 3y ago
  Brother is just as terrible as all the other printer manufacturers but for some reason their refusal to care about improving their products is seen as virtuous. I’m sitting right next to a brand new brother printer that, once per month, forces me to unplug it, reboot, and re-enter my Wi-Fi password using a nightmarishly Byzantine “up/down” input mechanism…into a LCD display seemingly from 2002. Would really love even a mediocre mobile app to help with this (somehow mine doesn’t support it). A quick internet search shows my experience is not uncommon. Brand is a powerful thing I guess. 15 years ago you release a somewhat not-terrible product in a stale category…and decades later you can do no wrong. Makes sense I guess, how many people have had the chance to evaluate first-hand more than 2-3 printers in their life.
  • c048 3y ago
    I had a similar issue, problem was a problematic WiFi-router. I got clued in when other devices were having sporadic disconnects once in a blue moon. Turned out that (unlike the brother) they also lost connection but managed to usually auto-reconnect on their own, hiding the issue. After replacing the problematic router all my issues went away. Not that it'll solve your issue with any guarantee, but if you haven't looked into it yet... .
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• avidphantasm 3y ago
  There is a similar phenomenon going on with home appliances. Since the reliability of most all appliances has declined over the last decade or so (based on talking to repair people and from what I read from self-described repair experts on r/HVAC, so grain of salt) the advice on what appliance to buy is something like: buy the appliance with the fewest features you can get away with (oh and avoid the 2-3 brands that particularly have trouble). I think the situation with printers and appliances share a common cause, the financialization of firms that is part of “late-stage” capitalism as evidenced by the shift between C-M-C transactions to M-C-M, and now M-M’ (see https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/daskapital/section2/ https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/daskapital/section2/).
  • duckworth 3y ago
    Yep, after dealing with all the frustration of "high efficiency" washing machines that would constantly have error codes mid cycle, not wash clothes well, etc. I ended up paying more for a Speed Queen. It uses traditional technology without complex electronics that ensures simplicity, longevity, and ease of use.
• danpalmer 3y ago
  Not Innovating only works when the entire industry has reached a certain point. Printers obviously have, the innovation that is happening sucks, and the market is likely retracting as more things move digital only. But if you look at, say, fashion, it's clear that the market still needs "innovation" (by that I mean new fashions, new trends, etc). If you stop doing this, you don't get the next generation, and your customers slowly age out and your market shrinks. Forget about growth, de-growth is literally unsustainable, and businesses need to be sustainable. Identifying whether the market needs the innovation or not is hard. Smartphones are in a weird place right now where each generation feels a little less convincing, and people are starting to talk about whether innovation is needed. We're not quite seeing the rise of "Brother" like products yet, but we are seeing an increased focus on longevity which is likely an early indicator.
• kgbcia 3y ago
  Same for appliances. Too much new tech to fail
• ecmascript 3y ago
  Well, just being a great maintainer of a great product could be argued to be innovative in today's world.
• quickthrower2 3y ago
  I sold a brother printer when moving country. How often can you say that? A printer that last long enough that it is possible to sell it! They are my preferred brand since 90s but they are venturing into the asshole design with respect to ink costs and tactics. I use 3rd party cartridges. Really why are cartridges being dumped a thing, why aren’t printers taking low waste bottles?
• rf15 3y ago
  Our Brother printer and sewing machines serve us well. After years of Canon, Samsung and others everyone in my family settled on brother products for their reliability and because they forego the usual anti-consumer antics of the other manufacturers.
• anymouse123456 3y ago
  I bought my Brother printer 10 years ago and she's still doing great work. There is nothing even close to this brand. To experience the polar opposite, fire up an HP sometime.
• transfire 3y ago
  HP used to be workhorse printers back when they acquired TIs tech. They started going down hill about 20 years ago. Brother was smart and took the mantle from them. (I only wish Xerox was as smart. I still miss my Phaser wax printer).
• globular-toast 3y ago
  I have a Samsung laser that just prints. Have they stopped making them now? I'll just this one till it breaks. Hopefully by then there will still be simple printers available. This is like with "smart" TVs. I just want a screen. Fuck right off with your godawful software. The only easy devices I've found for this are projectors. I know it's possible to find "professional" market panels, but it shouldn't be that hard.
• hereforcomments 3y ago
  I recently bought at a physical store of a large chain an "open box", unused HP LaserJet printer. I asked why it was returned, they said the buyers could not activate it. I was like "okay, lol, I'm a sw engineer, it would take 30 seconds to do that". I bought it and spend like 2-3 hours installing-uninstalling HP's crap software just to make it work. The quality of the prints are great and it works fine now but I'll never buy a HP ever again. I just want to plug it in and print. If I need additional settings, I'll install the related HP software but forcing it is very bad. Also still has not figured it out how to connect it to the WiFi so I use USB...
• octacat 3y ago
  Enshitification is not innovation. I would love for my sony camera to have good wireless connectivity, instead they wanna me to buy their cloud service. Just because of how bad and not tested their usb-c connectivity is. But all the youtube "influencers" would suggest you go get a sony camera (using our affiliated links). Oh, but then I remember AirPlay for audio having all kind of weird issues and delays even with hardware which works. So, wireless would sound good but would be broken for the important session. Innovations in 2023 are "we stick our cloud in the product even if it does not make sense and we will annoy people to death with it". Or marketing shit like 100 megapixels sensors and slow cards/ports/CPUs to work with these megapixels. But sounds cool.
• Farbklex 3y ago
  I want to believe that there is a "a-lot-of-millions" business opportunity for open source, easy to repair printers that just work without giving you any crap. Kinda like "The Framework" laptopts but for printers.
• vachina 3y ago
  Brother didn’t stop innovating, they innovated by figuring out a way to make their printer cheaper to manufacture and still reliable enough for that once a quarter use.
• nubinetwork 3y ago
  At least it's not a garbage Ricoh
• regularjack 3y ago
  Brother makes solid products that just work, in my experience. They are successful because of that. Their products are not just "fine", they are great products.
• Devasta 3y ago
  Not printers, but my TV is starting to give up the ghost, and I fully expect I'll be paying extra to ensure its not connected to the internet.
  • forinti 3y ago
    I had to give up on this goal. There are simply no dumb TVs in my country. I even considered getting a monitor, but you can't get one as big as a TV.
    • jwells89 3y ago
      I can recommend Sony TVs for this usage. They run very vanilla Android TV, won’t gripe at you about not being connected to the internet, and accept firmware updates via thumb drive. The newer ones also have a “simple TV” mode that pares back the TV’s “smarts”. They’re not cheap, but that’s to be expected if they’re not heavily subsidized by ads and content analytics like many smart TVs are these days.
      • ipcress_file 3y ago
        I can confirm the "won't gripe" part. Mine has been disconnected from Wifi for the last four years. It's been a great TV.
• hawski 3y ago
  I have a DCP-J725DW for around 12 or more years. I used non-official ink cartridges for it for most of its life. Quality of print declined a bit, but it was mostly, because we did not print as much in some years. Now we print more as my daughter like to have something printed once in a while. It is old, but works with Android print service, although it takes a good while for it to connect to the printer. Brother's Print and Scan application works faster, although it's also not ideal. Printing from Linux is not very nice, but at least some old Cups drivers are available. I usually do not bother and print from Android. The biggest surprise for me was printing from macOS. It shows me all the options I never new this printer had, the biggest thing being automatic two side printing. I would like to know how Mac's do it. The scanning is ok on my device, although the paper feeder for automatic scanning doesn't work reliably which is a pity.
• anjc 3y ago
  I have to wonder about a business model where you sell one inexpensive device and it works so well that the user never has to buy one of your products again. I'm in the same boat as others here, I bought a laser Brother about 20 years ago - €100 or so - and it hasn't missed a beat ever since. Probably the best purchase I've made and it still "sparks joy" for me.
• pmoriarty 3y ago
  Some Brother laser printers have three serious downsides: 1 - They count pages printed and will simply stop printing when they've determined you've printed enough even if you still have toner in your cartridge. 2 - They will not work with third party toner cartridges. 3 - They won't let you refill your own toner cartridge. So you are forced in to buying Brother's toner, and and forced to do so before you may actually want/need to.
  • LeifCarrotson 3y ago
    Citation needed? Or at least a listing of model numbers with this behavior. I've got a 12-year-old HL-2270DW that's doing fine at home, and have installed an HL-L2340D, an HL-L2380DW, an HL-L2390DW, and an HL-L8350CDW at work. None of them suffer from any of the downsides described to my knowledge. We run third-party toner in all of them, and they'll keep printing until the print quality fades. I personally haven't tried refilling toner cartridges in a long time, it's not worth it when third-party toner cartridges are as cheap as they are and the Comprenew up the road takes the empty ones back for recycling.
    • criddell 3y ago
      > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131 At work, we have an MFC-8950DW laser printer and it's not very good. It leaves streaks on the paper and the toner doesn't seem to fix properly all the time. I end up with printed pages that smear or the type rubs off. That printer replaced a much older Brother laser and it was better. We "upgraded" simply because drivers were not available for 64-bit Windows.
      • whynotmaybe 3y ago
        Might be an obvious question but have you changed the drum?
        • criddell 3y ago
          I'm not sure if we have or haven't. Mostly what we print is pretty ephemeral so nobody seems to be all that concerned about it.
• tehwebguy 3y ago
  I have a 10 year old Brother laser printer (prints black only). I bought it when I did because it was basically the same as the previous laser printer I had used at work, which had also lasted years with few or zero issues. Highly recommend a zero feature Brother laser printer. Yes, the replacement toner will cost nearly as much the printer but if you reach the end of the toner you got your money’s worth. You should be looking for one that is black and short, rounded rectangular. Like a much larger Apple TV shape. It should have like 3 buttons max. Anything else and you are out of my territory so who knows.
• tetrep 3y ago
  I was hoping this post would have at least an implication that they knew how Brother worked internally and that they were somewhat certain that the company had virtually no innovation for most of their history or something insightful like that. But no. It's just some random person who was told to buy Brother printers and wanted to say something that sounds cool.
• paultopia 3y ago
  If only there were companies with similar philosophies toward basically every other consumer product. Imagine, just imagine: - TVs not stuffed with spyware and "smart" features that stop working randomly! - Appliances, ditto - Cars, ditto Although now I feel like I'd better go buy like 10 Brother printers, because it's only a matter of time till some private equity firm decides the company is leaving money on the table by not requiring you to subscribe to the CEO's OnlyFans to get ink and buys it out to squeeze out some revenue from the brand before poisoning it.
  • paultopia 3y ago
    Actually, it may already be too late. I just searched amazon for brother printers, and it looks like they've rolled out an ink subscription.[1] This is clearly the harbinger of doom---remember when HP did theirs and immediately made their printers worthless? [1] https://www.brother-usa.com/supplies/ez-auto-reordering/refresh https://www.brother-usa.com/supplies/ez-auto-reordering/refr...
• pdpi 3y ago
  My Canon printer is much the same. The only feature I insisted on when I bought it was that I wanted it to be ink tank-based instead of cartridge-based. Other than that, it's completely unremarkable. People really need to assign more value to "completely unremarkable".
• kaon123 3y ago
  Omg why was I unaware of this? I bought an HP laserjet last year and am fighting SaaS software crap every time I want to attempt to print or scan. I am tempted to just trash my printer now.
• agnosticmantis 3y ago
  Interestingly, the medium of transmission here also backs up the message being transmitted: Mastodon is quite barebones and maybe not as “feature-rich” as Twitter/X, but holy shit what a breath of fresh air it is to read content on Mastodon compared to Twitter. Merely being able to scroll and read the whole thread without logging in shows how hostile the overly-innovated alternatives are.
• heymijo 3y ago
  They didn't enshittify their business when other printer makers did.
• wycy 3y ago
  Last time this came up on HN, I thought folks were saying that even Brother had started to go down the dark path. I'm not seeing that sentiment here now, though. Personally I love the Brother printer I've had for ~13 years now.
  • josephcsible 3y ago
    They have gone down the dark path. See, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
• 404mm 3y ago
  Just curious, did your monitor flicker randomly when changing screen content and while connected to a MacBook?
• delfinom 3y ago
  Or counterpoint, Brother is a Japanese company instead of an degenerate American company. That is worlds apart in terms of business strategies.
• donatj 3y ago
  I have had a Brother laser printer for 11 years. I am legitimately on my second toner cartridge. I try to tell family and friends not to bother with inkjet printers but they don’t listen. My dad’s big fancy Cannon photo printer has caused him nothing but grief. He swears up and down he needs to be able to print large-format full color photographs, but I have never seen him do so. What I have seen is his black cartridge dry out between uses and fail when he needs to print a form. My wife is occasionally frustrated by our inability to print color, but I am more than happy to drive to Walgreens or my companies office to print a color item once every couple months. An inkjets ink would’ve dried between prints.
  • diracs_stache 3y ago
    Scored a brother MFC-7340 from someone giving it away. Think it was 10 yrs old when we got it a couple years ago, it does a wonderful job.
  • ilamont 3y ago
    We have 2 brothers for our small business, one as the main and the other as a backup (which we have also brought with us when traveling). We are heavy users, probably >10k pages every year, but we have only replaced the drum once and have successfully ignored the "optical photoconductor life over" message for nearly 2 years. Once a new cartridge failed ("not recognized" error even though it was purchased through Staples) and the brother support person walked me through some secret squirrel reset code which I of course saved for future use. The fact I could get someone from the company on the line to help me was a rare experience for tech companies. My only gripe with the toner cartridges is the requirement to enter a serial number to get a recycling mailing label. The serial numbers are miniscule.
  • rzimmerman 3y ago
    One of the best purchases I have ever made is my Brother laser jet. I’m still on my first toner cartridge after three years. It works every time and never complains or updates.
    • lloydatkinson 3y ago
• otterpro 3y ago
  I've bought a $100 Brother laser printer 10 years ago, which still has similar form factor today, and I still use it for printing anything from receipts, maps, and forms. It is one of the most reliable device that I own. I think I'm on my 5th toner (cannot remember), and the toner (ink) from 3rd party are plentiful and cheap ($15 or less). I think I spend more on paper than on ink.
• retrocryptid 3y ago
  I'm old, what's a "mutual ask"?
• palemoonale 3y ago
  "Don't fix what isn't broken" - should be a mantra especially for the myriad of UI redesigns especially for apps, and corporate CI.
• smiley1437 3y ago
  Does anyone know if there are Brother printers\MFPs that can scan directly to email? I don't want the scan to go through some local computer software. I have to use HP MFPs because their scan-to-email is actually decent and can do authenticated SMTP sign-ins but I hate dealing with HP and their shitty toner practices.
• nonbirithm 3y ago
  Sounds like it could be an effect of a conservative Japanese business culture. For example Sony is one of the few companies to still manufacture high-end smartphones with a headphone jack.
• TeeWEE 3y ago
  What does a printer do? It prints... Thats what people buy it for to print.. Who wants a garden hose with iphone connection?
• FrustratedMonky 3y ago
  I hate my printer, and it is because of all of the options. So complex that it doesn't work. They would be better just by not having features. Canon, your printer is the worst thing I've ever used.
• jcd748 3y ago
  I remember we had an Epson colour printer that we got just after we got married: it was able to print photos, and this was a great feature, except that this would run through ink like nothing else, and ink, well, you know. When it eventually died I got a wired Brother B&W laser printer, and it's been incredible. We've put many thousands of pages through it, easily, changed the toner twice, and it just keeps on working. It is a simple, boring, wonderful piece of tech.
• rossdavidh 3y ago
  Some people want a Tesla; I drive a Toyota Corolla. It gets 50+ mpg, and it Just Works. I also have a Brother laser printer, which Just Prints. We need to have bleeding-edge innovators, but not everybody wants that in every aspect of their life.
• nijave 3y ago
  I'd argue they still innovated--they just focused on improving the core features of their product instead of continually tacking on more half-baked garbage. A print that Just Works with a range of different devices when you plug it in is (unfortunately?) fairly innovative.
• codingdave 3y ago
  Not innovating got them to the actual goal, which is to create a product about which people say: "It just works." Sometimes you need to change and innovate to get there, sometimes you need to stay where you are and keep an eye on it. But "It just works." is the quality that sells products for the long haul.
• jmyeet 3y ago
  Mandatory Steve Jobs quote [1]. There is a deep-seated myth that capitalism creates innovation. Capitalism builds enclosures, first quite literally [2] and now through intellectual property, rent-seeking, legislative barriers and so on to keep competitors out. Look at the story of Tetris, invented by a few guys in the USSR for fun, basically. And what did the Western capitalists do? They simply licensed, re-licensed, sub-licensed that creation. Printer companies maximize profit by creating enclosures. Limitations on ink, control of the drivers and so on. There's no motivation to innovate. industry is ossified. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGKsbt5wii0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGKsbt5wii0 [2]: https://www.joewrote.com/p/the-origin-of-capitalism-the-enclosure https://www.joewrote.com/p/the-origin-of-capitalism-the-encl...
• exabrial 3y ago
  Tangent, but related: My dad is restoring a 1969 MG Midget. The right turn signal stopped working. Using nothing more than a voltmeter, I found a disconnected wire and a short to the frame. I replaced the entire length of wire that was failing with $3 worth of wire, solder, and heat shrink tubing. The lesson here is repairability and simplicity. We’re constantly lectured to be “environmentally aware” by companies that no longer ensure their products will last a lifetime. There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn’t be used for the rest of your life. My Brother printer is nearing 12 years and is still on the same damn print cartridge. My Neato robotics vacuum has had countless parts replaced and is about the same age. If you truly want to be a good steward of the earth, stop demanding/consuming latest and greatest, endless product and UI refreshes, and instead demand 30+ years out of a product (with small repairs).
  • kazinator 3y ago
    > $3 worth of wire, solder, and heat shrink tubing I don't understand how with those three things, you are able to renew the blinker service subscription.
  • fooker 3y ago
    >There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn’t be used for the rest of your life. A phone, yes. A 'modern' phone conforming to our 'modern' expectations, no. It would have to be significantly larger, less performant, and have a worse screen for it to last even ten years. To make it repairable you'd have to make sure individual chips and capacitors are swappable, which costs ~2x power draw compared to a SOC.
    • exabrial 3y ago
      >less performant Only because the code we write is crappier
  • iteratethis 3y ago
    My father gifted me 35 year old speakers he had stored in his attic. I installed them on an old Marantz amp, which is also connected to my (new) TV. As he visited me, he couldn't believe the incredible sound coming from his own speakers. My friends are shocked by it too, thinking I'm some audio buff that invested 20K. My dad regretted the gift, went to buy the same amp yet with new speakers. Various sets of it, and failed to come close to the ancient set. I'm not sure what exactly was innovated in 35 years of audio, but my guess would be costs, not quality.
• amelius 3y ago
  Product idea: a pi-hole that blocks printers from being updated remotely and phoning home when you've used a different brand of ink etc.
  • soap- 3y ago
    HP printers completely refuse to print when they can't phone home for a month or so. Conveniently, that's right after the return window expires.
    • amelius 3y ago
      IANAL, but that's probably illegal.
• barryrandall 3y ago
  I'm pretty sure the VCs reading this are thinking "they're leaving so much money on the table, we should buy them."
• ipcress_file 3y ago
  As the owner of a Brother manual typewriter, I can confirm that this was their business model from the beginning. They made the same cheap, tolerable typewriter with different bodies for almost 30 years. The only innovation they ever made was the addition of a repeat spacer, which was a nice touch.
• einpoklum 3y ago
  But have all other manufacturers been "innovating up the wazoo"? OKI? Kyocera? Lexmark? Olivetti? Xerox? I look at their offerings - say, for a plain old A4 B&W laser printer, and see more or less the same thing. Maybe the LCD panel can get a little fancy on some models...
• WarOnPrivacy 3y ago
  I'm going come back and reread these Brother posts whenever I'm tech sad. It's like having 5 min of Tech Christmas[1] away from our still-detonating, Florida-flavored[2] tech dystopia. [1] Halloween really. It's not endlessly co-opted. No joy sapping baggage. No toxic expectations. Halloween is the Brother of holidays. [2] In August. In an election year.
• metafunctor 3y ago
  Is it innovation if a herd of business people lead a product for a couple of decades and drive it into the ground because they are chasing their bonuses? Or just bad ownership?
• projektfu 3y ago
  I agree with the article and really appreciate that Brothers aren't generally enshittified. However, that doesn't mean they can't be shit. I switched away from them a while back but every printer is potentially shit. Brother shit: a multifunction printer they had fed the paper differently and usually poorly from the manual feed slot. If you opened the paper tray, it loudly alarmed for three full seconds, classically conditioning me to avoid using it. A brother laser printer said it was out of toner. Replaced the toner and it said it needed a new drum. Replaced the drum and it turned out to just be broken. Cost of parts equal to a new printer, plus time wasted. But, you know, every other printer is garbage, too. Inkjets dry out (HP, Epson). Electrical faults cause the printer to hang or reset (Lexmark). Poorly written drivers cause the printer to waste a ream of paper printing junk on each page, probably trying to print PCL as ASCII (Samsung). An HP I had literally stressed out its own ribbon cable to the print head until it failed-a design flaw. But few things are as garbage as Instant Ink, pop-up ads, and needing special online apps to access the basic functions like scanning.
• btbuildem 3y ago
  I would passionately argue that "innovating" is not the right word. Encumber, complicate, enshittify - sure, most products with "tech" in them got there through one of those misguided drivers. Innovation? That rarely ever happens. It might be on corporate values lists, but no execs actually value innovation. You don't increase profits quarter over quarter by innovating. It's too risky and too expensive. It's safer to beat the familiar drum, and from time to time buy a startup that actually makes something good.
• donatj 3y ago
  In the opposite direction, my friend, an engineer who helps design engines for a living talks about how the government pressing them to be more and more efficient is the only reason he and his coworkers even have jobs. He says engine manufacturers would be more than happy to just continually pump out 30 year old designs otherwise.
  • afjeafaj848 3y ago
    Interestingly that actually does happen in the motorcycle world For example Suzuki still sells the DRZ400/DR650 bikes new in the US and both haven't been updated in like 20 years other than color changes The rumor is they are grandfathered in so they can't do any changes otherwise they'd have to pass modern emissions rules
• bstar77 3y ago
  As it turns out, printer hardware/software is something I specifically don't want any innovation. My 10 year old color and B&W Brother (wifi) laser printers are part of a very short list of "just works" tech I use regularly that require no additional software or firmware updates.
  • bluGill 3y ago
    Iteration is useful, but not really innovation.
• blopp99 3y ago
  My house brother printer "broke" a few months ago, because I started to need it again because of paperwork I need to do for my newly founded company I talk to my mom about fixing it. She was more inclined into buying a new one, HP. I oppose to it, that printer has been working for a few years without major issues, it has its quirks but works great. The one we had before was also a Brother. What broke in this one was the Drum, so I dived into printer tutorials and information to see that printer Drums are rated for an x amount of prints, the repair shop we took it to said it was because of that but in a negative way when its pretty normal in all sorts of things to break after the rated amount. In the end, the repair shop owner looked for an used drum locally so we can get it cheaper, She got it and sold it to us for $50 bucks. I waited to see if I saw any black friday deal to buy it and save it but didnt happen. Model: brother hl-2240
• karmelapple 3y ago
  Only bummer: the MFC-9320CW I have had for over a decade now is no longer officially supported by Brother on macOS. However, VueScan [1] - something I hadn't used since my Epson scanner in the mid 1990s - saved the day! They support scanning for it, and after a quick purchase I was able to scan from it again. This sounds like shilling for the company, but just posting here if anyone has a similar problem to me. I wanted to scan something but macOS 14 (and maybe 13 or 12?) wouldn't work with my Brother multi-function scanner... although the printing still works fine. Otherwise I'm still very happy with this scanner - one software purchase and one set of toner cartridges in over a decade is pretty good total cost of ownership :) 1. https://www.hamrick.com https://www.hamrick.com
• MostlyStable 3y ago
  Unfortunately, Brother seems to be slowly converging on standard shitty printer business behavior. Last year they pushed a firmware update that disabled third party toner cartridges (relatively easy to circumvent for now, but still). For now, they are probably still the least bad printer option (talk about a low bar), but I'm my opinion they really don't deserve the effusive praise they receive.
• passive 3y ago
  This tracks. 15 years ago, I bought the cheapest laser I could find, which was a Brother. Put two cartridges in it over the years, and last year it died. Some devices couldn't print to it due to driver issues, but it was easy enough to send to another device to print. Otherwise literally no complaints. I did some comparison shopping, and while Brother was no longer the cheapest, it was still pretty cheap. I'm not sure most of my family even remembers it's a different one, other than it printing more easily from every device. I replaced one grey box with another, but I mostly get to ignore it, and that's wonderful.
• GlenTheMachine 3y ago
  I had the most amazing printer when I was in college. It was a NeXT laser printer that I got for a steal when NeXT dropped out of the hardware market; the university library had one as a sales model, and I was the NeXT sales rep, so they let me have it for next to half price. It was amazing because, when you printed something, it would print. 8 pages a minute, guaranteed. When it was out of paper or toner a lovely woman's voice with a British accent would tell you to add paper or change the toner cartridge, and then it would continue to print. In hindsight, it would have been more than worth it to keep my NeXTstation working just to act as a print server for the printer. I now have a Brother laser printer. It prints when it feels like printing. Sometimes it doesn't bother to wake from sleep, and there's no way to force it out of sleep, so you have to unplug it and plug it in again and wait for it to boot. Depending on the complexity of the page it can take anywhere from ten seconds to 10+ minutes per page. When it's out of paper or toner, there is no audible signal. You have to walk over and look at the little LCD display. To be fair, it's loads better than the HP inkjet printer we used to have. We held a family activity where we beat that one to death in the front yard with a sledgehammer.
• TheMagicHorsey 3y ago
  OP is underselling Brother. My Brother printer takes bulk ink from bottles and doesn't require stupid expensive cartridges. My Brother printer can be left off, turned on for a print job, connects to WiFi with no issues, and prints from every single device in the house from a ten year old Raspberry Pi to a brand new iPad. My Brother printer doesn't treat me like I'm some kind of asshole. Just try an HP printer and see how it abuses you.
• nojvek 3y ago
  Got a brother HL-L23800W. Replace the toner every few years. Its a printer that prints. Wifi printing is such a gem.
• retrocryptid 3y ago
  Also, this seems to imply innovation equals new features. In my day, we had an "innovation process" where we found "lead customers" with specific requirements they would pay for. If we then found a lot of people would pay for the same feature, it became a "capital f" Feature, managed by a product manager and tracked through the dev process. Mostly we found a bunch of different customers with similar, but different requirements. We then worked out an API or hardware interface third parties could use to meet customer's specific requirements at a price point the customer would accept. But... now we just buy whatever HP or Apple ships and hire an intern to manually do the thing we were trying to automate.
• yegle 3y ago
  I've done my research and found (circa 2018?) that Brother scanner is the only one in the market that allows me to scan and save to a Google Drive, w/o a computer. This makes it extremely easy to archive receipts.
• Mister_Snuggles 3y ago
  I feel like I bought the last good HP LaserJet that was ever made. Many years ago, I spotted an HP Color LaserJet Pro m254dw online at Costco and bought it. It's been a fantastic printer. The toner never dries out, "empty cartridges" don't prevent it from printing. It is modern enough that I can use AirPrint to print to it, but old-school enough that it has an ethernet port. The supplies status page basically says "Just because it's at 0% doesn't mean you can't print, but maybe buy a new toner cartridge and replace it when the output gets bad." It didn't require any special drivers, there's no need to link an HP account, and it has a usable web-based management interface. So far I have the following complaints about the printer: * After some large amount of uptime (3mo? 6mo? I'm not sure) it won't respond to print requests. Rebooting it fixes the issue. * Toner cartridges are expensive. I priced out something like $450CAD for a set of the three colour cartridges. I'm still on the starter cartridges and, even though they're "empty", the output quality is fine. * The word "Color" in the product name is not properly localized to the Canadian market. Obviously I'm grasping at straws as far as complaints go! Honestly, this thing feels like I found a unicorn. I've been looking for a similar printer for my parents, but I haven't found anything from HP that ticks all of the boxes. The next one for them will likely be a Brother.
  • s3p 3y ago
    I used to have this one! Loved it. Upgraded to a m276nw when I needed a scanner. This printer has been perfect as well-- never complains about low toner levels, prints well, supports AirPrint and some (not all) of HP connected services like email printing, but no subscription needed or any HP bullshit getting in the way.
  • i386 3y ago
    Don’t buy new carts. Have them refilled. The carts themselves are very expensive. The kit below is around $75 CAD to do it at home. https://www.amazon.com.au/DINGLONG-Cartridge-Laserjet-M281fdw-Compatible/dp/B07K7GZ1FH https://www.amazon.com.au/DINGLONG-Cartridge-Laserjet-M281fd...
    • yumraj 3y ago
      I always worry about inhaling that stuff if I refill. Am I being paranoid? Genuinely curious.
• rootusrootus 3y ago
  Buying a Brother laser printer years and years ago was the best thing I ever did to meet my printing needs. But I have to say, their WiFi support is quite terrible. Mine is connected by ethernet, but I've recommended Brother printers to several family members over the years who've used WiFi, and it causes me regular support headaches. Printer forgets the password, forgets everything, or just forgets how to connect even though it has the right information. Rinse and repeat every few months. Got so bad with my parents that I just bought them a pair of power-over-ethernet adapters so the printer didn't have to use WiFi any more.
• iaseiadit 3y ago
  I’ve been buying Brother printers for the past 10-15 years, and recommending them whenever someone I know needs a printer. They’re simple, reliable, and relatively affordable, so they’ve given me no reason to seek out alternatives.
• JohnMakin 3y ago
  One of the worst offenses I've ever seen as an example of this is this trend with newer refrigerators (which I'm sure will brick after 2-3 years when the manufacturer stops supporting the software) where they have a camera inside that projects to a screen on the door. Cool, you can see what food is inside the refrigerator! Do you know how else you can do that? by opening the door. We need to stop "innovating" features that absolutely no one needs, because clearly the result isn't a better product, just a messier, more complex one that is frequently over-engineered and under-supported.
  • post_break 3y ago
    Can I open the fridge while I'm at work to see if I need to get more milk on the way home? I believe it can also send reminders using AI to see if something is getting low. I thought it was dumb the first time I saw it, but there are genuine use cases that tempted me to put a wyze cam into my dumb fridge so I can get the same sort of features. The worst example might be windows in the doors, so you can look into them. Except you put stuff on the door shelf and block the view or you can't really see inside all too well. Plus now you have introduce thermal issues.
    • SilkRoadie 3y ago
      On these smart fridges, I struggle to see how these are anything but gimmicks undermining the device's lifespan. Most cooking requires items from many sources. You can check your milk but what about the flour in the cupboard? AI reminders. Is that a subscription service or are advertisers being given your data? How long are these manufacturers promising to support the hardware? If the fridge is internet-connected and support ends, at what point is that a security risk? This generally applies to most purchases these days... I was looking in my garage and I found a cassette player my grandad gave me that still works. When I look around shops and at many things I own I see planned obsolescence everywhere. Personally, I find it really demoralizing.
    • UnserMannInK 3y ago
      > Can I open the fridge while I'm at work to see if I need to get more milk on the way home? Only works for a neatly organized fridge. The way my kids cram everything into the fridge makes this feature worthless.
• pkaye 3y ago
  I've had lots of problem with Brother MFC scanner/laser printer for a while. Seems to keep getting black dots and lines after some time. I did a lot of cleaning and replacing the toner cartridge and over a short time it keeps coming back. I never had this happen on past laser printers from Samsung and HP. Not sure what to do now.
• netfortius 3y ago
  This is not even funny. This article came right when I ended up with a US made Brother mulți-function inkjet printer in Europe, and can apparently only use if buying European Brother cartridges (different than the US ones), swapping the heads, and resetting the chips with a chip reset tool bought and shipped from US, in the hope that the assembly would work.
• lugu 3y ago
  My favorite feature of Brother laser printers, is their hidden menu to reset the print count of the tonner.
• mikhael28 3y ago
  Rant about Brother laser printer drivers: they still haven't added software emulation support for Apple Silicon. Khhhhhhaaaaaannnnnnnnnn.
• pseudosavant 3y ago
  I've had a couple of inexpensive (<$150) Brother laser printers and they've been awesome. They just reliably print from any device you own. My current one is up to 92k pages printed and all I've done is replace the toner and drums when they are done. Most of the 92k pages were two-side printed even, so the duplexer has held up well. I can just do "Add printer" without having to download any proprietary printer software on Windows. the iOS app makes printing from there a piece of cake. Brother FTW!
• throwitaway222 3y ago
  https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/brother-introduces-innovative-5-in-1-color-inkjet-printer-with-built-in-paper-cutting-technology-bringing-a-new-level-of-convenience-versatility-and-sustainability-to-home-and-small-business-users-301975867.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/brother-introduces-...