This has been going on for a long bloody time. My old brother ink printer (10-15years ago) had an internal counter which upon reaching some threshold value (20

This has been going on for a long bloody time. My old brother ink printer (10-15years ago) had an internal counter which upon reaching some threshold value (20k pages or whatever), would stop printing and would show some error. To fix it, you had to go into special secret "Maintenance/Service" mode by pressing the right combination of keys and then resetting this value. Which means it had to be thrown out or sent to "repair/servicing" after N number of pages by design. The number one thing to do when buying a printer is to check how hackable/refillable it is, and which printer has the most active hacking/refilling systems available from China and other countries that can't afford to buy overpriced originals, etc.