Books, newspapers, and magazines are printed perfectly all the time, why is it such a hassle to get home printers set up? Software is buggy and hard to work with even for professionals, and the hardware is always having issues. Home printers have been around for a long time and in general modern software is quite sophisticated. This seems like something we would have figured out by now. Even in offices, it’s hard for IT to set up printers. Why haven’t we gotten printers that just always work? Is there some fundamental problem we can’t solve?
In: 6143
As another comment pounted out, printers are made cheaply. To the point where they’re often sold at a loss.
This is in general because the manufacturers make most of their money in ink. A cartridge of ink costs cents to produce, including the fancy kind. They’re marked up ridiculously because they’re the subscription fee. Printer ink is literally a scam.
So, in their minds, they basically give you a printer and then milk you for the ink. This leads to huge amounts of terrible printers, because they try to cut costs as much as possible, because the printers are less financially important.
Edit: to those replying with pedantry, I’m aware of the error in the first line. This is what happens when you comment on stuff at 3 AM. While both statements are true, one does not lead to the other as implied.
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