Why do home printers remain so challenging to use despite all of the sophisticated technology we have in 2024?

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Every home printer I’ve owned, regardless of the brand, has been difficult to set up in the first place and then will stop working from time to time without an obvious reason until it eventually craps out. Even when consistently using the maintenance functions.

In: Technology

44 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are many layers of greed and incompetence that other people will go into, but one underrated problem with printers compared to other areas of “tech” is that they have to deal with the physical world using moving mechanical parts. This is inherently much less reliable than only dealing with 0s and 1s inside electronic circuits.

Which is also why we now have mini computers inside every other thing in our house, even though they’re in many ways a lot more “complicated” than the gears and shafts and pulleys they’re replacing. They’re just a lot more consistent, and in the long run that’s easier to deal with at scale than a “simpler” system that has to deal with the unknowns of dirt and moisture and material expansion/fatigue and everything else that goes on in the physical world.

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