

Why Apple Will Never Make Printers Again (2009) - d99kris
http://www.macworld.com/article/1144929/apple_printers.html

======
kabdib
Atari used to "make" printers. By that, I mean they would contract some Asian
company to make a printer mechanism that the Atari 400/800 was able to print
to, and Atari's factories would drape it in plastic that had an Atari logo. In
this space, if you saved a screw you were up half a penny, which was a big
deal. The printers that Atari produced were famously rickety and very, very
slow because Atari was a cheap-ass consumer company that indexed on price and
didn't care that it took ten minutes to print each page of your 20 page book
report for tomorrow morning.

I saw the boneyard of printer chassis that didn't make it through the
qualifying rounds. They were pretty terrifying.

\- One printer chassis had gone through several revisions, each revision
removing some major component (a motor, a solenoid) until just the bare-bones
remained. It was clear that each revision reduced the printer's ability; what
remained was something as close as they were able to get to an abstract _idea_
of printing without actually abandoning the ability to print. I'm sure the
cost-reducers considered that, too ("What if we gave them a tray for a hunk of
paper, included a pen, and the instructions said to copy down what was on the
screen?") The Ideal Atari Printer appeared to be a single motor, some kind of
print head and a way to advance paper (ideally also driven by that single
motor). Wackiness ensued

Now repeat that for each minor bit-player in the Asian printer mech market,
all of whom were hoping to strike it big by convincing Atari that _their_
bare-bones claptrap should be the winner in the race to the bottom.

\- There was a color printer that rotated ballpoint pens in a holder and drew
vectors. I was intrigued about how this would image anything on the Atari's
raster display, and this issue was no doubt the reason the mechanism had
landed in the boneyard. Still, it had gone through several revisions, and no
doubt the Asian engineers were thinking of goofy and cheap ways to spin that
pen holder, sans motor.

\- There was an enormous boat-anchor of a printer, which looked like it had
been submitted by a former designer of army tanks. _This_ was the printer you
wanted; indestructible, capable of printing in depths of the worst Siberian
winter. Whatever you wanted to print, this printer would go through hell,
cross mountains, take the enemy city and eventually your printout would
emerge, using whatever substance you wanted to print on. Paper? Bark? Stone?
Sure, no problem. Unfortunately the shipping costs were probably crazy.

\- A slightly less battle-oriented printer chassis looked like it had also
been submitted to Apple, and had an interesting similarity to the ImageWriter
when that was later revealed to the world.

Printers today look equally wacky. Just go to an office store and imagine
what's underneath the plastic. What knife fights drove the reduction in costs?
What engineering careers were left on the cutting room floor? There's drama in
consumer tech design if you dig deep enough. You want to avoid these printers,
they will let you down and force you to drive to Kinkos at midnight for the
remaining 18 pages of your book report.

We recently replaced an old but perfectly working HP laserjet because we
couldn't find new toner cartridges for it anymore (and remanufactured toner
carts _suck_ ); replaced it with an un-wacky HP laser printer that I hope will
last another 15 years.

~~~
DanBC
Is there a site that just does printer reviews, and also continuing reviews of
the printer after one month; six months; a year; etc?

And includes true cost of running, and details of the cart so people who use
third party toners or remade carts can use that too?

------
geon
_If_ Apple made printers, they wouldn't compete on price, but on quality. And
it would be developed in secrecy.

Just saying "this is how the market works today, and I don't see Apple doing
anything" isn't really relevant when you talk about Apple.

Not that I think they would make a printer, but the article is bad.

~~~
kubiiii
I agree. And I don't think the small margins really is a problem if you come
out with a "disrupting" printer. I don't think the portable music players
margins were that high when they released the ipod.

Then again, I don't know what a disrupting printer would look like. Printers
always appeared to me as awkward computer/realworld interfaces.

------
rejschaap
I would pay for a good printer. I bought the most expensive HP consumer
printer (which was not very expensive at all really). It never works when I
need it. Doesn't connect to my wifi network 90% of the time. It's bug ridden
as well, crashes all the time with the weirdest error messages. The only way
to fix wifi or crash is a reboot, which is annoying and takes forever. It
refuses to print black and white when it's out of magenta. And it's pretty
much always out of something, apparently you can get about 5 prints from one
cartridge. It also constantly nags you about low ink levels, worsened by the
impossible user interface. I don't even want to talk about the included
software and drivers. The scanner has a mind of its own and there is no
convincing it to use the flatbed scanner when it has decided you want to use
the feeder. I always end up at the local copy shop.

~~~
Sanddancer
Get a laser printer. Period, end of statement. Spend at least a few hundred
dollars on it, it'll last you a decade and a half, and it'll have much better
drivers than the jokes that inkjet printers come with. Plus, you'll get
supplies that won't go bad if you only print every month or two. Inkjets are
just complete and utter crap.

~~~
greyskull
We have an OfficeJet. The color ran out a year or two ago, and I haven't found
a need to replace them; I just print B&W. The only reason I didn't switch is
because I couldn't find a multi-function laser printer (I need a scanner and
the auto feeder) though admittedly I barely looked. It seems there are more
options now (well rated Brother on Amazon), so that's my next buy once the
black runs out. Screw ink printers, never again.

------
canjobear
Printers are an obvious dead end. So much so that this Onion article can
presuppose it to be funny: [http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-apple-ceo-
tim-cook-im-t...](http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-
thinking-printers,21207/)

~~~
davidw
I've always loved this take on printers:
[http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/printers)

------
alrs
The Imagewriter ][ was a stellar dot matrix printer. I wish I had an excuse to
have one set up.

~~~
radio4fan
I (partly) got into Linux because I needed a cheap postscript printer: my
(awesome but quickdraw-only) StyleWriter mangled everything QuarkXPress sent
it.

So an old 386 laptop, slackware (on floppies), ghostscript and some jiggery-
pokery gave me an AppleTalk Postscript printer for peanuts. It showed up in
the Chooser as a LaserWriter II and worked just the same (except for smaller
margins). The biggest cost was a RS232 to Apple-style cable.

The alternative would have been paying out for a (at the time) expensive laser
printer.

And I could leave that stylewriter unused for months, yet when I came to
print, the quality was perfect: no missing lines or head cleaning required. I
only got rid of it when I ditched Quark.

------
yuhong
Related:
[http://macjournals.com/mwj/laserwriter-8-5-1/](http://macjournals.com/mwj/laserwriter-8-5-1/)

~~~
sjwright
That's the most interesting thing I've read in quite a while. Thank you.

------
agumonkey
With all the open hardware 3d printer rage, I think there's a nice spot for a
2d equivalent.

~~~
detritus
I've been thinking this a lot recently too, especially when swearing at my
[trusty] old Canon printer when it eats up £10 worth of ink on a couple of
unrequested cleaning cycles.

A the very least, some OS solution to ink...

~~~
agumonkey
Have you ever used the generic ink refill ? I wonder if they're of acceptable
quality.

I imagine a very simple:

\- built it yourself printer \- non cute or small but trivial to open and
investigate \- reduced possibilities for easy open source drivers \- cheap
generic ink

With a simple but reliable and 'intellectually' owned device I anticipate a
good increase in peace of mind for all printer users in the world.

------
Serow225
Does anyone have recommendations for affordable ( < $300? ) multi-function
printer manufacturer/models that don't suck? Good driver support on OSX is a
bonus. Thanks!

~~~
cincinnatus
Any Brother multi-function laser. At that price you'll be black only for
printing. Be sure to search out how to fool the toner out sensor as they lie.

~~~
chiph
Another recommendation for Brother printers. I've been very pleased with my
entry-level duplexing laser.

Previously I had HP inkjets, starting with a Deskjet 500, and got tired of
bloated drivers (60mb?? WTF is _in_ there?) and supplies that cost more than
human blood. Most of which ended up being wasted in their constant cleaning
cycles.

------
__matt
Why Apple will never make floppy disks again

------
brianbreslin
Why did this 5 year old article make it to the front page?

~~~
jmspring
A technological area where Apple made strides forward. The particular market
doesn't have the margins/innovation worth pursuing for a company like apple.

------
mantrax3
I'm curious why they never make CRTs and floppies anymore. Let's write an
article about it.

~~~
DrStalker
It's obviously because they are devoting all their R&D efforts to fax
machines.

