> You have to go to extraordinary and extreme measures to break out of the basic choices that you are offered for which the profits all go to the same group of people
In this case we are talking about printers. There are literally dozens of printer makers.
And Berkshire Hathaway has an outsize position in the largest of them, HP.
What else does BRK own, and thus influence via board and activist shareholder position that is in your home.
This is the point. You can have a million “options” but if they all only benefit a handful of owners then no matter how you “vote” with your dollars it still makes the same people the same money.
Again, you have to go to extremes to find a printer that is manufactured by a union or employee owned cooperative if there even are any.
For what it is worth, HP barely still designs printers. Most of them are just rebadged Canons. They have a small number of models that are based on Samsung models that they got from their acquisition and an even smaller number of printers they actually made themselves. For the most part, when you buy a HP, you are buying a Canon printer with HP's label on it and HP firmware. HP is really just a middle man, and I am not sure why people keep buying their printers given that middlemen should be avoided.
Some of their software started to get pushy, and their toner cartridges started to ‘be empty’ too early - with some new printers also having ‘trial’ toners with almost no toner in them.
Canon does not do this. They also let you opt into the feature that blocks third party cartridges. You read that right. The feature is opt-in.
Coincidentally, many HP and Canon laser printers use slight variations of the same toner cartridges such that third parties can support both printers with the same cartridges:
I am curious if this is also true for the inkjet printers, but finding out would probably involve buying every cartridge and comparing. I cannot justify that expense to sate my curiosity.
At least with my HL-1112 (bottom-barrel model in 2015) and MFC-L2700DW (entry level all-in-one with decent, albeit aftermarket, multiplatform support) it's trivial to manually reset the levels once you know the button sequence - don't even need a retail cartridge with the mechanical "unused toner" spinner!
That said... yeah, who knows what they're up to, 5 years later?
In this case we are talking about printers. There are literally dozens of printer makers.