So it sounds like HP pays nothing to the people they hurt, they don't have to admit to doing anything wrong, and they get to continue to kill printers using forced updates as long as they aren't one of 21 specific models, and even for those 21 models they can still kill them using updates as long as they don't call the update a "Dynamic Security feature"?
This is exactly the kind of bullshit "win" that makes class-action lawsuits a total joke for anyone looking for justice, and why corporations continue to engage in user-hostile behavior. They stand to make a lot more money screwing over consumers than they have to fear from lawsuits.
I suspect that lawyers that fish for clients to represent in class action lawsuits intend to settle for a quick payout (to themselves) rather than actually represent the interests of those they represent.
If that is not the case, HP’s lawyers are fantastic.
Yep. There are three parties here: HP, the people they hurt, and the class action lawyers.
It’s better for both HP and the class action lawyers to get a resolution that doesn’t cost HP too much, doesn’t bind HP’s future actions, and pays out nicely to the class action lawyers.
> There are three parties here: HP, the people they hurt, and the class action lawyers.
You need to break apart the class action members from ”people they hurt”. The members of the class can be more narrow and easier to prove. The lawyers should have incentive to maximize damage x members.
> the class action lawyers to get a resolution that doesn’t cost HP too much
Naively, the incentives should be aligned with the class action members at this point. Why not? Can the lawyers negotiate directly with HP to increase their share of the pie?
> doesn’t bind HP’s future actions
Yes, but isn't that just water is wet? Like, the members want compensation, not different behavior in the future. (Unless it’s a defendant you need to continue doing business with like an employer). I thought class actions was supposed to act as a deterrent.
The incentives are not aligned with the class action members: sweetening the pot to get HP to accept the settlement means the lawyers can move on to another case, instead of this one dragging out.
I wonder if, after becoming successful, every company ends up turning into a law firm - ie dominated by lawyers and accountants. Instead of innovating, the only thing they know how to do is extract money from their product line in increasingly user hostile means.
I was not aware of this fact before I watched Better Call Saul. Really opened my eyes how the complete system is optimized to screw anyone who seeks justice.
I just started to realize that law firms are businesses, and what they care about the most, above everything else, is making a profit. Are these lawyers warriors for women's rights? Maybe. But what I know for sure is that they want to make money more than they want to be warriors. Which explains why they can directly talk to the other party's lawyers and get you a decent settlement, instead of actually going through litigation, at all.
Yes, actually, this monetization strategy is quite common, especially among smaller firms.
I know of a few here in Montreal, Canada, that will go after any big company (Mastercard, Facebook, Google, you name it) with random class action lawsuits. Then they settle as quickly as possible and cash out, usually with a payout in the $500K to $5M range.
To keep costs low, these firms often rely on interns, who are either unpaid or minimally paid and may only retain one or two actual lawyers.
It's become a whole cottage industry, kind of like patent trolling.
On the upside you can now decline firmware upgrades that try to prevent you from using 3rd party ink, aka: Dynamic Security.
But only on certain models.
Yeah, they totally got away with it.
… HP has agreed to continue making certain disclosures to users of Class Printers about Dynamic Security and data collection, and to continue to allow users of Class Printers to either agree to install or decline to install firmware updates that include Dynamic Security features. The disclosures that HP has agreed to continue making include the disclosure that HP collects printer cartridge data from Class Printers through the HP Smart App, and that HP’s Dynamic Security measures are designed to block cartridges using a non-HP chip, and may be delivered to printers through periodic firmware updates.
Because the average consumer has zero way to judge the quality of a printer or the likelihood of them doing something like this, either now or in the future (considering how well this turned out for HP, there's no reason why their competitors wouldn't try doing the same thing).
Most people are the parents of students going to school, teachers, trades people opening a store… they walk into BestBuy and they recognize the brand HP.
HP has massive marketing budgets and gets to package and discount their printers.
Most people think they’re getting an amazing printer at a great deal.
But why would you ever buy a second one? I can see people buying an HP printer because it's a good deal, on the surface, but when it's clearly not, then why replace it with a new HP?
When my first HP printer died after a few years, I had assumed it was bad luck since a relative with an identical model had no problems with his and he thought mine dying was somehow my fault. It continued to be used by him for something like 15 years. Seeing his printer continue to work, I brought another HP printer thinking it was just bad luck. Then that one died a few years later. My relative’s printer kept going, so I assumed it was bad luck and I brought a third HP printer that was an AIO model.
During this time, I noticed that the ink costs were ridiculous, so I brought a Samsung laser printer and stopped printing with the HP printer, only using it for scanning. 19 years later, it is still around. The ink cartridges no longer work, but it is used as an occasional scanner.
Since having to use xsane to make copies for my father was annoying, I brought an AIO canon color laser printer a year or two ago. Now I have three printers, and they all work, except for the HP, which is not given the new ink cartridges that it needs.
That said, I now realize that the secret to HP printer longevity is to not use it as a printer. That is how my relative’s printer lasted so long, as he likely printed infrequently. His was a print only model, so he did not even use it as a scanner like I do with mine.
My HP deskjet 2400 was $30 brand new in the mid 2000s, the ink cost $20, is still sold, and the printer still works perfectly, including being able to install the old drivers on modern computers, without all the bullshit add-on software that they usually want you to install.
The main problem is that I have to buy a new ink cartridge basically every time I want to print, because I print so rarely.
I plan to use them when my printers run out of toner, although I use them so infrequently these days that I suspect I might never need to replace the toner cartridges.
My printer has worked really well and for whichever reason I haven’t been hit by any of those HP shenanigans. Maybe it’s because I haven't installed any HP drivers or software? Not needed on Linux or ios which is what I have. Works great, network-enabled and supports AirPrint so we can print from our phones (95% of our printing needs). Toner is expensive and I’ve only ever used HP toner; third-party toner requires cannibalizing the chip from original cartridges which I’m too lazy to do. Color Laserjet pro m255dw. I still probably wouldn’t buy another HP given all the user hostility :)
m255dw owner also. You only have to swap the chips if you want the level reporting functions to work. I’ve used a couple of different third-party cartridges out of the box and just replaced them when empty. But, I have found that the reliability of the lowest cost cartridges is poor.
Well, my replacement cycle is > 1 year and I have found that the suppliers on Amazon have a shorter life than that. I've ordered a full set of replacements twice and the last was from a seller named CMYBabee. After about a year the magenta started transferring toner to whatever I was printing. I was in the middle of printing tax returns and just went to the nearest Best Buy and bought an HP replacement.
I should add that I sent a note to the vendor about the problem and they were eager to send a replacement. I didn't bother since I was already set.
I don't understand this broad take. HP makes two classes of printers for home and SOHO market. Low end and High End. There's no middle (aka the Sony model).
Lower end printers are really low quality. They have low monthly output thresholds, have lower quality ink, and have low end hardware which needs firmware on every boot, etc. They wear out and die. I worn one down, I know.
Their higher end printers are good. They use better inks. They cartridges are more reasonable (Ink Advantage Series), they work really well with anything from mac OS to Linux to your kitchen sink, because they talk PDF over well defined protocols, and they're reliable. They last more than a decade, and they don't wear down. My 4510 still goes strong, for example, and it works like the way I bought it the first day.
If you go even higher end, these models use full pigment ink sets for even more durable and color correct prints. Higher end home printers use pigment black and dye color sets.
Aren't there other good brands? Oh yes. Lexmark's lasers are good. Samsung used to make terrific laser printers with Xerox. People say Brother is also good. I didn't use them, I can't comment.
Lastly, I always say and will always say so. Not all ink is created equal, ink is not simple science. There's a specific reason why HP and Xerox have their own labs and patents on ink/toner formulation and delivery.
My Color Laserjet M478f-9f purchased two years ago is amazing. It required no configuration for phones or computers, scans and faxes prints, and is generally a high quality piece of kit. It is the best printer I’ve owned, and I have owned a few Brother laser printers and old school Laserjets. Hell, I owned one of the first NEC postscript laser printers back in the 90s.
It’s not cheap, but it just works.
I can’t defend the bullshit business practices, but the “medium” business class Laserjets are high quality. I wouldn’t touch anything SMB or residential with a 50 foot pole.
Will you build your own printer when the other brands all go the HP way ?
I will avoid printing as much as possible --- which is about what I do now.
I have a Canon color laser for business use which accepts 3rd party toner. For photos and the occasional large print job, I outsource to Walmart or Office Depot.
Ink jet is totally out; essentially worthless for my needs and nothing but an exercise in frustration.
Yep. I live near the library. I just go there if I have to print anything. It's really rare these days that I have to. I think I have paid maybe $5 to print in the past 5 years and I can take out a book or movie afterwards too!
Everywhere I look I see examples of the US justice system falling down on the job. It does reasonably well managing value-based conflict at the SCOTUS level, but God help you if you find yourself in need of civil justice at any lower level. Criminal justice isn't a lot better.
I feel like the root cause is a system built for the 1700s that actively rejects the principles of efficiency, effectiveness, right and wrong in favor of an it's-too-much-make-it-go-away bureacratic moral equivalency.
In no universe should HP be allowed to continue this practice. And yet, I also identify with class action plaintiffs stuck in a system that does not care one whit about providing even them reasonable access to justice after years of litigation.
> I feel like the root cause system built for the 1700s
The root cause is that lawyers are expensive a corporations have more money than just about anyone else.
Couple that with a legislature which pretty much only passes laws in a reactionary manner and the fact that corporate lobbying has been a mainstay in US politics for the majority of the lifetime of the US and you get what we have now.
The problem is not that skill is expensive, it is that methods are inapt and archaic.
If I told you coding was unsatisfactory in a scenario where a human compiler was required to process each instruction, the correct response is not "developers" and "corporations". There is a right and wrong and our judges and lawyers demonstrate over and over they have not constructed a modern system for doing or finding it.
I think you’re operating with a very limited understanding of what goes into law.
Law isn’t like programming. There’s no compiler. There’s no specific target machine code to which all laws must boil down to.
You can’t automate law, since the desired outcome for each case is not known from the start. That’s the whole “justice is blind” saying.
The issue is that the laws governing corporations were written by corporations and have lots and lots of loopholes.
To match your analogy:
You’re suggesting an entire codebase rewrite when, truthfully, we need to refactor our laws surrounding what corporations can and can’t do and what punishment should be for corporations and the people that run them.
A rewrite always sounds appealing when you first join a project, before understanding why architecture decisions were made in the first place.
What specifically do you think is inapt or archaic about our legal system other than the individuals that make it up?
Rhetorical, but why do lawyers have to be expensive when they can be your only recluse against being abused by companies? That's part of the problem right there. I understand that law needs to be meticulous, but we're clearly doing something wrong if the system is disproportionately hitting wallets wrong.
The legislative stuff is unfortunate, but partially brought upon by the people. That one more falls to lack of understanding from the voterbase that put those people in. Someone like Nancy Pelosi or Matt Gaetz should not have been so easy to keep winning more terms if you spent 2 minutes researching them. But alas.
This illustrates what is very, very wrong and a huge source of discontent in our corpocracy. Corporations are able to enact any law they want (DRM for example) because of United vs FEC. Then they can get away with anything in court because they can afford to pay millions in lawyer fees after extorting customers by bricking printers. If I did this, I would go to jail. Not to mention Purdue Pharma.
>Then they can get away with anything in court because they can afford to pay millions in lawyer fees after extorting customers by bricking printers. If I did this, I would go to jail.
HP didn't even "brick" the printers. They only prevented them from using third party cartridges. That's not "brick" in any meaningful sense of the word. It's also unclear how that's something obviously illegal if it's done by an individual.
Alphabet pushes a "dynamic security update” to your phone tomorrow, blocking the third party apps. They didn’t brick your phone, you still can continue to download and use their apps!
I wish my[1] bricked 3DS could still function as a game-playing machine but, alas, Nintendo ahem “pushed an update” to it because it had custom firmware installed and I “made the mistake” of letting it connect to the internet. Now it doesn’t boot, much like a brick. I think some people will even say this is not properly bricked because I can technically restore it.
To their point, the phone in this analogy was not bricked (nor were the printers in this case), even if such an update is incredibly user-hostile. At least, many people will think that the phone/printer no longer functions at all when they see that word, so they’ll think it’s not the right word to use.
1: still calling it mine even though the courts will let Nintendo treat it like it’s theirs
I don't know. Maybe newer printers "fixed" it, but older printers didn't say "only works with HP ink". It's a bit different than a user choosing to install different firmware on their hardware, something they go out of their way to do. The ink is in interface, not the core structure.
Also, consider a layman's perspective. They won't read into the error codes and all that stuff. They update a printer that was printing paper yesterday, and now it won't print paper today. The printer says ink is fine but it's not printing. That sounds like a "brick" to them, right?
Indeed. As someone who worked in small and embedded systems, I can't help but think that many people have no idea what "bricked" actually means (or at least, meant for it's first many years of life).
Not working with non-hp cartridges is hardly "nonfunctional". If that counts as "bricked", then apple "bricked" my iPhone when they patched jailbreaks.
You make a good point. I still think the term is being misused and I think is worth correcting as otherwise we have no term for what bricked actually means, but I can see how one could reason their way into it. A printer that won't work with what you have on hand is essentially a "brick" in the moment. But "brick" is typically a permanent state, not a temporary one that simply requires using compatible parts. Following that logic, one could describe a car with a dead battery as a "brick" but that is clearly not accurate.
FTR lest someone think I'm defending HP here (I don't know why so many people, including on HN where we're supposed to be more contemplative and analytical, think everything must be 100% black or white, but I digress), I think HP is a despicable company and this practice of theirs is beyond abhorrent. I will never buy another HP product short of them fully reversing course and issuing at least an acknowledgment of the change in course if not a full-blown apology for being evil.
I remember there was once great company that had supplied first rate scientific equipment, great printers and other things. Now we have a healthy racket business.
What a strange move. By all means you should be banning residential and small business equipment because that’s best practice for a number of reasons. But to ban their larger units is nonsensical. They are entirely different business models, run with different profit motives. Pick the best tool for your business, don’t let other bullshit that isn’t relevant to the business affect your decisions.
There is a gigantic market of vendors choose from, and sometimes it’s easiest to just say “We’re going to avoid vendor X because they create risk for us.”
The above poster didn’t say he’s banning HPE, either. Just HP. I doubt anyone will really suffer from banning HP products.
We have a policy of only buying Brother, Epson, and Canon desktop/office printers with an exception for Lexmarks that are laser printers and have specific built in features. It means a lot less drama supporting them and getting supplies (even though we only use OEM supplies, or else get service and supplies through a click charge maintenance contract).
There’s still a fleet of ancient HP printers, including a workhorse 20-year-old LaserJet still printing 11x17 sheets.
We already banned HPE after they let us down on service several times. Literally no parts availability and crappy support for 3 years. Moved to AWS. We were a very large spender on HPE / 3PAR stuff.
Agreed. We have some random HPE switches lying around. The second any of them fail they’ll go in the rubbish* and be replaced with Ubiquiti gear, most likely.
> They are entirely different business models, run with different profit motives.
Why should that be taken into account?
> don’t let other bullshit that isn’t relevant to the business affect your decisions
Why not?
If you only consider one aspect of a complex issue and make your decisions around that one aspect only, you might be missing out on the bigger picture.
Take Trump's "Dumbest Trade War in History" as the WSJ calls it. Why are e.g. Canadians not buying US goods and why are they cancelling vacations in the US?
Is it because they have better vacation options in Canada? I do not think so.
They are doing it because they take the bigger picture into account. They do not care about temporary discomfort it might bring them. They know that they need to send a strong message to Trump. And they are doing it with their own wallets.
The comparison you’re making does not hold up because it mixes two completely different types of decision making.
A consumer boycott is a personal, values driven choice. The goal is to express disapproval or take a stand, even if that means some inconvenience. It is about signaling, not about making the most efficient or practical choice.
Business decisions, especially around infrastructure, are made within a performance and value focused framework. The goal is to choose the best tool based on reliability, cost, support, how well it fits the business need and whether it brings value. If a business starts picking tools based on emotional reactions or symbolic gestures, it risks undermining its own operations without achieving any value.
So why not let irrelevant factors influence the decision? Because doing so leads to worse outcomes. You end up with inferior tools, higher costs, and more complexity, all without moving the needle on whatever issue you are trying to protest. HP’s enterprise printers products are fundamentally different from their consumer inkjets with different support models, economic models for parts and supplies, and so on. Ignoring that difference just weakens your argument and leads to poor decision-making.
> You end up with inferior tools, higher costs, and more complexity
Possibly, yes. These are the tradeoffs that the businesses are sometimes willing to accept. In exchange for achieving something else that is beyond their own short-term business success.
In general, I think that businesses should take the broader picture into account because if they only think short-term and prioritize local gains, they might go bankrupt in the long term.
Take the Chinese 5G chips for example. They might be great value for money. But they might also contain backdoors exploitable by the Chinese government. Should the US mobile carries, for example, be using them? Just because in the short term that would make them more money? I do not think so.
> all without moving the needle on whatever issue you are trying to protest.
Why would you think that?
If business customers stop buying for instance the HP enterprise products, I am sure that HP will notice. And then HP will either have to adjust to what their business customers actually want and take into account the reasons why they are boycotting their products and services. Or HP may continue to lose business customers.
The difference between HP and HPE is one is a really expensive way to get crap service and parts and one is a cheaper way to get crap service and crap parts.
I'm disappointed there's no legislation yet that bans these practices wholesale (vendor lock-in, wasteful and overpriced ink cartridges, etc). There's a range of consumer products with scummy practices like this, like razors, printers, vapes/e-cigarrettes, etc. They generate huge amounts of e-waste.
I'm not sure how legislating the razor and blade business model would help with the bit about e-waste. The basic idea is simply that the product is sold at a loss but the consumables (ink, blades, vape cartridges) are sold with high markup. My gut reaction is that making the consumables cheaper would increase the waste because people would be buying more of those consumables.
There's a big difference between "this vaguely might be construed as deterring competition" and "illegal according to anti-competition law". Razor blades, the namesake of "razor and blade business model" has existed for decades without successful legal challenge, for instance.
Has anyone read the decision? I'm curious what the actual legal justification was for not refunding customers for removing functionality. It seems so baffling I'm wondering if there was some technicality.
Also, why is the article misusing the term "bricked"? Bricked means a device doesn't work at all, and that it can't be fixed with a reset or further update -- not that it loses part of its functionality. These printers work as soon as you put HP ink in them, right? Their functionality has been limited, not bricked. (I'm not defending HP at all, just saying let's use the right words for the right things?)
The most interesting part of the short agreement is that there was exactly _one_ objection to the settlement. I guess most people don't care or there wasn't enough of an argument for them being compensated in this particular case.
Also, the complaints about lawyers enriching themselves seem exaggerated since their reported fees are $750k, which seems like not much to be honest.
Class actions aren't really known for their activism per se. A lot of setting it up is just calling or emailing people and getting their signature. I'm not too surprised the engagement is on the level of a Change.org petition.
>their reported fees are $750k, which seems like not much to be honest.
paying themselves high 6 figures to just shake hands with oligarchs is way too much, imo. There was no justice here, they just wanted a cut of the heist.
This reminds me of a Dell laptop with a great touchpad, if you were able to install the Synaptics drivers from ... Lenovo!
The touchpad had support for edge-drag, but the Dell ones didn't expose it. And it's not that the Lenovo driver did something special. In fact, they did less work. Instead of creating a custom UI, they just exposed the Synaptics UI.
This is exactly the kind of bullshit "win" that makes class-action lawsuits a total joke for anyone looking for justice, and why corporations continue to engage in user-hostile behavior. They stand to make a lot more money screwing over consumers than they have to fear from lawsuits.