Watching a mutual ask for printer recs and receive a chorus of tired tech folk going "Just get a Brother, they're fine" and man
MAN
Like this is actually kinda fascinating honestly, Brother is now the best printer brand, the one that every Computer Person recommends, and is it because their printers are good? Their printers are fine, they print, whatever, no, it's because everybody else's printers have gotten Innovated out the wazoo, every innovation making them way worse, until it's gotten to the point where I wouldn't have one in the house even if it were free, and meanwhile Brother's have remained consistently Fine I Guess, which now makes them the best printer manufacturer simply by virtue of them opting out of the Who Can Get Crappiest Fastest race
Brother have gotten to where they are now, by NOT innovating
@admin To be fair my parents have an HP all-in-one printer/scanner/copy with instant ink subscription, they bought it for like 50€ in early 2016 and it's still working fine.
Before that they used HP printers without subscription and they broke in a couple months.
And this is sensible to some extent, when the ink cartridge inevitably dies it's HP's money not yours.
Stupid "I want to print color and pictures" mentality, not much I can do, they're not going to take laser printers.
@juliank@ifixcoinops
I wonder how much money they could have saved over the years if they would have gone with a laser printer instead. I guess it depends on how often they print too
@ifixcoinops
Come on, Brother has Color Laser printers now, and also LED printers, and support newer protocols than 20 years ago, incl. stuff for smartphones over WiFi or whatever - they have innovated, they just haven't enshittified
@ifixcoinops The paper pickup on my 18 year Brother b&w laser broke and it didn’t AirPrint. A couple of months ago I bought a refurbished Brother color laser directly from Brother for about $300. Works great (as expected).
I would only recommend HP to someone I absolutely hate.
@kyozou@ifixcoinops I'd only recommend HP to someone I hated if they didn't know where I lived. Otherwise there's a chance they might leave it on my doorstep, which would mean I'd have to burn the house down and move to another county.
@ifixcoinops printers are a solved problem. They don't need innovation. Maybe a little iteration, but putting in network instead of a parallel port isn't a big deal. That is the only significant difference since 1990 and today. (Even then networking was an option)
However, the effort to build a better printer at this point means for ever R&D dollar spent on improvement, you might get fifty cents back; it just doesn’t make sense to innovate at small levels.
However, shareholders expect profits to grow year over year, so the temptation to squeeze more money out of something without investing to create any actual value is perpetually on the CEO’s mind. That’s why we get DRM in ink and printers that self destruct after 3 years.
Blame capitalism for the horrid state of modern printers.
@ifixcoinops Sure resolution could improve - but it doesn't matter because for most of us there is no advantage to higher resolution. Sure you can tell if you get a magnifying glass, but for most things low resolution is good enough so why pay for the innovation.
But... has there ever been a time when they actually worked? Brother, being "fine, I guess" and the modern champion isn't that different from the past, when they also didn't work.
They're now SaaS-burdened and enshittified. But the lack of reliability, burning ink like water, etc. aren't new problems. Those date back to at least 1998, which is the earliest I owned a printer that wasn't daisy-wheel/tractor-feed.
@ifixcoinops laser printers have never had those problems. You seem to have bought an ink-jet. I don't think brother makes them. Spend just a little more on a good laser and it will work for a decade or more.
@bluGill@ifixcoinops@codefolio Brother does make inkjets, which I would not (and did not, in this case) recommend. An all-in-one monochrome laser printer with no subscription service for $180 is worth getting if the budget allows for it.
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