What is the most shocking is that HP softwares are usually the crappiest crap that we can give on a computer. So it is really bad to see that forced on so many computers of people that might have avoided it in theory.
Printer software tends to be below average quality bloatware for most popular brands. Don't know why this happens. Back in the days when I used Windows I avoided running setup.exe supplied by the printer vendor and tried to install only necessary drivers using Windows UI to driver update/reinstall.
Yeah, but when I last installed an HP printer with AirPrint support it wouldn't print unless I set it up, preferably with an app that somehow was very interested in my contact information and GPS location...
Mine didn't either. LaserJet 402dne. I connected it via Ethernet (no WiFi on that model). No drivers or other software needed to be installed for MacOS, and I also print from iOS and Android without issues.
HP Color LaserJet Pro M255dw here and I didn’t get any of that crap either. I don’t even know or remember if there was a driver disc with the printer (not that I’d be able to use it, I no longer have any computers with a working optical drive) - just plugged it in, set networking up, and every device in the house (iOS and Linux) can see and print to it. Linux did require specifying the driver (came with CUPS).
The LaserJet Pros are actually still really nice printers. Expensive relative to the rest of the market, but my M479fdw seems to lack all the latest user-hostile features. It doesn't require an app for AirPrint, or anything other than drivers for Windows.
Not looking forward to the $800 or so in toner cartridges it will require when the starter cartridges are exhausted. They will basically double the cost of the printer. But if the quality is there -- and it definitely is -- I'm not one to complain, especially since the $800 is (supposed to be) good for 6000 pages. It should be several years before I have to buy another set.
Mine is the same across MacOS and Linux. Something people can do is setup a Linux server with an AirPrint printer setup and then share the printer over samba to Windows
(User-facing) software made by hardware manufacturers is almost always subpar. And printers are some of the most notoriously user-hostile hardware that exists, so naturally printer software is even worse than hardware-bundled applications in general.
It's outsourced two or three times. Some subsidiary in a cheaper country gets the job, outsources it to some local bodyshop that outsources it further to smaller firms or individual contractors.
Old HP was something special, people here might not be aware that they were a leading test equipment company back then not just a PC maker. That business was spun off as Agilent then spun off again as Keysight.
At a previous job we purchased a 3458a multimeter for some precision measurements. Its use cases are more limited now than in 1989 when it was introduced, but for high precision it's still the standard and the design is practically unchanged. They published a very in depth article on its ADC design at the time.
Because 1989 China didn't have the knowhow and industrial capability to reverse engineer, copy and manufacture your cutting edge HW designs and then undercut you, so there was no risk in publishing your know-how out in the open.
It's no coincidence the rise of Huawei coincided with the fall of Nortel.
I recently saw a tech youtuber from my home country review a bootleg iPhone 15 Pro Max, and it was very difficult to tell them apart HW wise unless you really knew what to look for.
Same with bootleg AirPods Pros, they even automatically connect to your genuine iPhone when you flip open their case, and only with a recent iOS update does the iPhone warn you they are not genuine AirPods Pros. Insane.
This video is Russian, but you can discard voice. It's pirate copy of iPhone 14. I couldn't tell the difference, at least from that video. That's really lot of effort gone to copy. Those who did that really deserve a respect.
Yes, same how a lot of fancy non-state-sponsored malware is developed by russian/chinese/iranian hackers. Obviously those skills could be put to much better use for good causes than bootlegging iPhones or writing malware, but that's what happens when you're born in a country with no good honest economic opportunities: crime is much more lucrative as no matter how smart and hard working you are, the local legal jobs and business opportunities are still shit.
> I couldn't tell the difference, at least from that video.
Here's an easy giveaway - the bottom bezel isn't symmetrical in width.
Getting uniform bezels requires flexible OLED screens (and a few other oled adjectives I've forgotten), and all this is much harder to engineer and a fair bit more expensive. So far other than Apple, only Samsung and Google Pixels appear to be capable of having uniform bezels.
>Here's an easy giveaway - the bottom bezel isn't symmetrical in width.
Sure, but they're not designed to fool those who already owned a recent iPhone, but to fool those that never owned a recent iPhone and are just buying their first iPhone now which so are easily fooled if they only get to play with it for a couple of minutes in a parking lot somewhere, before handing over the cash.
It's how this scam works in developing countries. You buy bootleg iPhones from Alibaba for $150 and sell them for $800 in a parking lot to a clueless dude looking to buy his first iPhone who can't afford the $1400 sticker price because that's way more than his monthly wage.
That's understandable and very likely true, HN has nearly a 100% rate of tech geeks/nerds compared to the real world. However at least in some places in India it's often implicitly understood that such a phone sold below market cost is some kind of fake or refurb or b/c stock etc.
I pulled those sales prices out of my ass as I don't follow second hand iPhone market prices but the real world scammers do and they make sure to advertise the correct market prices in line with genuine second hand iPhones, to not look suspicious as being too good to be true.
Good, that's a free, efficient market. If airpods cost $22 to make, they shouldn't sell them for $200. If you do, don't be surprised when someone sells them for $60. The whole reason they manufacture in China in the first place is to avoid paying livable wages in a free society that has environmental protection laws. Screw them.
Yep, there's a whole YouTube genre of fussing with pre-Fionacide HP test equipment. We have a couple pieces in the lab. The internals are a sight to behold, built with their period's best technology and no costs to spare.
Working with it had me oddly sentimental. Most of my measurements are 12V or less and not especially precise, so I'll reach for my Saleae before even using a modern scope or DMM much less a beast like the 3458a. But it was simultaneously a swansong for a bygone era of engineering while still proving the old tech can hold its own more than 30 years later. It felt a bit like having a Concorde sitting on my lab bench. Like you said if you open it up you can immediately tell a lot of thought and care went into making these things.
> Old HP was something special, people here might not be aware that they were a leading test equipment company back then not just a PC maker. That business was spun off as Agilent then spun off again as Keysight.
This sure sounds like a MBA beancounter desease gone cancerous.
You'd be surprised. I accidentally pushed myself out of Windows around XP because I loathed to wait out its startup and patch installation times. The longer you stay in Linux, the worse Windows punishes you when you come back, so you do just this one thing more in Linux. Then one day you wonder why Windows is so miserably user unfriendly for anything, and notice your brain flipped from Windows defaults to Linux defaults somewhere in the recent past. Turns out they are both equally brain damaged, and the brain damage from the most used one becomes invisible.
Now Apple, for some reason, never clicked with me.
Apple never clicked with me either, it's a clunky-crippled interface with a manufacturer that wants to lock you into their ecosystem worse than Microsoft does.
I've been using Linux since 97 or so though, so I'm pretty comfortable with it. But there are some things Windows is just necessary. Games are a good example, there are some games that just won't work under Proton at all. There is other stuff as well. I took the LSAT last year, and they require software to monitor the computer I use while I take the test, and only Mac or Windows is supported.
My qualms with Apple were more practical, e.g. their godforsaken keyboard layout. I ended up installing XP on that machine, which somehow angered both the MS and the Apple fans.
For games, I just stopped playing and ask for refund on gog or steam anything that doesnt work on wine. Im not much of a hardcore gamer though. I tolerate some nuisances, e.g. Timberborn wont let you alt tab away ( I tolerated that from XP too I guess).
Proctoring software is nasty, though. I have no windows machines left, so I dont know what I would do. Ask to take the test with them, I think?
My sons school software somehow works better on Linux than on the school PCs with windows, but schools have notoriously old hardware so that might be the issue too.
In the end, it's a free country. Anyone still happy on Apple or Windows, be my guest. But I knew a competent IT colleague that questioned my competence daily because I ran Debian at home (And Vista on the job like everyone over there). My response to him stays: Go away and leave me alone.
I agree with all of that. Asking to take the test would be an option, they do have some program where they can give you a PC to use, I just felt it wasn't worth the hassle. I'm not much of a gamer either, but I want the few games I do play to run - GTAV Online is one that won't run in Linux at all.
Surely 2D printing is pretty much a solved problem by now. How come there is no company making cheap, no-fuss printers that accept standard USB&network printing driver protocols. You'd expect them to eat everyone's lunch.
Arguably there should even be open source printers by now.
The profit is in the ink rather than the printer. There are two issues with someone coming into the market with a cheap printer/ink.
1) It's hard for any business to keep selling a product at 10% profit margin when you know you can sell it for 200% profit margin with the price increase not affecting sales.
2) In the rare situation that a business would accept low margins 'just to be nice to the customer' - they'll just get bought out. It's hard to not accept 10 years of profit for a business when it's being offered to you.
Counterintuitively, 2D printers are substantially more complex than 3D printers. Everything inside them needs very tight tolerances and many thousands of custom components. The only companies that have the tooling to make printer-specific parts are printer manufacturers and they sure aren't going to sell you parts so you can directly compete with them.
I have a black-and-white laser Brother printer from over 15 years ago. Never changed the toner, comes out once every few months for the rare occasion I need to print something. I love it
I bought a massive Brother DCP-L8400CDN printer for home use after tangling with some monstrous HP combo printer/scanner that didn't like to scan if the ink wasn't genuine. It's a colour laser with double-sided printing and an ADF scanner that works brilliantly over a network connection. I've been running it for years with 3rd-party toner refills and it "just works", though occasionally I've had to power-cycle it when it was too sleepy and didn't wake from a Windows print job.
Microwaves are also solved problems that are complete garbage now.
Nobody gets to graduate college and become rich by maintaining a solution, so you get people who make products worse to show an increase in profit to justify their salaries and promotions.
Are they? I just had a look in Asda and 9/10 microwaves just had a start +add time button. Event the big brand ones. I think there was a Samsung one with one of these keypads that look like a 1998 Nokia but those are rare and I have no idea who buys them.
Can you elaborate on what's wrong with them now? My chicken pot pie and frozen burrito still burns me while being frozen inside, just like it did 30 years ago.
TL;DR fault is not on HP side but on Windows side.
90% of commenters didn't read the article. (Yes I hate HP too. Use Brother.)
> It's likely that whatever bug is causing the problem made these PCs believe they had an HP printer connected, and then Windows worked the way it's designed to work and downloaded the HP printer app as a result. The questions are: What caused this bug? (..)
Interesting. With Windows 10, I rarely use the start menu button. One of my boxes had the HP Print software. I did not see it add/remove programs, nor do I have any HP computer equipment. Looks like it wanted permissions when it started up for the first time and had what appears to be a working uninstall. If it shows up on another computer - will track down how they installed it. Not cool.
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[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 112 ms ] threadEven my HP laser is bearable!
Not looking forward to the $800 or so in toner cartridges it will require when the starter cartridges are exhausted. They will basically double the cost of the printer. But if the quality is there -- and it definitely is -- I'm not one to complain, especially since the $800 is (supposed to be) good for 6000 pages. It should be several years before I have to buy another set.
At a previous job we purchased a 3458a multimeter for some precision measurements. Its use cases are more limited now than in 1989 when it was introduced, but for high precision it's still the standard and the design is practically unchanged. They published a very in depth article on its ADC design at the time.
https://www.hpl.hp.com/hpjournal/pdfs/IssuePDFs/1989-04.pdf
It's no coincidence the rise of Huawei coincided with the fall of Nortel.
I recently saw a tech youtuber from my home country review a bootleg iPhone 15 Pro Max, and it was very difficult to tell them apart HW wise unless you really knew what to look for.
Same with bootleg AirPods Pros, they even automatically connect to your genuine iPhone when you flip open their case, and only with a recent iOS update does the iPhone warn you they are not genuine AirPods Pros. Insane.
This video is Russian, but you can discard voice. It's pirate copy of iPhone 14. I couldn't tell the difference, at least from that video. That's really lot of effort gone to copy. Those who did that really deserve a respect.
Yes, same how a lot of fancy non-state-sponsored malware is developed by russian/chinese/iranian hackers. Obviously those skills could be put to much better use for good causes than bootlegging iPhones or writing malware, but that's what happens when you're born in a country with no good honest economic opportunities: crime is much more lucrative as no matter how smart and hard working you are, the local legal jobs and business opportunities are still shit.
Here's an easy giveaway - the bottom bezel isn't symmetrical in width.
Getting uniform bezels requires flexible OLED screens (and a few other oled adjectives I've forgotten), and all this is much harder to engineer and a fair bit more expensive. So far other than Apple, only Samsung and Google Pixels appear to be capable of having uniform bezels.
Sure, but they're not designed to fool those who already owned a recent iPhone, but to fool those that never owned a recent iPhone and are just buying their first iPhone now which so are easily fooled if they only get to play with it for a couple of minutes in a parking lot somewhere, before handing over the cash.
It's how this scam works in developing countries. You buy bootleg iPhones from Alibaba for $150 and sell them for $800 in a parking lot to a clueless dude looking to buy his first iPhone who can't afford the $1400 sticker price because that's way more than his monthly wage.
They are absolute bastards now and a shadow of their former self. But they still sell the 3458A
But yes that. I have a fair bit of HP test gear lying around dating from 60s to 90s.
And a few RPN calculators!
This sure sounds like a MBA beancounter desease gone cancerous.
HP kit was eye-wateringly expensive (and worth it), back then.
This is like reason 9.832 not to use windows.
Now Apple, for some reason, never clicked with me.
I've been using Linux since 97 or so though, so I'm pretty comfortable with it. But there are some things Windows is just necessary. Games are a good example, there are some games that just won't work under Proton at all. There is other stuff as well. I took the LSAT last year, and they require software to monitor the computer I use while I take the test, and only Mac or Windows is supported.
For games, I just stopped playing and ask for refund on gog or steam anything that doesnt work on wine. Im not much of a hardcore gamer though. I tolerate some nuisances, e.g. Timberborn wont let you alt tab away ( I tolerated that from XP too I guess).
Proctoring software is nasty, though. I have no windows machines left, so I dont know what I would do. Ask to take the test with them, I think?
My sons school software somehow works better on Linux than on the school PCs with windows, but schools have notoriously old hardware so that might be the issue too.
In the end, it's a free country. Anyone still happy on Apple or Windows, be my guest. But I knew a competent IT colleague that questioned my competence daily because I ran Debian at home (And Vista on the job like everyone over there). My response to him stays: Go away and leave me alone.
Arguably there should even be open source printers by now.
1) It's hard for any business to keep selling a product at 10% profit margin when you know you can sell it for 200% profit margin with the price increase not affecting sales.
2) In the rare situation that a business would accept low margins 'just to be nice to the customer' - they'll just get bought out. It's hard to not accept 10 years of profit for a business when it's being offered to you.
I have a black-and-white laser Brother printer from over 15 years ago. Never changed the toner, comes out once every few months for the rare occasion I need to print something. I love it
Nobody gets to graduate college and become rich by maintaining a solution, so you get people who make products worse to show an increase in profit to justify their salaries and promotions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiS27feX8o0
90% of commenters didn't read the article. (Yes I hate HP too. Use Brother.)
> It's likely that whatever bug is causing the problem made these PCs believe they had an HP printer connected, and then Windows worked the way it's designed to work and downloaded the HP printer app as a result. The questions are: What caused this bug? (..)