Everybody gets so mad about this because a lot of printer vendors go out of their way to force you to not use materials or resources that you purchased, and presumably the only reason is for them to make more profit.

It would be one thing if the printer had a red flashing button that you had to push to override the forced stop (i.e. an explicit, vendor-approved method of opting out of quality in favor of using up something you paid for). Some product owners are fortunate enough to have (generally accidentally) selected products that can be overridden via vendor-unapproved hacks.

While it's quite benevolent that companies like Brother choose to give us "great printers for less than $100", I don't feel that they're beyond reproach for selling me a container of liquid or powder at an exceptionally high price and telling me i can't have the last 5-10% of it for any reason.

It absolutely is infuriating to have a printer that is fully capable of printing a sheet of paper, except that it has been programmed not to.

> It absolutely is infuriating to have a printer that is fully capable of printing a sheet of paper, except that it has been programmed not to.

No, that is exactly the deal you agreed to when you bought the printer. That's the whole point of inexpensive printers. Buy high-end printers if you want lower per-page costs.

You, the customer, make the choice. There's no lying involved by anybody. The terms were perfectly clear up front.

The terms were that I get a toner cartridge that I get to use as I see fit. Nothing more, nothing less.

I'd like to point out no-one is cheating them out of their business models, they aren't updating their business models to the market.

Printers are getting cheaper to make. They keep lowering their prices to stay competitive. In order to keep making increasing profits they have adopted the Razor blade model.

Rather than innovating they are lying to customers to try and keep them spending. I don't mind a printer that warns me I might be about to run low, if it's off by weeks or a month I can live with that. I do mind a printer that forces me to waste.

A company needs to increase its profits or it will die. This is self-evident. Your italics seem to imply that increasing profits by itself is unethical? Didn't expect to read that on HN.

You're claiming Brother isn't innovating. As far as I know printers have gotten cheaper, faster, more accurate, lighter and produce less curly paper. Sounds like innovation to me. Did you just make that no innovation claim up - or do you have supporting evidence? [%]

Your misconception is that when you buy a toner you somehow pay for an amount of ink. You don't. The guarantee, when you buy a toner, is that you can pay 3000 or so pages of text before it runs out. If you get your 3000 pages you should be happy. If Brother uses a page counter to brick the toner as soon as I hit 3000 pages I wouldn't be outraged. After all, that's what I paid for.

You're not buying milk here. Milk you buy by the gallon. If you get less than the advertised weight you feel cheated. But here they don't even advertise the amount of powder in the toner. It's not relevant. It's pages you get. [^]

If brother would improve the efficiency of the printer by 2 then they could halve the fuel in the toner (without lowering the price) and you'd get the same amount of pages per toner. You'd be OKAY with that - because you're NOT PAYING FOR THE AMOUNT OF INK. You're paying for a (lower boundary on) pages you can print with a single toner.

If you want to buy ink in the same way you buy milk (which makes sense in a way, because some pages use more ink than others) then you'd be right. If you buy a 10 ounce toner you deserve 10 ounces of fuel. But that's very clearly not the case here.

The waste argument is valid, but it's simply an unavoidable result of our economy. Appliances are simply getting cheap, so waste becomes the rational attitude. Dishes dirty? Buy new ones. Dropped the coffee pot? Buy a new machine. Washer broken? Guess what? New one. Fan in computer rattles? Oh yes. Dell.com to the rescue. I agree that waste is bad, but toners are insignificant compared to waste in the general sense.

[%] Aside (and may not apply to you): people tend to make up arguments to support their position if they have made up their mind "intuitively". Rationalizing if you will. If you felt intuitive outrage on this toner issue, step back and re-evaluate. You might still come to the same conclusion, but you would definitely use different arguments.

[^] They do say "assuming 5% coverage", which is a bit of a slippery slope

Milk I buy by the gallon. Toner, I buy by the cartridge. There is no contract I sign when I buy it to leave 1/3 of the toner in the cartridge, and no implicit agreement.

The only reason people don't yell about this sort of thing more is because they don't know about it.

Yes, people would yell more about it if they knew. But it would not be the rational thing to do. After all, the only thing it would accomplish is that Brother will put less ink in the toner (or they'll lose money) and the last 300 pages or so will be of lower quality. That way the toner will be -empty- after the 3000 pages. Somehow, that's "fair"?

Customers will get an inferior product and they'll definitely be happier. And if you ask them: if you can get a cartridge for the same price that doesn't print faded pages in the end, would you buy that instead? You'd hear "Yes!". But as soon as they hear there's free toner left after 3000 pages, they'll get outraged again.

Irrationality at its best.

Not at all. I buy the cartridge. I want to maximize it's utility. Brother is artificially placing restrictions to prevent this maximal utilization. It's good for their business, but so would sending someone with a club to force me to buy more toner whether I need it or not. Somewhere there's a limit to what's sane for a company to do.

Either way, their good business is hurting my business by artificially preventing me from making maximal use of the supplies I buy. Workarounds are possible but annoying. I demand that I am allowed to actually use what I pay for without jumping through hoops.

> A company needs to increase its profits or it will die.

Why? While not exactly popular a company can live off stagnant profits.

> so the quality is high all the way to the end, and then the toner shuts down.

I think most people are aware that the ink is a finite resource, and are happy to change it when they see the level is getting low and not producing good results. Let them judge when that is.

The ink is not the expensive part. Brother could probably cut the price of toners in half and still make a profit. But by doing so, they'd get fewer recurring revenues, which means that the price of the printer itself would have to go up.

Either that, or they lose out on profits.

You wouldn't be angry if the toner contained less fuel. If you could print only 2000 pages instead of 3000, you would think you got a great deal. But if you can print 2000 pages, and the printer then refuses to print the last 1000, you're suddenly upset? Makes no sense. You're still getting essentially the same deal: 2000 pages for $60.

Brother.

Don't like 'em? Don't buy their products.