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