Or in other words, the price is high because there is consumer demand for printers that work, without advertising, without drm, without screwing you around to squeeze you for cash.

Surely DRM here, and allowing closed firmware, and such, are anti-Capitalist? Don't they prevent the market from optimising?

Unlikely. I see this frequently, where niche vendors charge a lot for discontinued products.

Perhaps demand for discontinued products is not uncommon.

It can have other reasons than the old products being bad (e.g. I recently bought two copies of a discontinued mosue at higher-than-MSRP prices because switching to a different model costs me in time to get used to it) but I wouldn't discount it as a major factor. A lot of products really have gotten shittier replacements.

> A lot of products really have gotten shittier replacements.

A perpetual pattern in humanity is this refrain coming from old people. :-) You can find examples of it from centuries ago.

A lazy response in online discussions is this idea that "old man yells at clouds" is somehow an argument for how things have not gotten worse. We are in a thread discussing an instance where a company is making their product worse FFS.

It is reducing the value of something merely to one attribute.