I own a home printer. I bought it because, like many things I didn’t know I’d have to spend all my time doing when I started a business, I often need to print documents and mail them places. Years of asking friends to print things for me or sneakily printing personal documents at work made me think owning my own printer would be a good choice that improved my quality of life. It's not.
Here’s a non-exhaustive, unranked list of what sucks about this thing:
- When plugged in, it has a lot of color-changing lights I can’t turn off, much like my computer headphones and other gamer peripherals that have come into my possession over the years. The color of these lights doesn’t indicate anything, and they just exist to keep me from being able to sleep in any room occupied by my printer.
- It came with a terrible desktop app. I actually just opened this app after writing the above bullet point, wondering if I could turn the lights off, but the main thing the app seems to be for is telling me I can buy ink from HP.
- It’s a wireless printer, connected to my single home network, and sits maybe three feet from both my computer and my router, and yet the odds all three of these items will be able to find each other when required changes every time.
- It chews through ink, apparently on purpose. When I tried to print some stuff a few weeks ago, I was surprised to find that the black ink cartridge was empty, but I chalked this up to assuming the factory-provided cartridge sucked. I bought a new one for fifty American dollars, printed less than 100 pages, and this weekend found that it was out of ink again. Researching this led me to a ton of printer nerds in forums who’ve made “coverage charts” demonstrating that, yep, this is working as intended.
- The app would like to remind me that I could buy more ink from HP.
- The printer will indicate that it is “ready,” but this status has no relation to whether or not anything will happen after I hit “print.” This weekend, I attempted to print a single page 10 times. Half of those times, the printer told me it “wasn’t ready” after I asked it to print, despite being “ready” moments ago. The other half, it continued to tell me it was “ready” but just didn’t do anything.
- When I realized I was out of black ink this weekend, I decided I could just print in color, by selecting the “color” option from the print screen. This did not work. This did not work so much that I eventually removed the empty black ink cartridge from the printer, which caused the printer to throw a lengthy fit and refuse to print.
- The app would like to remind me that I could buy more ink from HP.
In fairness to my printer, an inanimate object that doesn’t need my empathy, I am willing to concede that printing is hard. I remember how long it took me to learn to write by hand, which I guess is the human equivalent of printing. But once I learned how to write, I could reliably write things down whenever the need arose. My printer has no such consistency, despite the fact that we’ve had home printers since at least the 80s. I don’t remember printing being this shitty when I was young, but maybe my expectations were lower with nascent technology, or maybe I just had a child’s sense of how things should work.
Here is what makes the printer’s life so hard that its only recourse is to make my life hard too, according to Wirecutter,
there is some amazingly complicated technology in your printer, including the printheads, the ink, and the mapping software. You take your printer for granted, but that box can cover a piece of paper in millions of dots of precisely located, color-matched ink in a few seconds. You’re probably buying the printer for the cost of parts and distribution, which means the manufacturer is effectively subsidizing the thing on the premise that they’ll recoup their research and development costs (and the rest of their overhead) from your ink purchases.
The Outline points out that printers “have to attempt to cooperate with every computer ever made, and every computer that ever will be made,” which, OK, is a pretty tall order when you think about it. Taking these sites at their word and not assuming Big Print has gotten to them somehow, I guess I should be awed that the printer even occasionally works?
But I am not awed; I am angry. The fact that this problem seems universal–it’s not just my printer, or my computer, or my home network, or me–suggests that the problem rests with printers themselves, or at least every company that makes one, or–you might want to sit down for this–capitalism. As The Outline writes,
Blame the glory of the free market. Manufacturers were incentivised to make [printers] shittier. It’s similar to how freemium mobile games tend to prioritize addictiveness over quality in order to generate more in-app purchases. Or how Facebook utilizes aggressive growth hacks over not incinerating democracy. It’s a prioritization of profit above all else.
You probably know all this, and as such do not own a printer. You probably do what I used to do, and use your job’s printer, or print at the office supply store, or the library, or from one of your idiot friends like me who owns a printer. But me, your idiot friend, cannot print things for you, because even though it is 2024 in America, a country that has put a man on the moon, I cannot print things at home by pressing "print" on the machine designed specifically for the purpose of printing. I can merely spend hours cursing the heavens, wondering where in the three feet of ether my print job has gone, while a shitty app tells me it can sell me more ink.
(I feel like I should end this blog with that clip from Office Space, but it makes me feel old, and I already feel old enough writing a whole blog railing at technology. Sorry if that's what you were expecting here.)
