[HN Gopher] Brother have gotten to where they are now by not inn...
___________________________________________________________________
Brother have gotten to where they are now by not innovating
Author : anotherevan
Score : 826 points
Date : 2023-11-27 07:43 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (retro.social)
(TXT) w3m dump (retro.social)
| ramraj07 wrote:
| A comparison would be to a kitchenaid stand mixer. Once you've
| perfected a gadget best to stop there and not try and add useless
| value.
| ansc wrote:
| KitchenAid used their advantage into cutting costs, changing
| pieces into plastic though.
| legitster wrote:
| What pieces?
|
| If you mean the gearbox, contrary to amateur opinion, nylon
| is probably a superior material to the cheap metal ones they
| replaced.
|
| Because their mixers are still made in the US, labor saving
| cuts are much more worthwhile to them than materials.
|
| (Their non-mixer offshored lineup is overpriced crap though).
| crote wrote:
| They have been cheaping out on a lot of parts.
|
| A good example is the removal of the spring & washer used
| to secure the attachments: they are only a few cents of
| material, but they greatly increase the life expectancy of
| the mixer. Now you'll have to get those for $10-$20 from a
| 3rd party...
| legitster wrote:
| > they greatly increase the life expectancy of the mixer
|
| Oops. Do they? I ripped mine off years ago. It makes a
| bit more clatter at low speeds but I haven't noticed any
| damage.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The plastic gear is intended to function like a fuse. It
| saves other more expensive parts by failing under too much
| load.
| seeknotfind wrote:
| I have a Brother printer. Sometimes it just doesn't print,
| cancels the job with an error. Very annoying
| alex_duf wrote:
| I don't think the bar is very high to be a good printing
| company. Brother is at the top, but that doesn't mean they're
| excelling, they're maybe not as visibly trying to actively
| screw their user base.
| mnd999 wrote:
| That's literally what the article says.
| varjag wrote:
| Our requires its Windows drivers re-installed every while to
| even print anything (not an issue with Macs tho). Also, Brother
| is naturally on with the locked down cartridge, can't-print-bw-
| cause-you-low-on-magenta bandwagon with all other
| manufacturers.
| thewisenerd wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20231127074421/https://retro.soc...
| billpg wrote:
| Innovation....
|
| I saw a fridge that had an app so you could control it from
| anywhere.
|
| My requirements for a fridge are remarkably simple, to the point
| the only practical use I could think of an app was alarm that I'd
| left the door open or something.
|
| (If this particular app did have a door-open alarm, it wasn't on
| the list of features. It did say you could adjust the temperature
| from your office. A location I'm often worrying about the
| fridge.)
| jesterson wrote:
| Exactly this.
|
| Who decided to call useless ideas an "innovation" is beyond my
| understanding.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I need a printer to print. Ideally at acceptable prices (I
| know, ink cartrigaes are like razor blades and that won't
| change ever). Plus points if it can be connected to a network
| (which is a given today). I don't have to print when not at
| home (why would I fax something to myself when I am not at
| home?).
|
| Ideally, as I print photos mainly, I get more then 4 colors
| and decent color management.
|
| Added bonus for scanning (with or without document feeder).
|
| Not much else there. Pay-per-page subscriptions are ok, by
| the way, price wise for home office use.
|
| Then it comes down to innovation in the fields of color
| management, ink mixing and print heads and paper handling.
| And inks, of course.
|
| Anything else is just pointless, and nothing I would call
| innovation.
| garethrowlands wrote:
| Epson make EcoTank inkjet printers ink tanks that you
| refill from a bottle, not cartridges. It's vastly better
| than ink cartridges, there's no comparison on price,
| convenience or environmental impact. The tanks and bottles
| hold vastly more ink than a cartridge does. The printers
| are roughly the same price as any inkjet printer. I do not
| work for Epson.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I have an ET-8550 at home. Considerably more expensive
| than a comparable non-tank printer, with a factor of two
| give or take. Without a deal I got, it would have been
| out of budget.
|
| Compared to a Canon Pro-200, they break even was
| somehwere around 300 printed a4 photo mark if I remember
| my detailed calculation correctly (850 bucks for the
| Epson and 460 bucks for Canon).
|
| But yes, I love that printer! Because as a person, I do
| not think like my busoness case, hence with the tank
| printer I do kot think about print costs, as the purchase
| price is gone and mentally accounted for.
|
| I never compared the non photo-capable EcoTank and
| whatever canon calls their tank printers to the cartridge
| cousins so.
| garethrowlands wrote:
| Glad you like your ET-8550! That's quite a high end,
| expensive printer. I have a much less expensive one,
| though, on reflection, I agree the initial purchase price
| is higher than cartridge ink jets.
| hef19898 wrote:
| There are only so many A3+ sized photoprinters on the
| market. Decent ones that is that don't suck at B/W
| printing. It, for me at least, came down to either the
| ET-8550 or the Canon Pro-200. Break-even was somewhere
| around 300 a4 photos, based on retail price for the
| printer. So initially, I was inclined to take the Canon
| one.
|
| Then I got a decent deal on a ET-8550, and the peace of
| mind to not re-run ink costs everytike you print, plus
| the Epsons home office printer functions, closed that
| decision. And the Epson print quality is really good,
| even B/W, so far, with the right media setting and paper,
| no colour tints whatsoever (at least that I can see).
| _giorgio_ wrote:
| It seems that nobody knows of ecotank... It should be the
| top reference in this thread.
| molszanski wrote:
| I have L3150 or L3160 and it is good. 2/3 years mid usage
| run
| varjag wrote:
| Mine has a camera that shows you the contents of the fridge.
| It's been useful on many occasions.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Helpful to save you three steps and a lift of a hand to see
| whats inside?
| shiroiuma wrote:
| It's likely useful when you're at the grocery store and
| can't remember if you need to buy eggs or not.
| Fricken wrote:
| I rely on a shopping list like my grandma. Another
| scenario where not innovating is the way to go.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| I imagine the use case is more one of "I'm in the
| supermarket and I need to know if I have enough xyz left"
| the_other wrote:
| These two solutions are more fun.
|
| - make something else
|
| - buy more regardless and make a larger batch
|
| They have fewer points of technical failure; they don't
| create security attack surface; they save bandwidth; they
| get you talking to your friends, family or neighbours
| more; most food waste biodegrades, so it's not really
| "waste".
| varjag wrote:
| Sure, there's a way to talk down anything.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > most food waste biodegrades, so it's not really "waste"
|
| If your argument requires saying it's fine to just throw
| out food, maybe you should reconsider.
| hef19898 wrote:
| What litte food is wasted because people buy stuff they
| alrwady have by forgetting what's in the fridge pales in
| comparison the necessary effort and resources spent in
| building and installing cameras un a fridge and run the
| infrastructure necessary to connect those cameras to a
| phone over the internet.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| for sure I haven't run the numbers, but I think you may
| be underestimating the impact of food spillage / waste.
| Not only is spillage _huge_ in the US [1], but one has to
| take into account where the loss is.
|
| A pepper that you buy, cook and then throw away
| represents a considerable investment: *
| you spent energy cooking it * your supermarket had
| to stock / refrigerate 1.x pepper to sell you 1.0,
| because of spillage * the pepper had to be
| transported from the land, to and fro various logistic
| centers (sometimes 100's of miles) * the farmer had
| to grow 2.x or even 3.x peppers to sell 1.0, because of
| esthetics (unfortunately) .. meaning often esticides,
| heating, etc
|
| I am generally not in favour of IoT, and am not convinced
| that a camera will correct this issue. But make no
| mistake: food spillage has a huge impact.
|
| 1 : https://www.fao.org/3/bt300e/bt300e.pdf
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I understand why that sounds like it should be true, but
| I'm not convinced that it actually works out; I can get
| an esp32-cam for <$10 with no effort off the shelf, so if
| the cost to build the thing in is even vaguely close to
| that then the real cost is going to be dominated by the
| internet connectivity and phone client side of the
| equation. I guess it depends how much food we're talking
| about throwing out and how much it costs, but that
| strikes me as plausibly within an order of magnitude.
| troupo wrote:
| I'm an impulsive shopper, so I often end up at a grocery
| store with no idea if, for example, I need to buy more
| eggs, or butter, or...
|
| I'd love to be able to see/know what I have at home while
| I'm shopping.
|
| But yeah, it's a minor convenience
| jona-f wrote:
| Opening the door wastes energy. And it seems, mindlessly
| going to the fridge to see what's inside even though you
| know exactly whats inside, is a thing many people are
| doing. So there is an argument to be made, that a camera in
| the fridge is a useful feature. I'm happy without it.
| aydyn wrote:
| You could get a glass door fridge?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| That probably wastes more electricity; heat insulators
| and clear substances don't overlap very much.
| aydyn wrote:
| Is that more heat waste than the habit of constantly
| closing and opening the door to check what's inside?
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| I don't have the ability to experimentally verify, but I
| would think so? A window is going to be there 24/7 and
| air doesn't actually have that high of a specific heat,
| so you'd really have to be _constantly_ opening the door
| for it to come out in favor in my understanding.
| PeterStuer wrote:
| If the budget for the cameras, screens and apps would be
| spend on extra isolation, the fridge would overall be
| more ecological. But hey. I understand. Gadgets sell more
| than quality.
| chongli wrote:
| If you want a fridge that's really efficient, you can't
| beat a chest/bunker freezer with a thermostat.
| Refrigerators lose all their efficiency from the
| vertically mounted doors which allow all the cold air to
| fall out instantly when you open the door. A chest
| freezer door is mounted horizontally so the cold air
| stays trapped inside, even when you open the door. This
| makes all the difference in the world!
| varjag wrote:
| We were discussing the apps for the fridges, which
| naturally work well beyond physical proximity. One of the
| locations they work fine at is grocery stores.
| nly wrote:
| You can see every corner of the fridge with one camera? How?
| samastur wrote:
| How does this work?
|
| Our fridge is most of the time fairly full so I have a hard
| time imagining where would I put a camera to get a good
| overview of its contents. It seems that the best place is
| about half a meter outside. Even a fisheye would not be able
| to cover both door and the rest of it.
| varjag wrote:
| There are 3 cameras inside the door I believe.
| billpg wrote:
| That does sound useful. I'd need a camera on each level with
| the amount I pack onto each shelf.
| gregmac wrote:
| Genuinely curious.. how well does this really work, with a
| _real_ fridge? All the photos I 've ever seen are of a staged
| fridge someone clearly spent an hour or two carefully
| arranging, and usually between 20% and 50% capacity.
|
| Our fridge is often 75-95% full, and things I can picture
| this maybe being useful for - sour cream, pickles, condiments
| - are often pushed to the back or on the door. I have a hard
| time imagining anything besides mostly "oh look, the milk
| jug/large bowl of last night's leftovers is blocking the
| camera's view of this entire shelf".
|
| It also doesn't solve the "is that sour cream at least 1/3
| full?" or equally important "is it expired?" problem, which
| is almost worse, because seeing the sour cream container
| leads to a false positive, which means I don't buy more
| despite needing it.
| varjag wrote:
| You can't see the details certainly, but figuring if
| something is there or is missing is solving the 80% case.
| notatoad wrote:
| >Our fridge is often 75-95% full
|
| This is me too (or more realistically, my fridge is 95-105%
| full) but there's definitely people out there whose fridges
| are usually mostly empty and a camera could reasonably
| capture everything in it.
| mrweasel wrote:
| My dishwasher has a "wifi-button", so I decided to figure out
| what it does, as it turns out, it's completely useless. The
| only features you get is "you're out of rinse aid" and "Turn on
| remotely".
|
| The thing is that turn on remotely is useless, it requires that
| you've added soap, closed the dishwasher and that it's turned
| on. At that point you might as well just set a timer.
|
| There are two features I could see being useful: Auto-start
| during the night, when the electricity cost is lowest and a
| detailed error report, like heating element is 100% function,
| or water is leaking. None of those features will ever be
| available, because that's not why they are adding "smart"
| features.
| arethuza wrote:
| We got a new dishwasher a while back and it came with a
| mobile app - this was a bit of a faff to get working but was
| mildly useful in that it would send a notification once the
| cycle was done.
|
| Then after a few weeks the company decided they had to change
| their authentication scheme to something really complex and I
| couldn't be bothered - deleted the app and don't really miss
| it.
| tralarpa wrote:
| Remote start could be very useful if you want to maximize
| self-consumption for your solar panels. Do they support that?
| londons_explore wrote:
| Dishwashers aren't very solar-friendly if you don't have
| net-metering.
|
| They typically have a very powerful 2.5 kilowatt heater
| they run in bursts - for like 5 mins when prewashing, for
| like 10 mins when starting the main wash, and like 10 mins
| again when drying.
|
| In between those times, the machine uses only ~60 watts for
| pumps.
|
| I have often pondered what a world of machines designed to
| meet solar output looked like - and for a dishwasher it
| would involve the heater being modulated to match the solar
| output (and knowing that sometimes the wash cycle would
| take longer if a cloud was overhead so heating was delayed
| by a half hour).
| nicoburns wrote:
| I guess you could also use a small battery to help smooth
| things out.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The money efficiency isn't great - if you had control of
| the design of the dishwasher, simply having a hot block
| of concrete inside that you heated when there was spare
| energy would work out far cheaper.
|
| Concrete costs far fewer $$$'s than batteries do, per kwh
| of heat stored, it also doesn't require inverters,
| balancing or safety systems, ad lasts millions of cycles
| rather than thousands.
| usrusr wrote:
| How expensive would it be, transportation included,
| compared to an insulated water container of comparable
| heat capacity?
| goodpoint wrote:
| Or maybe store hot water and heat it up at the best
| time...?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The water is too hot to store safely.
|
| You can still slowly heat it up to 70 or 80degC and just
| add some extra heat on use, but that will still leave a
| lot of immediate power to deal with.
| notatoad wrote:
| I can't imagine a scenario where you've got a large
| enough solar system that you'd want to be running a
| dishwasher off it, and you don't already have some
| battery storage elsewhere in that system.
| usrusr wrote:
| Just have more dishwashers, and use them as storage
| cabinets: pick from a clean cabinet if you need
| tableware, deposit in a dirty cabinet when you are done
| and if you have at least three of them the transition is
| free to take a lot of time.
| pdntspa wrote:
| That sort of thing seems solvable with batteries used as
| a a capacitor, rather than trying to reprogram the
| dishwasher logic
| michaelt wrote:
| I tried to do things like this in my home. It turns out for
| washers, dryers and dishwashers you should just set a timer
| to start at noon.
|
| Once you've started an appliance on a cycle it's going to
| keep running, even if the sun goes behind a cloud. So you
| don't need to start it when the instantaneous solar power
| is at its highest, you need to start it when the _predicted
| next two hours_ of solar power are at their highest.
|
| And it turns out you don't need complex monitoring to
| figure that out.
| planb wrote:
| That's exactly what I'm using this for. I have a home
| assistant automation that starts the washing machine when
| the daily solar peak power (as estimated by a web service
| for my location) is reached. Of course, I have to prepare
| everything in the morning. On sunny or even just bright
| days, no grid power is used.
| mrweasel wrote:
| No, not out of the box. They don't really support any
| automation, you can build something using Home Assistant or
| If This Then That, but now we're already past what I care
| to manage. There isn't even HomeKit integration (which I
| noticed is a trend, Google Home will be supported, but not
| HomeKit).
| Farbklex wrote:
| At some point I discovered that the dishwasher I own has
| wifi.
|
| I will absolutely never enable it.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| I intentionally bought the dumbest dishwasher I could find.
| It has two cycles: "Normal" and "Heavy Duty", a "Heat
| Dry"/"Air Dry" selector, and a start/stop button. I could not
| find one that was simpler.
|
| "Less to go wrong" is my mantra for appliances. I want to
| switch them on and forget about them.
| notatoad wrote:
| > There are two features I could see being useful: Auto-start
| during the night, when the electricity cost is lowest
|
| Your dishwasher might not implement it, but the existence of
| wifi-connected start function probably means that home
| assistant could enable this.
| gaazoh wrote:
| Even a door-open alarm works better as an actual alarm than an
| app notification. My fridge does that: it beeps if the door is
| left open, so you can get your ass back in the kitchen and shut
| it. I don't want to receive a notification from my fridge app
| while I'm at work because my wife left the fridge door open at
| home (or vice versa), I want whoever is physically close enough
| to the fridge to leave the door open to be notified.
|
| I have yet to see a single non-bullshit feature from any
| "smart" appliance, honestly.
| seb1204 wrote:
| I recently bought a LY washing machine that is smart. I now
| get notified when the wash cycle is done, this is actually
| useful for me as the laundry is not in the house so I can't
| head a buzzer or chirm. Is it essential? Probably not.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yup, this is the proper use for connecting an appliance.
| Our washer and dryer are in the house but from my computer
| I can't hear the dryer, the washer doesn't even make a
| noise. (Note that we've had these for more than two
| decades, they're dumb by modern standards.) I've been
| wondering why somebody doesn't make a smart plug that can
| send a notification when it's connected appliance draws
| power in a specified fashion. (Both would be fine by
| setting a minimum power to activate, then below it for a
| specified period. Washer: The threshold would be set below
| the power the agitator draws. The delay would cover the
| rinse fill time. Dryer: Threshold for the motor that runs
| the drum, immediate trigger if it stops.)
| jasonjayr wrote:
| I have a fridge in our garage that has no such alarm.
|
| It turns out it was a very simple Wifi ESP8622 project to
| wire up a reed switch + a magnetic door sensor to add such an
| alarm to Home Assistant.
| garblegarble wrote:
| >I want whoever is physically close enough to the fridge to
| leave the door open to be notified.
|
| Same - although I have experienced an interesting extension
| of this: HomePods now have alarm detection (the intention
| being to detect a smoke/burglar alarm). It is also triggered
| when the fridge is left open, leading to everybody in the
| household getting a critical alert (which ignores silent
| mode).
| bluGill wrote:
| A smart stove would let you start the oven preheating before
| you get home, thus saving a 5-10 minute wait before you can
| start cooking that frozen pizza you just bought. That is the
| only justification I've seen for a smart appliance I've seen.
|
| I would like a smart fridge that lets me know what is inside
| - so I know if I should get milk or a salad on my way home.
| So far nobody makes that.
| gspencley wrote:
| > A smart stove would let you start the oven preheating
| before you get home, thus saving a 5-10 minute wait before
| you can start cooking that frozen pizza you just bought.
|
| I'm sure this is practically not a real issue, but my OCD
| paranoia cannot fathom the idea of my oven being on while
| I'm not at home due to safety / fire concerns.
| the_snooze wrote:
| >A smart stove would let you start the oven preheating
| before you get home, thus saving a 5-10 minute wait before
| you can start cooking that frozen pizza you just bought.
| That is the only justification I've seen for a smart
| appliance I've seen.
|
| I feel this is a terrible trade-off: a minor convenience,
| in exchange for a huge attack surface that could allow
| someone to burn your house down remotely. The folks who
| build IoT systems have neither the skill nor the economic
| incentive to keep these things secure for the 15+ year
| lifespan of a durable good like a cooking range.
| 0xDEADFED5 wrote:
| know what innovation i want? a smart camera inside that can
| scan a label and remember the expiration date...then later on
| notice if i've used it or not and remind me to cook it/eat it
| if nearing expiration
| layer8 wrote:
| That would be useful, however expiration dates are often
| printed so badly and in all kinds of locations that it seems
| difficult to make that work reliably. Also people wouldn't
| want photos of their fridge contents being uploaded to a
| cloud AI all the time.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I have the solution for those labels, even if _that_ hype
| is over for quite a while now: RFID tags! /s
| master-lincoln wrote:
| Can somebody enlighten me why the above statement was
| sarcastic and why it was downvoted?
|
| Aren't RFID tags on all groceries a viable solution to
| make product info available to a fridge?
| hef19898 wrote:
| Because RFID labels are orders of magnitide more
| expensive than bar codes and printed labels. The groccery
| margins are simply to small for that. Hence the sarcastic
| comment of using expensive tech (that had its own hype
| curve in the early 2000s), to solve the how-do-I-know-
| whats-in-my-fridge-without-opening-it problem.
| bluGill wrote:
| IF RFID was useful for other purposes it would be worth
| the small cost (scale can bring RFID costs down - it
| would cost more than bar codes, but potentially can bring
| enough logistical benefits that overall it is cheaper).
| However so far the logistical benefits can't be realized
| because you can't be 100% sure you read all the tags in a
| room.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Mass readability is one of the reasons why logistics
| isn't using RFID tags atva global scale. Cost is another,
| and a major one.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Sounds like a good idea until I think about our fridge. After
| the weekly shop the fridge is packed to the brim so much that
| the light barely makes it into some corners. How would a
| camera help here? Towards the end of the week the fridge is
| empty and I know I need to buy the usual. Use case dead in my
| head.
| vel0city wrote:
| It would be nice if there was a standardized machine-readable
| format for information like expiration dates. It would be
| neat to be able to track inventory in the fridge by just
| scanning a label when you put it in then scan and mark as
| empty when its done.
| duckmysick wrote:
| Wouldn't it be better to have a fridge close the door
| automatically after one or two minutes?
|
| If you get a notification at work that your fridge door is left
| open, it would stay open until someone gets home and manually
| closes it.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Nah, this requires hardware that makes the fridge more
| expensive.
| AlfeG wrote:
| My fridge also have an app, with usefull feature - to track
| when bottle of water is cooled. But. I need to login to app
| everytime I open this app. And there is no way to share access
| to the fridge to anyone else.
| bloopernova wrote:
| We got an air fryer recently, a Cosori brand. Its app tells me
| when the cook cycle is done. I named the device "PHILLIP J
| AIRFRY", so getting a notification makes me smile. Yeah it's
| silly, but sometimes you need a little frivolity in your life.
| bloopernova wrote:
| We got a humidifier today. Name of "MISTER ROBOTO".
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I solved the problem of a freezer door (upright) being left
| open. Shoved a plank of wood under near the front to increase
| the tilt. It shuts itself.
| abcd_f wrote:
| It's an official installation guideline for Samsung fridges.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| Isn't being level a requirement for the condenser pump?
| vel0city wrote:
| I can't imagine a few degrees off from perfectly level is
| going to make a big difference.
| thunkshift1 wrote:
| My fridge has an app store
| vGPU wrote:
| My fridge has a door open alarm, and I wish it didn't. I have
| yet to be like "wow, I'm so glad my fridge is beeping at me
| while I try to decide if I want chicken or taco leftovers".
| artemonster wrote:
| I have some basic laser printer (I think its 5500D) from them and
| it works like a charm. also added rpi with printer server so that
| I can print wirelessly from all macs, iphones, windows pc and
| from my toaster and I couldnt be more happy.
| theanonymousone wrote:
| May I ask how the cartridge replacement works with Brother, and
| Laser printers in General?
|
| I am quite annoyed after "breaking" two Inkjet printers in 5-6
| years and want to buy a laser one this time, but am not sure
| how is the cartridge issue different between laser and inkjet.
| Do laser cartridges last longer? Is it less problematic to use
| non-original cartridges?
| torstenvl wrote:
| I have a HL-L2340DW I bought in 2017. I've replaced the toner
| drum once, in 2021, for $55. You can get cheaper off-brand
| replacements pretty easily but I didn't bother. The amortized
| cost of the genuine thing worked fine for me.
| artemonster wrote:
| I use off brand from amazon, also replacing drum unit
| occasionally (I think it happened like 2 times in last 7
| years?). The whole procedure is 5 minutes long. Its dirt
| cheap, compared to inkjet
| extrapickles wrote:
| Toner cartridges generally last a few thousand pages and are
| much more tolerant of infrequent use than ink cartridges.
| Unlike Ink cartridges, laser cartridges don't dry out or need
| to waste ink priming. The image drum does need to be
| occasionally replaced (not often, 10k+ pages), though if you
| tolerate defects in prints it can last longer.
|
| How well non-original cartridges work is highly dependent on
| the printer model. Some have more complex authentication of
| the cartridges and others it's a simple page counter.
|
| The main downside is color is a significant increase in cost
| of the printer as fairly expensive pieces need to be
| duplicated for each color.
| maratc wrote:
| Inkjet cartridges are highly sophisticated devices, it's
| really where "the magic" happens. They have much complexity,
| not helped by the fact that the ink is drying on the printing
| head and so hinders its ability to print.
|
| Laser cartridges are just boxes of fine black dust. You can
| buy a matching box of fine black dust from somebody else, or
| refill your (empty) box with a different version of fine
| black dust, this won't matter much at all.
|
| Having said that, I use a Brother b/w laser for 10+ years,
| and -- with original toner being sold on Amazon at $40 and
| delivered for free to my door -- have never bothered with
| neither refilling nor using "aftermarket" toner.
| garethrowlands wrote:
| Not all inkjet printers require cartridges, of course. Some
| have ink tanks you just fill from a bottle. They're a bit
| more expensive than cartridge inkjets, but still
| affordable.
| austinjp wrote:
| Nice, can you share info on the rpi setup?
| artemonster wrote:
| sorry, I am very bad at this, I basically copypasted some
| terminal commands from some tutorial (I think it was
| https://www.tomshardware.com/how-to/raspberry-pi-print-
| serve...) and also spent a lot of time fixing some of the
| settings (there had to be something done about spooling
| service) to finally make it work for my windows PC, as mac
| and iphone started working immediately. But even if a
| complete noob like me with some lame google-fu skills could
| do it, I think anyone can.
| hellweaver666 wrote:
| I have a Dell 1350cnw, which is a rebranded Brother CMYK laser. I
| bought it in 2009 and it still works perfectly today (except for
| the fact I have to keep an old computer around as a print server
| because Dell refuse to release 64 bit drivers for it). I will
| almost certainly replace it with another Brother printer. I
| mostly only use it these days to print colouring pages for my
| kids and the very rare physical letter.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| You can likely select another (compatible) driver in MacOS and
| have it work without the original Dell drivers.
| ekianjo wrote:
| Brother printers also happen to have pretty good Linux support
| which is amazingly rare for Japanese manufacturers (Epson and
| Canon never do that)
| hef19898 wrote:
| Epson and HP work fine under Linux for basic stuff, for
| anything more fancy, well, yes, there doesn't seem to be much
| Linuy support around.
| ekianjo wrote:
| HP is not a Japanese manufacturer
| hef19898 wrote:
| True.
| deng wrote:
| I have an Epson and it works under Linux with their ESC/P
| drivers:
|
| https://www.openprinting.org/driver/epson-escpr/
|
| It is true that they don't officially provide support for these
| drivers, but they work fine for me and are even GPL-licensed so
| that they can be (and are) packaged with Debian. Printer was
| immediately recognized via Avahi and worked pretty much out of
| the box.
|
| I must also say that I really like the new "EcoTank supertank"
| concept, it's way cheaper and ink lasts a long time. So it's
| not like all innovation is bad. I had a Brother before and it
| actually had quite a few issues (leaked ink like crazy, and
| very poor photo print quality) but admittedly, it lasted a long
| time.
| ndiddy wrote:
| Epson's Linux support for both their printers and scanners is
| great in my experience, although they don't provide tech
| support if you can't get it working. They even open sourced the
| Linux port of Epson Scan 2 (their scanning client software).
| Aardwolf wrote:
| I have a Brother printer, which supports plugging in a USB stick
| with a PDF to print the PDF.
|
| Its PDF parser doesn't seem to support all PDFs, and for some
| PDFs it will _PRINT_ , on paper, an error message from the PDF
| parser.
|
| So not only did it not print a perfectly valid PDF, it also
| wasted paper and ink for it.
|
| You can't know beforehand which PDFs it'll support or not from
| looking at them, any computer / phone PDF viewer supports those.
| It could be as simple as a PDF sent by an airline.
|
| They should:
|
| 1) use a proper PDF library, not some half baked one
|
| 2) if something is wrong with the PDF, show the error on screen,
| not waste paper for it
| hellweaver666 wrote:
| This feels like the workflow for a 3dprinter without Octoprint.
| I get the feature is there, but why on earth would you use it?
| serf wrote:
| i've had a lot of Japanese made printers stumble on PDFs for
| some reason.
|
| My Brother and Epson have both have trouble with printing old
| out-of-print machine manuals that used ancient PDF versions.
| They'd happily accept the job, and then proceed to crash the
| print spooler and more-or-less break explorer on more than one
| machine with the same set of drivers.
|
| The problem would go away if I converted the pdf to a newer
| version or into an entirely different format.
| recursivecaveat wrote:
| Heh, I would have preferred that to one of my recent
| experiences with an HP printer. It would simply silently drop
| the job only for that specific pdf (an ordinary shipping label
| of which I had printed many on that machine before). I dug
| around so many menus trying to figure out where my job was
| going until I by chance clicked print on a different document.
| At least with the paper error message I would have known right
| away to apply the hack of screenshot + print png.
| waihtis wrote:
| This article made me think - I haven't printed anything in about
| 5 years now for personal use (for business, its still mandatory.)
|
| Contrast to 10-15 years ago, feels like I would've been needing a
| printer on a weekly basis, at least.
| atemerev wrote:
| You don't have children, do you? With kids, printer is a
| necessity.
| waihtis wrote:
| I have 4 kids :)
| AlfeG wrote:
| 2 kids, no reason to but printer. Living without it for 6
| years already. If I need to print something - there is a
| bunch of places where I can do it.
| Mashimo wrote:
| Why is that?
| chongli wrote:
| Because kids have to print things for school. Lots and lots
| of things! And schools generally don't have the budget to
| let every kid print everything they need, so they push this
| cost onto the families.
| atemerev wrote:
| This, and also you print coloring books, math quizzes,
| puzzles, and everything else. Yes, these things are
| available on tablets too, but I think working with
| pencils and paper is also important.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| why do you think so?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Probably varies a lot from school district to school
| district, but mine get a lot of print-at-home things from
| ours.
| master-lincoln wrote:
| So the school hands out exercises that the parents need
| to print at home?
|
| Would be much cheaper and more inclusive to ask for a
| small fee and print it on professional devices centrally
| organized by the school.
| fma wrote:
| Same thing with school supplies. You get a piece of paper
| that tells you everything you need for the year. Even 2nd
| grader needs a box of crayons. How many colors, which
| brand? What if one parent buys a name brand another buys
| Walmart brand? How about all the time I need to spend to
| order it, make sure it's the right one? Thank goodness
| for Walmart...I can deliver from store w/o fighting all
| the back to school parents.
|
| Well - now the free market has figured it out! There's a
| private company who will buy everything for you on the
| list and deliver it to your classroom.
|
| Welcome to America.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > So the school hands out exercises that the parents need
| to print at home?
|
| Yes. COVID saw some of this move to Microsoft Teams at
| our district, but some teachers are definitely holdouts.
| Some teachers want essays handed in on paper for marking
| up, as well.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Not sure if I'd say necessity, but it's damn convenient.
| ansc wrote:
| My Brother printer is one of my better purchases to be honest. I
| sound like a complete shill, but it's connected to wifi (and it
| just happily connects even if it's been off for a month or two),
| and all devices can just connect to it and print. Never need to
| reconnect or do anything with it. It's a printer that prints. I
| love it.
| PennRobotics wrote:
| printing from a smartphone over Wi-Fi with no extra drivers
|
| :)
| LeanderK wrote:
| still feels like magic and it's 2023. I am regularly
| surprised it just works
| markdown wrote:
| model # please.
| dv35z wrote:
| This is the one I've got - pleased with it.
|
| Brother Compact Monochrome Laser Printer, HLL2390DW,
| Flatbed Copy & Scan, Wireless Printing, Duplex Two-Sided
| Printing, https://a.co/d/8vMWJCK
| zuhsetaqi wrote:
| Which model do you have?
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| If you want a basic model that works over wifi and prints
| from your phone, get the HL-L2340DW.
|
| If you want one that additionally has PCL 6 support for
| universal compatibility, get the slightly more expensive
| HL-L2375DW.
|
| I have both, no regrets.
| martin_a wrote:
| Thanks, very valuable information as I look into buying a
| small printer.
| bradfa wrote:
| If you want color, so far I've been happy with an
| HLL8260CDW going on almost a year. I previously had
| HLL8350CDW which I very much liked even though it destroyed
| a fixing/fusing roller after about 5 years (repaired with
| ebay parts) and then at about 7 years old some small part
| inside a mechanism which selects between the toners broke
| and spares were not available. Although the part numbers
| are very similar between the two, sadly the toner
| cartridges are completely not compatible.
|
| For a long time Monoprice sold very good Brother compatible
| toner for reasonable prices. Sadly, that time has long
| passed. Brother 1st party toner is not as cheap as I'd like
| but it's still decently affordable compared to other major
| brand 1st party toner. I've had horrible luck with non-
| Monoprice 3rd party Brother toner.
| losthubble wrote:
| Have had the HL-L2340DW since 2016. Still on the original
| tonner. Only really use it to print my resume to bring to
| interviews. Still works like a charm.
| MrBuddyCasino wrote:
| I changed the original toner yesterday. Mainly use it to
| print out DHL shipping labels.
| moduspol wrote:
| I just checked my purchase history and I'm a month short of
| it being ten years ago. Not bad for a printer.
|
| Brother HL-3140CW. Color laser printer. If you'd have told
| me it'd still be working ten years later, I wouldn't have
| believed you. I print so sporadically, but when I do, it
| just works. Does AirPrint from smartphones, etc.
|
| My only complaint with this model is that it actually has
| no Ethernet port, so it connects only via WiFi. Seems like
| a strange trade-off for something like a printer.
| dustingetz wrote:
| also which MFC (scanner) model? historically drivers have
| been an issue is this solved?
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Completely agree: it's one of the best purchases I've made.
|
| Printers were a product category that were expensive for what
| they offered and were always kind of finicky. I can still
| remember never knowing if my printer was going to work when I
| needed it to or not.
|
| Since I purchased a Brother printer all of those concerns went
| away. It works well, requires minimal set up, is reliable, and
| represents great value for money over a period of years.
|
| I'm on my second printer from them in the last 10 years and
| wouldn't even consider a competitor unless there's a serious
| decline in their quality.
|
| Edit:
|
| Since I saw someone ask below my model is MFC-9340CDW
| soco wrote:
| I have over time switched to Brother printers (lived through
| Epson and HP) because they are the least bad of the bunch. But
| Windows will still claim they are offline with no way to un-
| offline them, or print jobs will still get stuck from time to
| time - but this is probably just the Windows printer queue
| software staying exactly the same since two decades, with
| Microsoft giving zero fucks about it (or about anything
| requested by users, for that matter).
| gpderetta wrote:
| there is an LTT series where they try to daily drive Linux.
| They complain about a lot of stuff being half-broken,
| unfriendly or simply not missing. But they are amazed that
| printing just work out of the box without all the issues they
| have on Windows.
| PlutoIsAPlanet wrote:
| Because Linux uses CUPS, which is the same print server as
| macOS and made by Apple, Distros often ship generic CUPs
| drivers for printers, that work with most printers made in
| the last two decades.
|
| Apple had no choice but to make CUPs support generic
| printing interfaces because printer companies at the time
| rarely made macOS drivers, and this has benefited Linux
| too.
| jwells89 wrote:
| My memory may be failing me, but it feels like "rarely
| supported" is a bit of an exaggeration. It was mostly a
| handful of consumer printer companies that were hell-bent
| on supporting nothing but Windows... I think Lexmark
| might've been one of them?
|
| Any of the printer companies that made high end
| professional printers used by print designers,
| photographers, etc usually had Mac drivers for their
| entire printer lineup because Macs had a huge presence in
| world of desktop publishing, graphics design, and
| photography from most of latter half of the 80s all the
| way up through the 2000s.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Apple did not create CUPS, although they did hire the
| main developer (and buy the rights to the code) some
| years later.
| g-b-r wrote:
| Restarting the spooler service often solves those problems
| soco wrote:
| Until it happens again later today, or tomorrow. Or on
| wife's computer at work. Or on grandma's. Unless you're
| from Microsoft, I wouldn't call that "solution".
| g-b-r wrote:
| Well it solves it until it happens again - \ _ ( tsu ) _
| / -
|
| I wasn't implying that you can't complain about it!
| jlangenauer wrote:
| I have a Canon printer which I use with Windows, and I get
| exactly the same thing. I think your diagnosis is correct.
| vel0city wrote:
| I had that issue for a while. I solved this issue by ensuring
| SNMP was allowed on the printer. I never had that issue again
| after confirming SNMP traffic worked.
| katbyte wrote:
| I got a brother B+w laser printer 4 years ago, plugged it into
| a switch and all my macs and iPhones found it, can print to it,
| and it just sits there waiting for a thing to print. Still on
| the original toner.
|
| Couldn't be happier with it
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| But will it blend?
| bestouff wrote:
| I have a very old (more than 10 years old) Brother HL 2130 that
| still works like a charm. I changed the toner only twice, I
| added an RPi behind it to have it network-enabled. Also one of
| my best purchases !
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| I bought a brother printer once largely because of the praise I
| see in HN, but it was a color inkjet printer. It did not work
| out well. At first it was great, but I don't print much and ink
| dried on the print head and the 'cleaning' mode used up all the
| ink and and basically it never worked properly again after
| that. I ended up tossing it for a POS canon inkjet. I don't
| print often, but when I do I want color so a BW laserjet isn't
| a good fit.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| The praise is for Brother LASER printers.
|
| It's universally coupled with a lot discussion about how much
| of a scam inkjet printers are from _any_ company.
|
| > I don't print often, but when I do I want color so a BW
| laserjet isn't a good fit.
|
| .....then....buy....a Brother _COLOR_ laser?
|
| The levels of arrogance in "well I can just throw out more
| than half the advice" is breathtaking...
|
| ... _and then_ you have the nerve to blame the community?
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| TBH my Brother multifunction colour inkjet/scanner is also
| better than any I've used from any other printer
| manufacturer. No activation junk or "genuine cartridge"
| nonsense, it just prints.
| mminer237 wrote:
| Really? I thought Brother started started blocking third-
| party ink a couple years ago, even pushing firmware
| updates for older Wi-Fi printers that previously allowed
| it.
| g-b-r wrote:
| The mastodon post to which this discussion refers to
| doesn't mention the word laser, nor do most of the
| recommendations in the rest of this discussion.
| rchaud wrote:
| Every person learns about printers the same way.
|
| 1) Buy a cheap inkjet printer
|
| 2) Discover it runs out of quick within ~50-100 pages
|
| 3) Learn about the distinction between laser and inkjet
| printing
|
| 4) Buy only Brother laser printers for the rest of your
| life
|
| It's a rite of passage at this point.
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| A color laser is worth several cheap inkjets. I don't print
| much so its actually cheaper to use a crappy inkjet and
| throw it out and get a new crappy inkjet multiple times
| then get a single color laserjet.
| Mashimo wrote:
| Does the Canon not dry up?
| Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote:
| It can, but on the cheap canons the printhead is part of
| the ink canister, so if you just have to get new ink and
| problem solved. On the brother they use a higher quality
| printhead that is part of the printer. Good, unless
| something happens to that head and you can't fix it.
| gureddio wrote:
| Definitely consider the outlay for a colour laser printer.
| I've had one for around 5 years and it has been no trouble
| and is always ready to print, scan and copy.
| starkparker wrote:
| I love my color laser, but depending on what you're
| printing they're either not ideal (photos) or not always
| possible (sublimation, transfers, some adhesives, most
| things involving heat; laser-specialized materials might be
| available but won't work as well).
|
| Inkjet is also typically more viable for non-commercial
| borderless and supertabloid printing, like large prints and
| posters.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Mine just works and the scanner shows up in simple-scan over
| wifi (Linux), it's all very smooth.
| seb1204 wrote:
| Agree, same here
| risfriend wrote:
| The best part I like is it provides a unique email address and
| hosts a server inside it. I can literally just email a pdf and
| get it printed on back-back pages, no commands, love it!
| papruapap wrote:
| wait what? Any tutorial on how this works?
| dubcanada wrote:
| https://help.brother-
| usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/158082/...
| seb1204 wrote:
| Where do I find this email?
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Downside is you have to email the documents you want to print
| to Brother (the company).
|
| Think about that before you email anything you want to keep
| private.
| hurtuvac78 wrote:
| Can one guess printers email addresses and start spamming
| random printers?
|
| I dont see any way to register the sender's expected email on
| the printer. Back to fax spamming...?
| sct202 wrote:
| Someone did that to my old HP printer a couple times, but
| there were settings to only accept emails from specific
| addresses that I eventually turned on.
| usrusr wrote:
| Funny how the article seems to be selling this as "not
| innovating". I was genuinely surprised when I discovered that
| it was just a social media post and not some ad-entrusted
| clickbait repackaging that theverge.com article while trying
| to one-up it with the "no innovation" claim.
| bjoli wrote:
| They have done that for as long as they have been internet
| connected.
| xd1936 wrote:
| Like this slice of journalism?
|
| https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-
| printer-2023-brother-...
| rchaud wrote:
| "Tech innovation" these days means gating hardware features
| behind a subscription tier like BMW or Tesla do.
| qwertox wrote:
| I love my MFC-490CW printer.
|
| It never gets in my way, always works when I need it, is happy
| about the default drivers and costs me around 20EUR in ink
| every two to 3 years.
|
| It makes me happy to hear it once a week when it cleans itself.
| kamranjon wrote:
| Mine constantly falls into some deep sleep state where it can't
| be found on the network and I have to spend ~10 minutes coaxing
| it out of sleep using an unknown combination of random button
| jabs and test prints before it can be detected by my devices
| again and will print.
|
| If anyone knows how to fix this please let me know, I want to
| love my printer as well.
| ourmandave wrote:
| Seconded. The 4 button, one line display interface is
| hopeless.
|
| I print once a never, so the only answer I remember is to
| power cycle the little bastard.
|
| And then I have to reboot my pc so windows 10 will find it.
|
| There's probably a couple services I could restart instead,
| but reboot is fast enough I don't care.
| vel0city wrote:
| I used to have this issue on Windows. Enabling SNMP solved
| it. By default it checks SNMP to see the status of the
| printer, so if SNMP is off it'll eventually think the whole
| printer is offline.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| Ran into the same issue. I think using ethernet instead of
| wifi was the solution (and maybe something with disabling
| ipv6? been a long time since I looked into it).
| thanatos519 wrote:
| This! It even gets regular firmware updates which (when I
| notice them) I always say yes to and it always keeps working.
| They even told me how to reset the low toner warning so I can
| replace colors when they actually run out.
|
| If anything its connectivity works too well: I first connected
| it via USB, installed the Brother drivers (i386 only, but
| whatever, I don't need a 64-bit printer driver really!), and
| CUPS shared it over the network to all my computers. Then I
| added an Ethernet connection and it shared itself over the
| network. So now there are multiple ways to reach it.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I wish that were true for my Brother printer. I bought a basic
| but decent black and white laser printer of theirs several
| years ago, and it worked great for maybe 3 years, but then it
| started refusing to accept print jobs from all inputs (wifi,
| ethernet, USB, doesn't matter, neither does the device sending
| the print job) and factory resets do nothing to help it. So
| now, it sits in a closet while the Canon inkjet with janky
| print heads that it replaced is doing print duty.
|
| Apparently this can be fixed be reflashing its firmware but
| from what I can gather this requires some obscure utility
| that's not generally available.
| leokennis wrote:
| I have a similar experience. Installed and connected my Brother
| printer 3 years ago, pop in new ink about once per year and
| that's it. It works and I do not need to worry about it.
|
| Also look at the delicious Windows 2000 style settings
| interface:
|
| https://i.imgur.com/YtnfaAN.jpg
| JeremyNT wrote:
| I own a Brother DCP7065DN that I bought nearly a decade ago,
| and it still works just fine. I've always used third party
| toner (there was a setting that needed to be toggled to enable
| this). I can even print and scan from my phone.
|
| All the cloud nonsense is there to enrich the manufacturers, it
| doesn't actually make these products better. KISS!
| emeril wrote:
| I have the same experience - after an initial slightly tough
| config to get it connected to wifi (understandable given the
| budget price and older model), it has worked flawlessly - I
| will always recommend brother printers now
|
| Further, I got mine as a refurb since I wanted it in the throes
| of the pandemic so I wasn't going to spend big bucks on a
| printer and needed something for the amazon returns labels
| primarily...
| HumblyTossed wrote:
| I have an older brother that only has ethernet, but I share it
| via my server, so I'm good that way. Every device that needs to
| print can print to it no matter the OS they're running. In this
| day, that is _amazing_. I don 't have to have special apps or 4
| different printers. I just have the one and it just works. This
| is as it should be.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| I'll echo this sentiment. 3-4 years ongoing, and my Brother
| printer just works.
|
| The HP laser that was replaced was finicky at the best of
| times.
| nimblegorilla wrote:
| > it's connected to wifi (and it just happily connects even if
| it's been off for a month or two), and all devices can just
| connect to it and print. Never need to reconnect or do anything
| with it. It's a printer that prints. I love it.
|
| Wifi is the only "innovation" that I cared about when buying a
| new printer. My old Brother just had USB, which was fine for 12
| years. But my newer (10 years old) Brother has wifi and
| printing from the couch is great!
| hysan wrote:
| WiFi is a nice feature, but instead of buying a new printer,
| I setup a CUPS server on old raspberry pis and turned both my
| and my parents' printers into WiFi capable ones. Now our 5+
| and 15+ year old printers are just as good as any new ones
| today.
| sebazzz wrote:
| This is probably not a popular opinion but that is nothing
| special. My HP MFP M177fw laser printer has no issues at all,
| and if I must believe HN it's manufactured by Brother due to
| its well behaviour.
| rmoriz wrote:
| Brother (printers and sewing machines) feels like Zoom (audio
| recorders): a bit conservative but they are very well made and
| long lasting. And consistent. A USP in today's world of crap-
| loaded, buggy short living throw away products.
| mxmbrb wrote:
| We could use an international magazine or media channel that
| focuses solely on tools that have prooven to be robust and
| reliable. And on trustworthy companies with good value for
| money ratio. I'd love to spend double for some things, if I'd
| be able to know it lasts way longer and works better.
| Doctor_Fegg wrote:
| That's kind of what the Wirecutter was until (irony of
| ironies) they started "innovating" too.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| They're not well made. The Zoom recorder's DACs are incredibly
| noisy.
| octacat wrote:
| TBH, flaky sewing machine would be a disaster, you cannot just
| go and restart it. Apps working like a sewing machine is
| something from the imagination nowadays.
| cookiengineer wrote:
| Some could argue that Brother printers adhere to the POSIX / UNIX
| philosophy: Solve one problem only, and solve it well.
|
| In the end it somewhat boils down to pure greed. Instead of
| stabilizing production costs and/or reusing generic components to
| ease up manufacturing and repair - HP, Epson, Canon, Dell,
| Samsung, Kyocera and others try to hype their products with
| whatever tech stack is currently in trend. "growth hacking" is
| literally their job description.
|
| There eventually will be a ChatGPT printer on the market. It's
| inevitable due to what kind of people manage a printer business:
| It's not the type of people that know how to build printers
| anymore.
| waveBidder wrote:
| thanks I hate it. definitely wouldn't bet against you on that.
| vidarh wrote:
| "As a language model I don't think this is the tone you should
| take in a letter to your printer manufacturer. Instead of the
| long string of expletives, here is a suggested letter of praise
| for your printers reliability, and an order for more toner
| instead:
|
| ..."
| layer8 wrote:
| It will just silently "auto-correct" the letter instead.
| jll29 wrote:
| You don't need deep learning for that...
| https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-
| workcentres...
| vidarh wrote:
| But that was at least a bug, and a somewhat
| understandable one (though still stupid). I did my MSc on
| doing statistical methods to reduce error rates in OCR,
| and one of the methods that actually worked very well was
| various nearest neighbour variations over small windows
| of the pixel data. As part of that I did a literature
| review, of course, and there has been quite a lot of work
| on various algorithms for cleaning up images by trying to
| replace patches of pixels with presumed "clean" samples
| (sometimes from a known font, but more often by applying
| various clustering methods to patches from the image
| itself). Get that wrong and you'd very easily end up with
| something like this.
|
| My own methods would also have easily produced this kind
| of error if you set the threshold for what to consider
| identical when clustering high enough. But for OCR the
| risk is somewhat mitigated by people not trusting it to
| be error-free, and so it can be an acceptable tradeoff if
| it reduces the _overall_ error rate, but if you 're
| outputting the raw pixel data and let people think it's
| an unmanipulated image you're begging for trouble.
| vidarh wrote:
| You're probably right - I'd not make a good printer company
| executive, I'm not cynical enough.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > Solve one problem only, and solve it well.
|
| I unfortunately discovered that my brand new Brother printer
| can only communicate over 2.4 GHz wifi, which conflicts with
| the 5 GHz my phone requires (my router can only do one at a
| time, and there's no way I'm switching as needed). So USB it
| is.
|
| It's one of their cheapest inkjets (MFC-1010DW), but I selected
| it for features more than price. Wish I had read the
| documentation. I would have purchased the next model up.
|
| Nicely compact compared to the ~10 year old Canon that died
| recently.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| This is going to become a bigger problem over time. A lot of
| the embedded chips that provide WiFi only supported 2.4GHz.
| There's a whole bunch of devices that just aren't going to
| work.
| hales wrote:
| > my router can only do one at a time, and there's no way I'm
| switching as needed
|
| That's abysmal! Every 5GHz Wifi AP I've ever come across lets
| you run both PHYs at the same time.
|
| Please, on my behalf, sternly talk down to your router.
|
| Even ignoring the massive issue of device compatibility: 5GHz
| and its protocols do not have anywhere the range and
| penetrating power of 2.4GHz. When I walk outside my house I
| can keep watching videos, but my laptop does this by
| transitioning to the 2GHz radio link modes.
| octacat wrote:
| oh, I actually needed to check routers recently. Prices
| like 5 years ago but specs for cheaper models are "slightly
| broken". Like 2.4+5 router, but only 100MBit ethernet (and
| full AC speed for wireless). So, you kinda have "cheap"
| models, but to get a real usable router you have to pay the
| full price. Marketing.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| It's an 8 year old SBG6580-2 with radio button selection
| for 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz on the web interface. I bought the
| cheapest one guaranteed to work with Xfinity to save on the
| rental costs. I'll upgrade when they force a move from
| DOCSIS 3.0. Just like I'll upgrade my cheapest smart phone
| with a replaceable battery when they force a move from 4G
| (or finally make a workable phone with a physical keyboard
| again).
| amluto wrote:
| Eww!
|
| Whenever you replace it, get a separate AP and modem.
|
| Also, DOCSIS 3.1 modems come with queue management. You
| may benefit significantly from an upgrade even if nothing
| else changes.
| vGPU wrote:
| Just spend the $150 on an omada eap670 and call it a day.
| pdntspa wrote:
| In a lot of places 2.4ghz is unusable because of the
| density of networks transmitting in the space. I live in a
| SFH in a lower-tier metro and only 5ghz is performant
| filterfiber wrote:
| Most cheap wifi modules are all 2.4ghz, so printers, iot
| stuff, etc will almost certainly be 2.4ghz. Like 1$
| cheap.
|
| > only 5ghz is performant
|
| Most of these barely need any bandwidth. A printer is
| possibly on the higher end of bandwidth, but I think the
| number of printers that support 5GHZ is possibly still
| single digits.
| spookie wrote:
| Doesn't help that Bluetooth is on the same spectrum
| jrockway wrote:
| The main function of the popular ESP32 microcontroller is to
| preserve 2.4GHz WiFi for the next 20 years.
| filterfiber wrote:
| Are there any microcontrollers in the 1$ to 5$ range with
| 5GHz?
|
| And/or documented microcontrollers that are purchasable in
| the states?
|
| Won't 2.4GHz have better range anyway over 5GHZ?
| jrockway wrote:
| The ESP32-C5 has dual band support:
| https://www.espressif.com/en/news/ESP32-C5
|
| I think that 2.4GHz having longer range is a myth. When I
| worked on WiFi for Google Fiber we tested it pretty
| extensively and didn't see any common building materials
| that attenuated 2.4GHz more than 5GHz. Historically, the
| problem was that routers often selected low-power
| channels for 5GHz. If you use a channel where the maximum
| power is permitted, 5GHz is just as good.
|
| The 5GHz band plan is kind of complicated. You will want
| to ensure that you get a 160MHz channel. How you
| accomplish that varies by region, unfortunately.
| tass wrote:
| It's pretty typical for printers (and a huge amount of iot
| devices) to only support 2.4GHz. I'm a little impressed that
| this is the first device you found this incompatibility with.
|
| There's some standalone dual-band access points on sale this
| weekend for <$40 right now which would solve your problem.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| > I'm a little impressed that this is the first device you
| found this incompatibility with.
|
| Don't be. A comprehensive list of our WiFi-capable devices
| are two smartphone models, the printer, and two laptops
| that are plugged in to wired connections.
|
| Edit: Forgot about the two wireless work laptops.
|
| For our purposes the 10 foot USB cable solves the problem
| fine.
| ohuf wrote:
| I must have missed the Blockchain/Bitcoin printers
| dubcanada wrote:
| Oh they exist
|
| > https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2020/08/honeywell-
| depl...
| __loam wrote:
| I mean, it's blockchain necessary to accomplish this?
| Probably not, but they're at least not building on top of a
| crypto currency.
| indrora wrote:
| Brother and _Canon_ are both really good examples of long-term
| thinking in Japanese companies, along with Nintendo.
|
| All these companies still have their original core competency:
| Canon still makes optics, Brother still makes home equipment
| like sewing machines, and Nintendo to this day has not
| discontinued their playing card products.
|
| Yes, you can buy Nintendo playing cards. I have several sets
| both modern and older and they're very good.
|
| These companies think in terms of decades and half-centuries.
| They may fall trap to occasional trends, but they're not the
| ones who rush into a market to innovate; Canon started making a
| clone of a Leica camera and happened into doing the first
| indirect X-ray system in Japan, as a single example.
| vGPU wrote:
| And it's not just Japanese companies that manage to pull that
| off. Some others have managed to do the same. See: Lego, for
| example. They branched out into movies, games, and parks, but
| their primary and core product remains bricks.
| GCA10 wrote:
| Truth.
|
| I got years of use out of a second-hand Brother 2350 printer
| and then eventually some of the electronics failed. I needed a
| new printer and I still owned a couple unused Brother toner
| cartridges. Imagine my joy when I discovered that Brother would
| sell me a new model that still used the same toner system.
|
| Sticking with the same spartan feature set was fine by me. It's
| all I need. I didn't even bother looking at the other makers'
| low-end offerings. Brother's approach of treating printing as a
| solved problem (Build once; sell often) is so much simpler and
| more cost-efficient than the super-frisky alternative (Build
| many times; sell once)
| axus wrote:
| I'm pretty sure mine came with some OCR PDF-generating
| software. It has Fax functions I never use, Copy functions that
| come in handy several times a year, and Scan I've used a few
| times. The web admin interface seems to have a lot of options.
|
| But all that stuff doesn't get in the way of the core feature,
| network laser printing.
| causi wrote:
| Have people forgotten that Brother, too, has become enshittified?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
| mjevans wrote:
| I had forgotten. Is there anyone left that isn't BS though?
| misja111 wrote:
| I'm amazed that there is still no legislation to control this.
| E.g. consumers should have the option to choose between a cheap
| printer with vendor ink lock-in, or a more expensive one but
| with free choice of ink.
|
| It seems like something that the EU could make itself useful
| with, for instance.
| erremerre wrote:
| The most interesting comment and there is absolutely nobody
| commenting on it. :(
| Ambroos wrote:
| And just like the other printer manufacturers Brother now
| offers an "EcoPro" ink/toner subscription, a copy of HP's
| Instant Ink model.
| snvzz wrote:
| An Open Source Hardware printer is sorely needed.
|
| It would force companies that make printers to be honest, as
| otherwise we'd just get the open hardware one that doesn't force
| bullshit upon us.
| chx wrote:
| Yes, much like Framework has completely upended the laptop
| industry.
|
| /s
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| The laptop market was never as bad as printers.
| mstngl wrote:
| I'm asking this obvious question as well from time to time, and
| indeed some insights were given here: Ask HN: Why are there no
| open source 2d printers?
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24786721
| legitster wrote:
| I have a 14 year old Brother hl-2140 that still prints (like
| crap) but I am still nostalgic for since it got me through
| college.
|
| Always works with no fancy drivers and aftermarket toner is
| cheap.
|
| Part of the reason though is selection bias. I prefer the
| simplicity of a B&W laser printer and don't mind the "lo-fi"
| aesthetic.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Yeah that printer model is my favorite for home printing needs.
| In the rare case I want to print photos, I'd rather pay a
| little markup and have them printed at a local pharmacy where I
| won't have to deal with the BS that consumer inkjet printers do
| (+ maintenance is someone else's problem).
|
| It's like $50 now and the toner lasts for soooo many pages it's
| basically free. In other words, for the price of an inkjet
| cartridge that lasts maybe a year, this thing lasts forever.
| yalok wrote:
| I have 2 Brother laser printers - BW and Color. BW works like
| charm, always. The Color one can't print multiple copies of the
| same page without re-uploading it from MacBook for every copy.
| This gets aggravated that the data transfer speed looks slower
| for the Color printer (it may be the same speed, but maybe Color
| printer has to send more data) - so the effective print speed is
| many times lower than the max speed.
| niemandhier wrote:
| Buying a black/white only brother laser printer solved all my
| printing problems.
|
| Cartridges last for thousand of pages; no strange cloud
| requirements; the FritzBox registers the printer immediately and
| all devices in the local net can print.
|
| Non of this was the case for my previous HP or Epson printers...
| hef19898 wrote:
| It worked surprisingly well for my Epson so. Connect to WiFi,
| all devices find it, including Linux ones, without additional
| drivers or software.
|
| Additional software is needed for photo prints (color
| management and stuff like that) and (maybe?) scanning. I didn't
| try scanning without additional software, as I installed it
| with the photo print software. And since that software inly
| works under Windows anyway, I never bothered with scanning
| under Linux.
|
| Printing works just fine so.
| amluto wrote:
| GNOME ships a scanner app that can scan from many (newish)
| networked scanners without a driver. The UI is, ahem, about
| as minimal as you would expect from a GNOME app, but it
| works.
|
| (Seriously, GNOME, whether to scan one side or two sides is
| _actually important_ and the desired mode changes all the
| time. Would it kill you to dedicate some screen real estate
| to it, instead of filling everything with empty post-modern
| white space?)
| jen729w wrote:
| Cartridges that you can get from cheapinkcartridges.ru and they
| work just fine.
| chongli wrote:
| I think people forget that ink is a liquid which dries up and
| leaves a sticky mess. They think of the printer as a magic
| technology box that somehow is supposed to deal with that mess
| perfectly, without issues or waste.
|
| Well it doesn't work! Ink needs to be flushed to keep the lines
| clear. Inkjet printers need to print regularly for optimal
| performance and low waste. If you need a printer to sit on the
| shelf for 4 months between print jobs, laser is the only game
| in town. Toner is a solid powder and it lasts forever without
| issues. No clogging, no mess.
| soared wrote:
| Shouldn't a liquid not dry up if it's sealed properly?
| stonogo wrote:
| The container has to have holes through which to squirt the
| ink onto the page, and when ink is dispensed it is replaced
| in the container with air.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| You could make one that doesn't have an air hole. Put a
| membrane between the air and the ink. Consider a standard
| reverse osmosis water tank--inside there's basically a
| big bag, pressurized air on the outside, water on the
| inside. The outside should stay dry, the inside shouldn't
| contact the air.
|
| You still have the problem at the print head, though.
| crote wrote:
| I remember something similar being the case with HP Laserjets a
| decade ago or so.
|
| People were buying second-hand 1995-era Laserjets _in 2010_
| because they were simply better than anything you could buy
| new. They... Just Worked.
| MarkusWandel wrote:
| The only problem with these ancient and durable HP Lasterjets
| - I used to use a 4L - is that they were slow. My modernish
| Brother HL2270DW - which I got for _free_ at a garage sale
| because the toner cartridge was missing so they couldn 't
| test it - is much faster and can print double-sided. And has
| a $20 aftermarket toner cartridge in it.
| NoGravitas wrote:
| I used to maintain/repair a couple of LaserJet IIIs (circa
| 1990), up until about 2010, when I got tired of the printer's
| footprint being so large, and retired my last computer with a
| parallel port. The LaserJet III was the VW Bug of laser
| printers in terms of being easy to repair.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Buying a black/white brother laser printer gave me just a
| single consistent issue that was entirely my own fault. It
| didn't print in color.
|
| So now I bought a color laser instead, and I couldn't be
| happier.
| Loughla wrote:
| Which model do you have?
| Ographer wrote:
| I bought a black and white laser printer (Brother HL-L2350DW)
| because paying a little extra for laser up front results in
| much total lower cost of ownership due to the cartridges
| lasting much longer than ink jet. I have had it almost 5
| years and I've only replaced the cartridge once.
| hanspeter wrote:
| My exact experience. It just works and it's fast. In the rare
| occasion I need a fancy color print, there's a store close by
| where I can order some nice prints with a few clicks.
|
| Had an HP color inkjet before that. With that I felt like I did
| not have a printer.
| baz00 wrote:
| To be fair I have the same experience with my HP LaserJet Pro
| (M148).
|
| Consumer garbage printers are consumer garbage printers.
| aljgz wrote:
| The growth mindset is incredible for expanding when your product
| is in its early ages. But there should be a "sustain" mindset at
| some point. First you push to grow the market, or your market
| share. When returns on your efforts become diminishing, you push
| to improve how much you earn of each customer/each sale. At some
| point there should be a mindset that our company is worth X
| dollars, and we should sustain that.
|
| What happens instead is companies keep rewarding executives by
| increases in revenue, they keep rewarding product managers
| similarly, and product managers selectively choose metrics that
| optimize immediate revenue, at the expense of brand loyalty. This
| is happening to almost every tech company, and the exceptions are
| rare gems.
|
| In android, if I click on a link in facebook messenger that takes
| me to facebook, the back button takes me "back" to facebook's
| home screen instead of to the messenger app. Tapping back button
| again does nothing. I have to switch back to messenger manually.
| That's 5-6 taps/swipes instead of 1, because a product manager's
| bonus in FB depends on how well they beg for more engagement. As
| a result, I rarely use any of these products. I used to spend
| some time in Instagram/FB. I close LinkedIn immediately after an
| important interaction for similar reasons.
|
| I made a mistake of buying another Samsung product after years.
| Never again. I made a mistake of buying another HP product, never
| again. I might still consider Dell only because of how well they
| supported me with their monitor flicker.
|
| None of these products have a defect that's caused by poor
| design, programming, or manufacturing. They all suffer from
| growth-obsessed mindset.
|
| Brother is what it is, not because of lack of innovation, but
| because of deliberate evasion of short-sighted greed.
| konschubert wrote:
| Instead of trying to innovate in-house, many big old companies
| would be MUCH better served returning the money to
| shareholders.
|
| The shareholders can then invest into new companies and
| startups.
|
| This is much better for the economy AND for the shareholders
| hef19898 wrote:
| Stock buy-backs exist, and are controversial for various
| reasons.
| konschubert wrote:
| My point is that stock buybacks and dividends are good for
| the economy.
| hef19898 wrote:
| The point is that they are good for management, share
| prices and share holders. The economy is made of more
| than just those groups.
| konschubert wrote:
| Stock buybacks are good for the economy because they
| allocate money to where it can be used more efficiently,
| which is usually not in existing big corporations.
|
| The alternative to stock buybacks is that the corporation
| make stupid acquisitions and try to integrate them into
| their processes, thereby killing them.
| jowea wrote:
| The closest alternative to buybacks is dividends. But to
| be honest I'm not sure if that's what the critics want
| the money going.
| konschubert wrote:
| Stock buybacks and dividends are the same thing
| economically, I mean both when I say "stock buybacks".
| The difference is only in taxation.
| sumuyuda wrote:
| Shouldn't the money be used more efficiently for
| society's benefit or not concentrated by the share
| holders? Share holders will only further their own
| interests and not society's interests.
| qwytw wrote:
| How do you accomplish that? Historically "shareholders"
| as a group have been quite effective (often but obviously
| not always) have been quite effective at using at their
| money for society's benefit.
|
| In fact every society which tried to take all of their
| money away and eliminate them as a class (more or less
| violently) has failed economically. Turns out when it
| works properly free market competition is strongest force
| for economic and technological progress that has ever
| existed.
| konschubert wrote:
| They are also good for everybody else, because they
| incentivise investment that grows the economy, which
| means rising real wages.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Now that you link stock buybavks to growing salaries, I
| cannot ignore it anymore.
|
| Stock buybacks only benefit shareholders and companies,
| not the economie. Trickle down and all that doesn't work,
| stock buybacks reduce a companies tax burden, especially
| when leveraged which they often are, do not lead to more
| investment. And they make the rich even richer.
|
| See, for example, here:
|
| https://hbr.org/2020/01/why-stock-buybacks-are-dangerous-
| for...
|
| And salaries rise, primarily, through labour organization
| and collective bargaining.
| YuccaGloriosa wrote:
| This...exactly
| kortilla wrote:
| Stock buybacks are not "trickle down" economics. It's
| returning money to investors who then have to rebalance
| their portfolios and find something new to invest in.
| This is what is good for the economy.
| jehb wrote:
| > It's returning money to investors
|
| I believe the parent commenter's point was exactly this.
| Giving money to the investor class and expecting it to
| benefit everyone is the definition of trickle-down
| economics.
| qwytw wrote:
| In theory (and sometimes/often in reality) it results in
| more effective allocation of capital. It's not about
| "trickle down "econonomics"" but about those investors
| using that money to invest into more productive
| businesses.
|
| > And salaries rise, primarily, through labour
| organization and collective bargaining.
|
| No. Supply and demand is and pretty much always was a
| much stronger force.
| mlrtime wrote:
| If I get RSUs quarterly and my company additionally buys
| back 10% of stock. My post vest RSUs should also be worth
| 10% more. This is effectively a bonus and my tax
| obligation would be lower than cash.
|
| I'm all for it as a employee AND a shareholder.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| I personally prefer dividends conceptually but the tax
| treatment leads to buy backs which are less good.
| konschubert wrote:
| I agree the difference in the tax treatment is bad and
| should be fixed.
|
| But besides that, is there anything that makes buybacks
| worse than dividends?
| rjtavares wrote:
| The cost of buybacks is affected by timing, unlike
| dividends.
|
| Dividends are cleaner and affect the price in well
| understood ways: you set a date for the elegibility, and
| if you bought before that you get the dividend, if you
| buy after you don't.
|
| Stock buybacks are less transparent (you don't buy them
| all at once).
| orwin wrote:
| Yes, it concentrate/centralize power. If you want a new
| aristocracy, continue buybacks until a share is worth so
| much, people will start to buy share fractions, with all
| the shit and overhead that'll bring.
| konschubert wrote:
| Companies do share splits all the time.
|
| Dividends also give money to people who have shares.
|
| There is not difference beteeen these two mechanisms in
| who gets the money.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Dividends are better because you don't have to sell to
| realize the gains. I'd love to own Google and Facebook
| and get dividends regularly.
| qwytw wrote:
| How is that better? With buybacks if I want to reinvest I
| don't have to pay taxes on them and if I want to realize
| the gains I can decide when to do that myself (of course
| seem more like an issue in Europe and with companies
| which only payout yearly).
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Because it encourages longer-term ownership, and gives
| shareholders a stake in the future cash flows of the
| business.
|
| Like I said, it's the tax treatment that basically
| stopped growth companies giving dividends. I think that
| we should change said tax treatment and also make
| buybacks illegal but that's a bit more controversial.
|
| In any case, for both G and FB, they'd need to do
| buybacks anyway because of their employee share programs.
| konschubert wrote:
| Buybacks have the same effect of encouraging long-term
| ownership.
|
| Given a certain amount of money, spending it on stock
| buybacks vs spending it on dividends returns the same
| amount of money to each HOLDING shareholder.
|
| In one case, they receive a small sum. In the other case,
| the value of their stock goes up.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| >people will start to buy share fractions, with all the
| shit and overhead that'll bring.
|
| Which is to say, very little overhead
| whatever1 wrote:
| How are they good? Companies are killing their inventory
| / safety / rnd / experienced headcount to do buy backs
| and in the slightest economy disruption they are forcing
| us to bail them out. Look at finance, airlines, oil,
| manufacturing for very recent examples.
| konschubert wrote:
| I think it's good if human working time shifts from oil
| exploration to other ventures.
|
| That's what happens when the oil companies do buybacks
| instead of investing the money
| whatever1 wrote:
| If you seek the assassination of a company, it is better
| to tax them to death instead.
|
| This way at least the money stay in country, instead of
| sending overseas checks.
| geysersam wrote:
| That's a good point. However why not just hand out
| dividends? From what I understand stock buybacks are
| basically dividends with tax benefits.
| throwaway5959 wrote:
| That's why they don't just hand out dividends. If you
| want to take money out of the business just sell some
| shares. Long term capital gains in the US isn't bad.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Plus dividends are independent from the stupid market
| valuations. Everyone benefits the same, not just the
| folks who will sell after the uptick of price
| renegade-otter wrote:
| They are good for the _stock_. There is no evidence they
| are good for the company, its workers, or the economy.
|
| Stock buybacks have destroyed companies like GE and
| Boeing.
|
| This is very well covered in the book about Boeing -
| Flying Blind. A bunch of Jack Welch mentees did the same
| trick, selling the company for parts and buying back the
| stock - until there was nothing left to sell. It was very
| "profitable" for a while, though!
|
| It's not a tool for company growth - it's an accounting
| trick to make the wealthy ultra-wealthy.
|
| There is a reason why buybacks at these levels were
| illegal (or at least very hard) until the early 80s, but
| there were multiple pro-big-business "reforms" that took
| root under Reagan which are now wrecking sensible
| Capitalism.
| sofixa wrote:
| > This is very well covered in the book about Boeing -
| Flying Blind. A bunch of Jack Welch mentees did the same
| trick, selling the company for parts and buying back the
| stock - until there was nothing left to sell. It was very
| "profitable" for a while, though!
|
| Ooh nice, TIL and thanks! I really liked "Lights Out:
| Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric" about
| the failure of GE and was looking for something similar.
|
| On the topic of buybacks and dividends, it's part of the
| short term quarter-oriented thinking. Spinning off
| subdivisions and doing stock buybacks and dividends are
| very popular and look good on the balance sheet in the
| short term... but if you think about a quarter or two
| ahead, it's crippling. But it doesn't matter, stock go
| up, bonus go up, everyone happy for now, kicking the can
| down the road until it's someone else's problem.
| konschubert wrote:
| So you're saying companies paying dividends is bad?
|
| That companies should always operate as worker
| cooperatives and never return money to shareholders?
|
| Because stock buybacks are just another type of
| dividends.
| drewcoo wrote:
| > That companies should always operate as worker
| cooperatives and never return money to shareholders?
|
| Workers are the shareholders in worker cooperatives.
| noobermin wrote:
| >I don't like pears
|
| >You don't like fruits!?
| duped wrote:
| Buy backs are just tax preferred dividends, they are
| controversial for the taxes and not their existence.
| raincole wrote:
| But big old companies can acquire new companies and startups
| already...?
| konschubert wrote:
| And then they kill them, most of the time. Sometimes
| intentionally, usually unintentionally.
|
| The money in the pockets of shareholders is more effective
| at finding good investment opportunities than the
| innovation department of big ol' corporate.
|
| But yes, there is an argument to be made, that acquiring
| small companies can be a valid strategy for big companies.
| Overall, I think this is bad for the economy though,
| therefore I am glad that antitrust is pushing back on this.
| admsmz wrote:
| The theory is nice but does this actually happen?
|
| My mental model is that money in the pocket of companies is
| "low entropy money" and money returned to shareholders is
| "high entropy money".
|
| It's the same amount, but much less effective.
| konschubert wrote:
| I am not quite sure what you mean, can you elaborate? In my
| mental model, money in the pockets of shareholders is much
| more effective than money in the pockets of big corporates.
| nicoburns wrote:
| In my mind, big corporates tend to be large corporations
| of wealth controlled by few people. And shareholders on
| average are the same. And therefore neither ought to be
| considered likely to be particularly effective.
| geysersam wrote:
| Best would be if the company increased salaries, then
| their employees could invest themselves in stuff that
| actually benefit them, boosting the real economy.
| txnf wrote:
| higher salaries would be captured by landlords.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Only because there is under-supply of housing at the
| moment. If we built more houses then landlords wouldn't
| be able to charge higher rent just because people had
| more money.
|
| To be clear, I think that we need to address both of
| these issues: general wealth distribution and lack of
| affordable housing.
| duped wrote:
| A majority of the population's landlord is the bank that
| holds their mortgage, and they don't just raise your
| mortgage payment because your income increases.
| refurb wrote:
| Most big corporations are owned by institutional
| investors which represent the 401ks and pension plans of
| your average citizen.
| duped wrote:
| Define "effective." A company spends its money on people
| and other inputs to productivity. To my mind that's a lot
| more "effective" than giving it to the investor class
| that "spends" it on other investments (by buying it from
| other people in the investment class).
|
| Most of the money returned to shareholders isn't going to
| be pumped back into the economy as money spent on goods
| and services. It just goes into the casino we call stock
| and bond markets where it provides some liquidity for
| some investment into companies, but most of it is just
| spinning around creating no value.
| konschubert wrote:
| In an economy, people's work is transformed into output
| in the form of goods and services, which are then
| consumed by people.
|
| It matters whether people's work is effective or not,
| because it it's ineffective, you have fewer goods and
| services that can be consumed.
|
| The factor that connects work to output is called
| productivity.
|
| It matters how the goods get distributed, yes. But as
| communism has shown, it also matters a whole lot how many
| goods and services are being produced.
| dukeyukey wrote:
| > The theory is nice but does this actually happen?
|
| All the time, that's what dividends are. Not something that
| happens much in growth tech stocks but real common in the
| rest of the economy.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| If you think about it the growth mindset is quite psychotic.
|
| Imagine a human being with a growth mindset. He optimises his
| bodyfat to the point of anorexia. He optimises conversations by
| extracting knowledge then moving on. His diet is pure protein
| shakes and broccoli. Every morning he does six Leetcode Hards.
| If you met him you'd think he was deranged.
|
| This growth ideology means every company we interact with
| behaves like Bob. Soon enough this Bobism filters into people
| through the labour market and professional values. (Like the
| Leetcoders). It's alienating and the only purpose it serves is
| an investment based economy with unclear benefits to society at
| large
|
| It creates a very strange world where we have computers acting
| like people and people acting like machines
| aikinai wrote:
| Your description reminded me of this Krazam sketch[0].
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/_o7qjN3KF8U?si=OyKs8ULYBNLOmmcI
| masklinn wrote:
| > If you think about it the growth mindset is quite
| psychotic.
|
| More to the point, if you think about it the biggest follower
| of the growth mindset is cancer.
|
| And turns out that's not just of
|
| > unclear benefits to society at large
|
| But actively detrimental to it, and ultimately, with a
| handful of exceptions, to the cancer itself.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That was exactly the way I worded it.
|
| https://jacquesmattheij.com/if-growth-was-good-then-
| getting-...
|
| This obsession with growth is so utterly self-centered. I
| still have those chairs, by the way.
| masklinn wrote:
| Seeing the date, I would not be surprised if that's where
| I originally got it from, in all honesty.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Regardless of where you got it, the analogy makes perfect
| sense and I'm sure others have come to the exact same
| conclusion. Growth will _always_ be capped somehow and
| the sooner companies realize that you can only grow
| forever at the expense of everybody else the better. It
| 's in a way amazing that whole industries can be so
| utterly divorced from reality that they'll wreck a good
| chunk of the planet just to prove the obvious.
| jowea wrote:
| What about a state with a growth mindset? I feel it's a
| decent parallel to the behaviour of states as described by
| realism, or even to the Red Queen hypothesis where if you
| stop running you lose.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen_hypothesis
| jacquesm wrote:
| Aka the coffin corner.
| bluGill wrote:
| Growth for a nation has changed. 500 years ago there wasn't
| much ability for a state to grow except by expanding their
| borders. Your farmers couldn't produce enough food to feed
| more people (they would on a good year, but then the extra
| starve in a bad year), and so you could expand your economy
| only by growing your borders. Thus a noble (read rich)
| would build an army and go to war - this at best adds more
| land they control and thus more taxes, but even in the
| worst case destroyed a lot of people who then didn't eat
| freeing up more food for the rest. The limit was land not
| labor, so if you killed a lot of men (women were ignored)
| those left could work a little more and produce just as
| much food.
|
| However starting 200-300 years ago the industrial
| revolution and various innovations have made other growth
| possible. Today war destroys far more than it gains you
| need a large industrial base to build a lot of equipment
| that you destroy (bombs are not cheap), plus all the
| equipment the enemy destroys. If you don't go to war you
| can instead use your industry to build more luxury goods
| (vacations are a valid luxury good for this discussion
| though we don't normally think of them that way!)
|
| Note, war above is entirely from the attackers point of
| view, and it is - as attackers are - optimistic about the
| chances of winning a war. The defender has other
| considerations.
| xvector wrote:
| > He optimises his bodyfat to the point of anorexia. He
| optimises conversations by extracting knowledge then moving
| on. His diet is pure protein shakes and broccoli. Every
| morning he does six Leetcode Hards. If you met him you'd
| think he was deranged.
|
| This was my life 2-3 years ago! Almost exactly. Definitely
| was deranged, no argument there. But I got in shape for the
| first time in my life (-90lbs), found a romantic partner, and
| got a ridiculously well paying job, all within a year. So,
| yeah, definitely worth it!
| carlob wrote:
| So after losing 90 lbs you lost 300 more and found 5 other
| romantic pattners and 3 more jobs?
| xvector wrote:
| Maintained my weight and found an even better job :)
| 632brick wrote:
| That's not very innovative of you. ;-)
| guhcampos wrote:
| Touche!
| achenet wrote:
| I think the comment you're replying to was trying to
| point out that growth mindset should not be forever.
|
| At some point, obsessive focus on growth has to lead way
| to something more sustainable.
| jofla_net wrote:
| Not to minimize your argument because at the core i entirely
| agree. I have come to understand that most of the reasons for
| the growth in so many of our beloved tech come from who is at
| the helm, and more specifically their personality types.
| Dominantly open-minded and creative people are extremely
| valuable in so many edge cases but when you have a group
| dominated by them nothing is stable. The culture has by now
| stabilized to reward and seek their input so we are all
| circling the drain waiting for the next best thing.
|
| This is not to say low-creative types make a better company.
| I've worked with completely different sets and it makes for
| polar opposites. What I find interesting is that
| companies/groups tend to cluster leaning towards ones which
| push for innovation or either shun it, again determined by
| their core member personality makeup. I wish there was some
| more tendancy for them to balance out somewhat, but it is
| definatey a phenomenon.
| everdrive wrote:
| This is a really great point I hadn't considered. I also
| think it's worth considering software itself as one of the
| issues here. It's much easier to continuously modify
| software than to continuously modify (for example) the
| supply chain or assembly line for vehicles or other
| manufactured goods. Of course these supply chains and
| assembly lines _are_ modified, and may even be helmed by
| people with a purely growth mindset. But, there are just
| physical realities slowing some of these more traditional
| companies down which don't necessarily affect tech
| companies. Sometimes it just feels like the tech companies
| are on fast-forward. They start, they get huge, they get
| stagnant, and die, all much quicker than an old-fashioned
| company.
| adwn wrote:
| Your argument is proving too much [1]: _Every_ attitude will
| lead to absurd results when followed to absurd lengths. It 's
| like claiming that the advice to drink water is _" quite
| psychotic"_, because drinking 50 liters of water will rupture
| your stomach and kill you.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proving_too_much
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, it proves _just enough_ : because growth _is_ followed
| to absurd lengths regularly and you will be hard pressed to
| find many other attitudes that are followed to those
| lengths in quantities that make that much difference to
| everybody alive today.
|
| The three month stock market cycle coupled with capitalism
| and advertising are at the root of a ton of societal
| problems that we are incapable of solving within that
| framework. Between those three we are all just lemons to be
| squeezed.
| Reason077 wrote:
| Not necessarily an entirely bad thing. Companies have
| lifecycles. Sure, a mature company might become largely
| profit focused, and stop innovating like they used to. But
| this generates surplus to return to investors, and creates
| opportunities for new innovative startups to fill the gaps
| that the incumbent is neglecting!
|
| As long as they aren't acting in a way that excessively
| blocks/restricts competition, I don't really see a problem
| with this. Old companies get boring, and eventually if they
| get _too_ boring they get disrupted ... maybe disrupted to
| death.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Companies have life cycles, but it is especially those
| companies that were successful early on whose drive to keep
| growing causes damage. That's when you get into patent
| portfolios, IP milking, M&A and squeezing competitors by
| cross subsidizing products.
|
| Growth for growth's sake is simply wrong. It is always
| growth at the expense of something larger.
| baoluofu wrote:
| I feel like you have presented a straw man argument for what
| a growth mindset is when it comes to individual people. You
| have taken extreme behaviours and ascribed them to a growth
| mindset, which I would disagree with.
|
| I would expect a growth mindset as applied to health and
| fitness would recognise short term versus long term benefits.
| Maintaining a healthy bodyweight decreases the risk of all
| cause mortality. Losing weight to the point of anorexia would
| cause numerous potential problems, and quickly be recognised
| as not ideal and a different approach applied.
|
| Optimising conversations only for maximum knowledge
| extraction is not a valid approach within the broader goal of
| optimising social interactions to maintain a healthy group of
| friends and family who you enjoy spending time with and can
| depend upon for years to come.
|
| A diet of pure protein shakes and broccoli is clearly not in
| line with any reasonable approach to a healthy diet which
| instead should aim to have a broad a varied source of
| nutrients, again with the goal of maintaining long term
| health and supporting whatever sports/training/activities the
| person takes part in.
|
| A programmer/software engineer who is serious about improving
| their craft would be much better served by taking a holistic
| view of their role and expanding their knowledge and
| expertise to a much broader set of skills than just
| algorithms and data structures.
|
| Your hypothetical deranged person I would argue is operating
| under the exact opposite of a growth mindset.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| I think you are hung up on some careless phrasing on my
| part.
|
| I'm lambasting the "growth strategy" that leads companies
| to release worse products via over-optimisation. I am
| pointing out how this sort of 'growth strategy' would lead
| to absurd behaviours if a human applied the same logic.
| theodric wrote:
| The risk of posting on HN is having your rhetorical
| flourish taken literally, deconstructed, and criticized
| in excruciating detail: QED.
| throwaway_08932 wrote:
| This risk multiplies when you have the audacity to make a
| joke on HN.
| gretch wrote:
| Unfortunately this guy broke the first and most important
| rule of telling a joke -> it has to be funny.
| HelloMcFly wrote:
| I think the problem here is that "growth mindset" has a
| more specific meaning to many readers that is not at all
| synonymous with "growth strategy", and there's some
| crossing of streams going on.
| willsmith72 wrote:
| "Growth mindset" has far more and different meaning to
| "growth strategies of companies"
| kibwen wrote:
| FWIW, I call this "the virus mentality". Growth at all
| costs, even if it means the death of the host.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| Well they do call it viral growth unironically. I think
| the ambivalent moral motivation behind it would be a
| little better surfaced by calling it the cancer cell
| mindset.
| theelous3 wrote:
| I would say someone like David Goggins probably fits the
| bill. Some people find his level of drive inspirational, I
| find it deranged. Ultimately I suppose the outcomes are
| good. Great health (probably) and a great fitness
| influencer brand, but the desire for suffering that fuels
| it all and the incredible levels of self criticism and even
| hatred involved, make it seem far more like some kind of
| fitness anorexia than self care.
|
| I think it would be reasonable to class his mode of being
| as that of individual growth mindset.
| PH95VuimJjqBqy wrote:
| It's an analogy, if it were perfect it would cease to be an
| analogy and be the thing itself.
|
| Analogy is a literary device for conveying an idea. You
| obviously understood the idea being conveyed, thus, the
| analogy did exactly what it was meant to do.
| rvba wrote:
| I live in the American Gardens Building on W. 81st Street
| on the 11th floor. My name is Patrick Bateman. I'm 27 years
| old. I believe in taking care of myself and a balanced diet
| and rigorous exercise routine. In the morning if my face is
| a little puffy I'll put on an ice pack while doing stomach
| crunches. I can do 1000 now. After I remove the ice pack I
| use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower I use a
| water activated gel cleanser, then a honey almond body
| scrub, and on the face an exfoliating gel scrub. Then I
| apply an herb-mint facial mask which I leave on for 10
| minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always
| use an after shave lotion with little or no alcohol,
| because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look
| older. Then moisturizer, then an anti-aging eye balm
| followed by a final moisturizing protective lotion.
| phlakaton wrote:
| You are assuming a growth mindset has identified the
| correct ways to measure growth, and is capable of
| recognizing when it has missed the mark and why. I think
| the wreckage of products all around us that have grown
| dramatically - from exciting starts into miserable current-
| states - shows that anorexia is closer than you think.
| rngname22 wrote:
| You're missing the point which is that growth mindsets,
| while well intentioned, may optimize for the wrong things
| and cause not only suboptimal outcomes but even inhuman
| ones.
|
| The point isn't that the particular strategy for health and
| fitness is right or wrong, it's that the growth mindset
| causes the person (Bob?) to over-focus on that aspect of
| their life to the detriment of more important but less
| obvious ones, like personal relationships, being kind to
| others, or enjoying fallen leaves in autumn.
|
| Bob spends his 20s trying to improve his bodyfat
| percentage, max his bench, get a Porsche, and build his
| 401k.
|
| He misses out on his niece's early childhood, loses his
| highschool friendships, and breaks up with his girlfriend
| for a job opportunity in a different city.
|
| This is like the printer company focusing on revenue
| instead of brand loyalty or its reputation.
| kukkeliskuu wrote:
| I agree with you that the "phychotic" phenomenon you describe
| exists, and it is sometimes called the growth mindset.
|
| But there seems to exist another phenomenon that is described
| in the book The Mindset, where the term originates, which is
| quite different.
|
| Let's take some examples from partner dancing which I am very
| familiar with.
|
| In some dance cultures, it is customary for the leader to try
| to maximize the area on the dance floor that is occupied (or
| "owned") by the couple. This is done, so you can dance more
| freely, do whatever you please. Such leaders may use many
| methods, such as intimidation and even physical force to push
| "weaker" leaders away from the area they consider their own.
|
| There are other dance cultures, where the leaders try to co-
| operate. For them, the area on the dance floor is shared. I
| feel where the other leaders are going, in a way I dance with
| the other leaders as well. We will try to harmonize our
| movements so that we can all share the area. The leaders who
| are able to effectively use the space are highly valued in
| such cultures. Beginners are given a little bit more slack,
| of course, but at the same time, non-cooperating leaders may
| be pushed out by the co-operating leaders.
|
| I once participated in an Argentine tango dance event (called
| a milonga) in Buenos Aires, which was for locals only. Many
| milongas are filled with tourists, so the locals try to keep
| the tourists out from certain events they consider their own.
|
| I was invited to the event by a friend, a follower, who knows
| many locals and so is accepted member of that event. But even
| knowing my friend did not give me any slack, but my co-
| operation was put into a rough test from the beginning.
|
| Many leaders intentionally surrounded me on the dance floor,
| and pressured me from all sides. As I am quite experienced in
| dancing in small spaces, I did not hesitate and was able to
| continue my dancing and keep co-operating with the other
| leaders although they were putting me into this test. After I
| had passed this test, I was accepted, and the testing
| stopped.
|
| I have also been invited into events where one key
| requirement to even get allowed to apply is that the
| organisers know your dancing, and they especially need to
| know that you will co-operate. These are lovely events,
| because the level of co-operation is very high.
|
| I think one key part of the real growth mindset is co-
| operation. You give up on fighting for some resource (in this
| case, the area you occupy on the dance floor), and you will
| gain something more valuable -- co-operation with the peers
| -- and through this co-operation you will have enough of the
| resource you need -- in this case you will always have enough
| space for your dancing.
|
| Another part of the real growth mindset appears to be the
| attitude of anti-fragility. If I accept the challenge of
| trying to learn to dance without aggressively trying to
| occupy space -- even though I would be skilled enough to do
| it -- that pressure will eventually teach me to become an
| even better dancer. It is not easy, however, it may take
| years of persistent effort to overcome this hurdle. But
| without this pressure I would have never learned.
| kstenerud wrote:
| > Soon enough this Bobism filters into people through the
| labour market and professional values
|
| It already has:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_of_the_SubGenius
| nick__m wrote:
| May the slack be with you !
| jacquesm wrote:
| The growth mindset is utterly idiotic. It presumes an
| endlessly growing market with endless resources and endless
| GDP growth. Everything has a natural growth stop: it's called
| adulthood. And after that you are supposed to take
| responsibility and act your age, rather than that you keep on
| demanding more like some angry toddler.
| refurb wrote:
| Why is that idiotic? GDP has no ceiling to it.
|
| And I don't know about you, but I'm kind of glad the
| healthcare industry has a growth mindset that "what we have
| is good enough".
|
| It's how humans advance. If cavemen thought "well this is
| good enough" well, we'd still be living in caves.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > GDP has no ceiling to it.
|
| Where did I say that?
|
| > And I don't know about you, but I'm kind of glad the
| healthcare industry has a growth mindset that "what we
| have is good enough".
|
| No, you really don't know about me. But there is plenty
| of innovation in healthcare, and not all of it is super
| costly (though some of it is). Like every other industry
| it is a confusing mixture of regulatory capture, people
| that really care, people that only care about their
| income stream or bottom line and people that wished they
| could do even better. The difference between say 'big
| pharma' and your average nurse of doctor is massive and
| to lump them all into one giant heap is not very
| productive.
|
| > It's how humans advance. If cavemen thought "well this
| is good enough" well, we'd still be living in caves.
|
| The 'this is good enough' is a strawman. There are plenty
| of things that really are good enough, and which have
| turned into pathways that are borderline extortionist.
|
| And there is plenty of innovation that is not cancerous.
|
| But do deny the reality that short term stock market
| driven goals of eternal growth are incompatible with a
| sustainable and healthy society is a non-starter for me,
| it is so incredibly clear that to ignore it is almost
| wilful at this stage. "After me, the deluge".
| pixl97 wrote:
| If breathing 21% oxygen is good for you, then breathing
| 100% oxygen is better!...
|
| The problem with reality is it is not clean or simple.
| For example having chlorinated water keeps you from
| getting any number of terrible diseases when you get a
| drink. At the same time it's a deadly chemical that takes
| huge amounts of industrial processing to make, and if not
| treated right is a source of pollution.
|
| Not any different then the 'forever chemicals' we've
| made. They were highly stable and did their jobs well.
| They also are terrible cancer causing bioaccumulators
| that have caused tons of misery.
|
| Open ended problems do not have simple solutions. They
| have trade offs. It's a good idea to fully understand the
| trades you're making.
| goodpoint wrote:
| You are describing the lot of the HN crowd that overlaps with
| HBO Silicon Valley. Having soylent for lunch and microdosing
| LSD for productivity.
|
| > investment based economy with unclear benefits to society
| at large
|
| "unclear benefits"? Unlimited growth is causing the
| environmental collapse.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Growth is probably the only thing that will save the
| environment. If we stopped technological growth with 1900
| dirty coal power plants, we would be far worse off.
| harry_ord wrote:
| Most beings kinda do during pregnancy and childhood
| parthianshotgun wrote:
| Can you expand on that?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| This is not growth mindset, FYI.
|
| Growth mindset is the _personal_ belief that _your own_
| abilities are not fixed and can grow. It provides
| psychological benefit when faced with difficult problems and
| improves grit. It is not the classic HN over-optimized self.
| It says nothing about _requiring_ growth.
|
| But for this conversation, the point is made well enough, I
| just hoped we could avoid a viral pushback against a
| perfectly reasonable thing.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| I am referring to the "growth mindset" as it applies to
| companies, and then pointing out how absurd it would be for
| a human to act the same way. The context is how the
| "continuous growth strategy" leads companies to release
| inferior products
| steezeburger wrote:
| I understand your point, but you do keep using a phrase
| that means something else than what you're describing.
| "growth mindset" is a phrase used a lot in psychology,
| from Carol Dweck.
| jbreckmckye wrote:
| I used the term only twice, directly replying to a
| comment about growth strategy. If I could edit I would,
| but still I think it makes sense in context.
| lioeters wrote:
| > improves grit
|
| I like how you phrased that as the positive result of a
| (personal) growth mindset. For non-native English speakers,
| the word "grit" might be interesting to learn about. Aside
| from the other common meaning of "coarse grains as of sand
| or stone"..
|
| > In psychology, grit is a positive, non-cognitive trait
| based on a person's perseverance of effort combined with
| their passion for a particular long-term goal or end state
| (a powerful motivation to achieve an objective).
|
| > This perseverance of effort helps people overcome
| obstacles or challenges to accomplishment and drives people
| to achieve.
|
| > Distinct but commonly associated concepts within the
| field of psychology include "perseverance", "hardiness",
| "resilience", "ambition", "need for achievement", and
| "conscientiousness".
|
| It reminds me of a similar term, "gumption".
|
| > gumption - Boldness of enterprise; initiative or
| aggressiveness.
| clnq wrote:
| An interesting read on grit that was popular on
| LessWrong, despite not being posted to their platform - h
| ttps://docs.google.com/document/d/1CyHvCwWh_BwukwNE-y61oB
| Cj...
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I think a lot of this thread is really confusing
| 'personal growth' to 'market share growth'.
|
| You can have ordinary well functioning products that just
| do their one thing and do them well, and thus grow market
| share.
|
| There is nothing about 'growth' that says your product
| must add and add features until it is un-usable, which it
| seems like people are saying is 'growth' as in 'personal
| growth'.
|
| Just build good products and 'grow' market share.
|
| Printers have failed this by making their products bad by
| growing features, and thus Brother is winning because it
| can simply print. A printer that can just print, and not
| wash your car.
| xtiansimon wrote:
| Your comment reminded me of Seth Godin's take on public
| education as a means for producing "obedient" "factory
| workers".
|
| https://youtu.be/C7FG6-KmMPg?si=ivTxNNdR6Ha4vOQK
| jedrek wrote:
| > If you think about it the growth mindset is quite
| psychotic.
|
| But it's absolutely crucial to VC funded businesses. Current
| VC groupthink isn't "how can we create businesses that
| deliver value", it's "how can we create businesses that we
| can convince other investors to see as valuable before we
| cash out and move on?"
|
| That's why we have things like "increasing headcount" as a
| goal, because increasing the number of people a business
| employs increases its perceived value. It doesn't matter if
| it destroys team dynamics, increases the burn rate, etc. It's
| a tool used to make a company seem more valuable before the
| VCs exit.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| >"how can we create businesses that we can convince other
| investors to see as valuable before we cash out and move
| on?"
|
| "How can we steal a man's shirt while convincing him he
| only lost it[1] instead?"
|
| If there's only so many shirts to go around, and they have
| to come from someone else, maybe we just load a bag full of
| rocks, lie and tell people it's full of their laundry, and
| then leave the laundromat before they notice. When they do
| notice, they will blame themselves. "Why oh why," they
| lament, "did I not immediately recognize it was a bag of
| rocks all along!"
|
| 1. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/losingyourshirt.asp
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| This is in fact a description of the economy of some western
| nations, like the USA.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| The Bob you described sounds like he's mostly targeting fixed
| set points. E.g. body fat percentage is bounced below, he's
| doing a fixed number of leetcode problems, etc.
|
| That sounds more like a sustained model with unhealthy
| targets.
|
| I'd think a growth model would be more like uncontrolled
| addiction, where the goal dosage continually increases and
| stays out of reach.
| Clubber wrote:
| I think a better example of personal growth mindset would be
| your career. Eventually you'll cap out being a programmer for
| example. You've mastered the highest paying technology,
| you've moved to the highest paying location, etc. Your
| options are to go independent and start your own company,
| move to a startup with equity, or start cheating people.
| Cheating people would be to over bill your hours, take on 2-3
| jobs and half ass them all, etc. I would argue it's not so
| much the growth mindset, but the lack of ethics people apply
| when chasing money once their growth is capped out.
|
| Growth is good, but it will eventually cap out. It's what
| people do when that happens that really matters.
| bluGill wrote:
| Growth doesn't cap out, but it becomes only a slight
| upward. I'm a C++ programmer I can become better by using
| C++23, or I can learn rust. Both would be paths to growth,
| but since I'm already good at programming the difference
| will be minimal. Both would be worth doing, but the
| difference would not be very significant.
| Clubber wrote:
| I was specifically referencing income growth via
| programming career. I didn't make that clear. I
| referenced it here but not in the opening statement.
| Personal growth for the sake of personal growth is
| boundless.
|
| >You've mastered the highest paying technology, you've
| moved to the highest paying location, etc.
| Applejinx wrote:
| Depends on how you define society. Is society a machine for
| producing high achievers who accomplish tasks? Is society a
| blade for lopping off tall poppies? Is society an organism
| with its own fitness functions outside of the individuals
| that compose it?
|
| If you've studied artificial life and see societies as
| mechanisms for executing the genetic algorithm, you see the
| faults with the growth ideology you've criticized. It's a
| plateau-making machine: it will tend to reward what's working
| right now, and starve out the genetic pool of anything else,
| leaving the resultant society unable to adapt.
|
| Computers acting like people and people acting like machines
| is a bad trade-off. It's not at all focussing on the
| strengths of each. There's a reason societies (such as big
| cities) that seemingly focus over-much on caring for useless
| and suboptimal people (compared to the darwinism of the wild
| frontier), end up burgeoning and becoming hotbeds of
| accomplishment. If you treat people not as machines, but as
| the genes of the genetic algorithm, it suddenly makes a lot
| more sense to be humanist: you'll get unexpected wins out of
| unexpected traits being cultivated until they can be useful
| in their own right.
| agumonkey wrote:
| that's because it's degen growth
|
| indeed there's a notion of quality in innovation and
| development, and also market rhythm fit..
|
| as a kid, waiting 3-5 years to see the next version of
| photoshop or office was long but good, when the web came, you
| could get a near direct line with the devs.. instant
| download, constant updates.. and it quickly felt like a
| disease, this growth is just instability under disguise
| bitwize wrote:
| What are you talking about? Sounds like a typical Hackernews,
| right down to the protein shakes and broccoli. You've
| probably conversed with many such people on this site.
| Sai_ wrote:
| Big O = Patrick Bateman
| bmitc wrote:
| > It creates a very strange world where we have computers
| acting like people and people acting like machines.
|
| Of course people here are getting hung up on your analogy.
| It's no surprise. But what you've written here is a very real
| consequence of our growth economy because humans are merely
| inputs into hoarding monetary capital. All other capital,
| including people, with the exclusion pf land and some
| selective niceties are expendable towards that end.
| withinboredom wrote:
| The thing is, there is a ceiling with SaaS products. You can
| usually hit it within 5 years of starting. That ceiling is
| entirely controlled by churn, with 0% churn, you go to the
| moon, but nobody has 0% churn.
|
| Once you hit that ceiling, the only reasonable thing is to
| focus on churn, not growth (as it will have the most impact).
| But that is like explaining that a "circular line on a map is
| actually a straight line" they say they get it, but they still
| see a circular line.
| amelius wrote:
| We should have stronger consumer organizations. Want to mass
| produce a product? Consumer orgs should first okay it.
| AlgorithmicTime wrote:
| That seems absurd. People often have no idea that a product
| would be useful or desirable beforehand. Perhaps our current
| level of consumer choice is somewhat absurd, but that brings
| you to a Soviet style system.
| qwytw wrote:
| It's fascinating that this was downvoted. What the comment
| above is suggesting is literally a planned economy.
|
| How would these "consumer groups" even work? Would they be
| democratically elected? Appointed by governments? How would
| they be insulated from pressure from companies trying to
| suppress competition? It would inevitably lead to a
| thoroughly inefficient and corrupt system...
| mlrtime wrote:
| People who come up with these ideas think that the
| 'groups' would be filled with like minded people like
| themselves when in reality it would be the opposite.
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| > In android, if I click on a link in facebook messenger that
| takes me to facebook, the back button takes me "back" to
| facebook's home screen instead of to the messenger app. Tapping
| back button again does nothing. I have to switch back to
| messenger manually. That's 5-6 taps/swipes instead of 1,
| because a product manager's bonus in FB depends on how well
| they beg for more engagement. As a result, I rarely use any of
| these products. I used to spend some time in Instagram/FB. I
| close LinkedIn immediately after an important interaction for
| similar reasons.
|
| This! Each and every time I see an Instagram link I avoid
| clicking on it for the same click/login capture nonsense. If
| they opened it up for views only with out logging in, I'd
| probably actually end up using the service. Short-term
| protectionist strategies like these will be etched into the
| gravestone of Meta/Facebook.
| xvector wrote:
| Details like these go through extensive A/B testing. Clearly,
| Meta has found that gating their content behind a login
| prompt leads to greater engagement and revenue growth. For
| what it's worth, I eventually created an Instagram account
| because of these prompts. The strategy works.
| lacerrr wrote:
| it's just artificial growth, though. You're not generating
| any more engagement than if they'd just show you the
| content as a guest. Unless you also started using the app
| as a result of creating an account.
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| They've covered non-logged in engagement into logged in
| engagement, which lets them target ads better.
| alluro2 wrote:
| Or at least immediately fees you presumably more relevant
| posts from people you follow, so that you can engage more
| and they can serve more ads.
| nine_k wrote:
| The growth may be artificial and not sustainable, but the
| money it brings is real, and can be invested (or
| consumed) sooner than later. Opportunity cost is a real
| thing :-\
| mlrtime wrote:
| Additionally the infrastrucutre is not free either. Even
| without ads (which is fine by me), serving up the full
| suite of tools to logged out users is very expensive and
| much harder to control
|
| At our company we're trying to do the same thing now,
| supporting logged out users is just too expensive and not
| worth it.
| zeitg3ist wrote:
| I would argue it's actually easier to serve content to
| logged out users as you can cache the whole response and
| serve it at the edge. Then it "just" becomes a cache
| expiration problem.
| doubled112 wrote:
| I have seen right here on HN where my request cannot be
| processed, but it loads fine in a private browser window.
|
| Logged in users receive more errors.
|
| Thanks, caching, for allowing me to continue
| procrastinating.
| mlrtime wrote:
| Correct, we push static assets to the edge. However not
| all SASS products are the same, there is a spectrum of
| features that can be pushed to the edge and some cannot.
| The engineering comes from cost, usability, reliability,
| etc...
|
| Ultimately we prioritize our logged-in customers.
| kuschku wrote:
| tbh, that's how a lot of apps do it, and it's wrong. The "Up"
| button in the navigation bar should _always_ bring you to the
| hierarchically higher point in the app 's own nav graph,
| while the back button in the device's navigation bar at the
| bottom should always bring you to the historically previous
| page.
|
| Any app that does something other than that is wrong and
| should not have been approved.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| I've been noticing this type of bullshit with Netflix recently.
| Every time I watch something I'm prompted to rate it. Every.
| Single. Time. And it's not like a gentle suggestion, it's a
| pop-up that has to he dismissed to be able to interact with the
| rest of the interface.
| zubairq wrote:
| Makes sense, yes the growth mindset makes sense until you or a
| company get product market fit. When stagnation sets in and
| things stop working then a growth mindset makes sense again. Of
| course you also need to make sure that you don't get blindsided
| by new changes in society or tech, but those things just need
| you to be open minded to new things
| clusmore wrote:
| > The growth mindset is incredible for expanding when your
| product is in its early ages. But there should be a "sustain"
| mindset at some point. First you push to grow the market, or
| your market share. When returns on your efforts become
| diminishing, you push to improve how much you earn of each
| customer/each sale. At some point there should be a mindset
| that our company is worth X dollars, and we should sustain
| that.
|
| Kent Beck calls this the Explore and Extract phases (with the
| middle phase being Expand). I'm not sure if you had this talk
| in mind as you were writing your comment, but if not I think
| it'll resonate with you.
|
| [1]: https://youtu.be/YGhS8VQpS6s
| gpderetta wrote:
| YouTube on android does something similar. Eventually if you
| back-button enough you get back when you started. But the
| amount of presses required increases every few months or so.
| But hey, engagement and retention goes up!
| tcfhgj wrote:
| Our society's economy is grow or die
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > The growth mindset is incredible for expanding when your
| product is in its early ages. But there should be a "sustain"
| mindset at some point. First you push to grow the market, or
| your market share. When returns on your efforts become
| diminishing, you push to improve how much you earn of each
| customer/each sale. At some point there should be a mindset
| that our company is worth X dollars, and we should sustain
| that.
|
| The worst part is that when companies MUST switch must switch
| to "sustain" because they can't squeeze out any more growth or
| their efforts to squeeze out more growth become counter
| productive, they instead switch to enshitification and drain
| their user base, and the company, of all the value they can,
| essentially running into the ground for a few more quarters of
| profit and bonuses.
|
| As an aside, I'm sad that "growth mindset" has been hijacked to
| mean "grow at all costs" when it originally meant "the belief
| that a person's capacities and talents can be improved over
| time". It was originally a term of nurturing, not of
| exploitation and infinite capitalism.
| nine_k wrote:
| It's not just a "growth" mindset; it's "this quarter's growth"
| mindset. Short-term goals that give short-term results while
| making long-term results predictably worse. Not a problem for a
| particular executive: they will move on to work on something
| else, and are not going to be hurt by the fallout.
|
| But if this strategy underperforms as badly as we as customers
| feel it does, it will eventually drive its perpetrators from
| the market. If they think that their positions are
| unassailable, let them remember how the unassailable GMC and
| Ford felt in 2000s.
| lettergram wrote:
| You really need to balance both at a company. Some segments
| need innovation / growth at different times. You also might
| want to release / invest in competitors to ensure you maintain
| your market share which is taken via innovation.
|
| Google kind of did this for a time with Inbox and similar
| products. Apple had multiple phone lines (less like this, but a
| tad). Facebook has multiple social media platforms. Block has
| square and cash app (among other things).
| artursapek wrote:
| I agree with you completely. The endless growth mindset
| (resembling cancer) is driven by investors who want passive
| income in the form of returns. Investment returns in a company
| necessitate its market cap growing, not merely being sustained.
| A "sustain" mindset is incompatible with this. It requires
| ownership to be simple and unanimously content with not having
| endless return on their capital.
| grumpy-de-sre wrote:
| There's an interesting cultural element to this, and I think
| Brother being a Japanese company is not a coincidence. I see
| the same mindset applied widely here in the German Mittelstand.
|
| The American growth at all costs mindset (particularly
| quarterly) is excellent during the technology exploration
| phase. It spurs radical innovation, but as a technology matures
| it becomes impossible to meet growth expectations. In response
| to this the spiral of Enshittification kicks off and eventually
| the company and it's products fade into irrelevance. Stability
| in such an environment is impossible (the gain knob is cranked
| to the max).
|
| The German Mittelstand are different, typically they are much
| slower to innovate during the technology exploration phase (I
| think mostly due to the German economy not really rewarding
| early stage innovation). However as a technology matures the
| Mittelstand's strength in stable, gradual evolution and
| refinement really shines. They focus on being the best in their
| niche and grow by expanding to new markets, opening adjacent
| product lines etc. Enshittification is the last thing on their
| minds (the system is critically/over damped).
| jacknews wrote:
| I think your phrasing is wrong, 'growth mindset' is the idea
| that you can improve yourself with effort, education, etc,
| instead of just 'I'm inherently bad at maths' or whatever.
|
| What you are referring to is simply Capitalism.
|
| Capitalism is where 'capital', aka money, ultimately, owns the
| 'means of production'. And it also innovates, and creates the
| means of production, by deploying money to uncertain ventures;
| building a new factory or whatever.
|
| The problem is that deployed capital needs to earn a return,
| else why bother. In other words, everything needs to grow. The
| system just doesn't work without growth.
|
| 'Growth' can be, people doing more things, or, more people
| doing things, or, making more money from the things people do
| (though I'm not sure that's actual growth). We've come a long
| way in the last century with the first two, and now the focus
| seems to be on that third option.
|
| IMHO the current system is past, or at least fast approaching,
| it's expiry date, and we really should have researched, and
| have at least a vague idea of a plausible future replacement,
| by now, otherwise we might be doomed to recycle the 20th C.
| jakderrida wrote:
| > What happens instead is companies keep rewarding executives
| by increases in revenue, they keep rewarding product managers
| similarly, and product managers selectively choose metrics that
| optimize immediate revenue, at the expense of brand loyalty.
|
| While I'm not advocating for the growth mindset, you seem to be
| neglecting why, exactly, most executive incentive packages so
| frequently include stock options. They are directly intended to
| defer the rewards over a defined vestment period to align their
| incentives for the long term success of the company.
| duxup wrote:
| It's the same problem with tech support.
|
| I've worked in several support organization that sincerely
| prioritized providing good support to customers. They paid good
| tech's good salaries, hired good managers, and we provided
| great support. Sales team members would come to me and say they
| were selling support contracts with ease because of the support
| provided, "easiest money I ever made" was a common refrain.
|
| But eventually at every company customer / tech support
| eventually is viewed as a cost, an annoyance. After all when
| customers complain what do they complain about? Even the best
| customer's can't praise support enough for companies to avoid
| eventually seeing it as an annoyance and eventually cost that
| is easily cut. Good managers see it coming and jump ship,
| support for support teams starts to erode and the culture
| changes.
|
| I worked one company where the engineering team would secretly
| invite some of the support staff over to their building when
| they had a team lunch ... because they liked us and knew that
| our team lunches (low cost pizza) had been cancelled.
|
| It happens time and again ... :(
|
| Eventually I moved on and learned to code. Maintenance is hard
| and not valued.
| pmontra wrote:
| > The growth mindset is incredible for expanding when your
| product is in its early ages. But there should be a "sustain"
| mindset at some point.
|
| This is OK if management is paid and get bonuses by the money
| they make by selling products. If they make money and get
| bonuses by selling their shares or increasing their value, they
| cross the line between industry and finance. Finance doesn't
| give a f** about industry. They'll eat one after another like
| we eat cherries. Unsustainable growth and enshittyfication are
| two tools to squeeze the most money from a company and if it
| dies in the process they move to the next one.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > The growth mindset
|
| Somewhat pedantic comment: the phrase "growth mindset" is also
| psychology jargon that refers to the fact that many skills are
| more learnable than most people realize. It contrasts with a
| "fixed mindset" where people assume you have to work with what
| you've got.
|
| Just wanted to point that out so people don't get confused
| between the healthy idea of being able to grow and the idea
| you're addressing, which is more like a compulsion for
| businesses to grow economically.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The same observation works for the psychology definition too,
| they are similar. If you insist on getting better and better
| on the stuff you already excel, you will hit a wall and will
| have to sacrifice a lot for small improvements.
| watwut wrote:
| I have seen it used only in context of talent itself and
| people who do not have much skill.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| As the OP said, for companies that don't have a lot of
| fitness, it's great too.
|
| The one overwhelmingly large difference is that the
| professionals that deal with it on the context of people
| are well trained and know not to push it over the point
| it becomes harmful. But that detracts nothing from the
| point.
| refurb wrote:
| The "sustainable" business model is fine.
|
| However, investors aren't interest in buying stock in a company
| with poor returns. They have other options with better returns.
| It comes with accessing capital in the public markets.
|
| The other issue is that a sustainable business quickly becomes
| a dying business when competitors innovate and you don't.
|
| I honestly can't think of any business that just prints cash
| without a daily struggle to keep the company growing.
| taneq wrote:
| > Brother is what it is, not because of lack of innovation, but
| because of deliberate evasion of short-sighted greed.
|
| Exactly. We have two new Brother multifunction printers at work
| and they're pretty great. They're exactly like printers, you
| tell your computer to print a document, that's where it comes
| out. No hassle.
|
| All this other BS that HP, Epson etc. are pulling isn't
| innovation, it's extortion. "Just be a printer that isn't shit"
| is innovation in this environment.
| jauntywundrkind wrote:
| This idea about sustain-mode resonates with me! It almost feels
| like we need different kind of "product" people to do this; the
| typical incentives for product is to innovate innovate
| innovate.
|
| This topic reminds me a lot of the recent thread on Signal
| being so comparatively small but being scaled so big (and
| shaming big tech companies for being so big).
| https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/signal-meta-google-too-b...
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38382811
| shimonabi wrote:
| I bought a Brother laser printer a while back but it set itself
| up by default using the WSD protocol. After some time it stopped
| responding to the network and I could use it only after
| reinstalling the driver every time I wanted to print.
|
| Only after I set it up with the TCP/IP protocol, it works fine
| and is available every time.
| maratc wrote:
| TIL protocols other than TCP/IP exist and are used for
| connecting printers.
| yair99dd wrote:
| Another their Linux supported thermal printers.
| https://github.com/pklaus/brother_ql
|
| It did take Time to stabilize the design, anything before the
| ql700 is clunky. But the ones I tried after have been Great
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Wish I'd seen the web interface when setting mine up for remote
| printing, the first party drivers come as a x86 only rpm binary
| that worked terribly.
|
| I ended up buying a thin client and installing full windows 10
| as a print server.
| poisonborz wrote:
| Among all the praises, well, there are still things they could
| fix/upgrade. Some of my printers don't wake up from sleep in
| certain networks and clients report them as offline (a widespread
| problem if you search for it). Also it'd be nice if they'd
| support wifi beyond N (this is sadly common among wifi devices in
| general).
| pontifier wrote:
| I've bought at least five brother laser printers because I
| wanted one everywhere I go. They've all worked great except for
| the last one (HL-L2390DW). That sleep problem has caused me to
| consider other brands instead of just buying my default.
|
| I'm betting lots of people haven't experienced this, because
| their old printers are still working great.
| dazc wrote:
| Is there a best version, say as replacement for a basic ink jet
| printer doing an average of 2 pages a day?
|
| I have a basic Canon which, to be fair, has worked well for ten
| years or more but I want to be ready for when it eventually stops
| working.
| chx wrote:
| you should be able to get a not much used Brother color laser
| from eBay for less than 150 bucks...
| CrlNvl wrote:
| I have a Brother DCP L2530DW: black and white laster, wi-fi,
| with scanner. Works perfectly for my use case (scanning
| invoices, printing tickets and mail), no need for a specific
| app be it on Android, Windows or Linux.
|
| I'm only using the Brother Windows app for scanning purposes,
| as the OCR works well for my needs.
|
| It's been 2.5 years, no issues whatsoever, just needed one
| toner change after a while.
| cubefox wrote:
| I've recently bought the same one. Only thing that surprised
| me was the double-line dot-matrix LCD from ~30 years ago. In
| terms of usability this isn't great (entering the WiFi
| password was no fun), but most of the time it's used with a
| second device anyway.
| hef19898 wrote:
| I might be one of the very few ro see it like that, but for low
| print volume withoutbany speciap needa regarding print quality
| and size, I'd propably go for one Canons or Epsons pay-per-page
| subscription models. Costs oer page are dirt cheap, printers
| aren't very expensive neither and there models with decent
| document scanning.
|
| There is a reason laser printers usually have their own room or
| remote corner in offices, they aren't really great for air
| quality.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I don't think 2 pages a day is going to be base for most
| rooms in the home with decent ventilation. Like if you live
| in a city I suspect you breathe in more particulates from
| tire wear in the air.
|
| As for price, a hl-2140 is $50 and will last you for 10k
| pages if not more. I don't think inkjet pricing economics
| ever win here even with the pay per use the latest "pricing
| innovation" the inkjet companies have invented. I love that
| my laser printer has 0 maintenance aside from filling the
| paper tray and I never have to think about it. It ran out
| toner after like 7 years of very occasional printing and
| there was lots of advance warning. The printer itself just
| works with no issues.
| hef19898 wrote:
| If you get a decent quality laser for 50 bucks, well, the
| question is settled.
| qwebfdzsh wrote:
| Epson's cheapest plan (printer + 1,250 pager per month) seems
| to be $14.99/mo. Not if that's a great deal if you only print
| 60 pages on average unless you need to buy a new printer each
| year for some reason.
|
| Seems like the subscription might be a decent deal if you
| actually print quite a lot, though.
| inamberclad wrote:
| Eh. My Canon G3060 ink tank printer is great. No cartridges, no
| DRM, CUPS and scanner support on Linux out of the box. Only
| downsides are no document feeder for scanning and no double-sided
| printing (really Canon?). Other good printers do still exist.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| Had a Brother printer once ... never again. I will just say
| "Cleaning". 'nough said.
| wodenokoto wrote:
| But where are brother printers though? TFA basically just say
| "they are what tech people recommend for printers", and while
| becoming a favorite amongst tech people isn't a bad goal, I'm not
| sure it's a great yard stick for business success.
| criddell wrote:
| I wonder what their yard sticks are because their sales process
| sucks.
|
| I was just on Brother's website thinking I would get a printer
| and 20 minutes later I've given up. Their website is really
| bad. In my first five minutes I think I closed the pop up
| advertising their Refresh ink program five times.
|
| They have a soooo many models but thankfully there's a _help-
| me-choose_ button. I went through that and at the end it
| recommended something that had everything I need. But there's
| no _buy_ button at the end. The more information button says I
| need to contact a dealer for pricing.
|
| I think checking duplex-copying pushed me into their business
| line (even though I chose home at the start). So I started over
| and skipped that option and at the end I got a different
| recommendation but again, no buy button and the only listed
| retailer was Walmart. I searched for it on Google and I think
| it might be a discontinued model.
|
| Their _help--me-choose_ function didn't help much because my
| number one feature is that it not have DRM'd cartridges (ie
| accepts third party cartridges) and that's not something you
| can filter by.
| tmikaeld wrote:
| Here in Sweden, there's the same feel about the OKI printers.
|
| I've had a lot of clients with office and I do remote support,
| always recommended OKI because they just work.
|
| This is all that's needed from a printer:
|
| - 1 day delivery to the door (yes, from OKI).
|
| - Register and get 1 free large black cartridge.
|
| - Print mono-tone or single color, don't need all of them.
|
| - Windows and MacOS installs drivers OOB, no need to download or
| install anything.
|
| - It connects to WIFI, everyone can connect and print.
|
| - Only 1 e-mail from OKI in a year! (From registration)
| dade_ wrote:
| OKI printers are excellent, I never see them on the consumer
| market in Canada. There were 2 brands in the 90's that caught
| my attention as extraordinarily reliable when I worked at a
| computer store in the 90's, Brother and OKI. OKI performs very
| well in terrible environments such as woodworking shops (over a
| decade with sawdust everywhere). HP and Lexmark were awesome
| for service contract work.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Most models are reliable, compatible with *nix network drivers,
| and don't pull shenanigans when you need them to work.
|
| The only issue I saw is the toner color match on laser models
| could be a bit better. Still highly recommended for anything
| except photos.
|
| "Innovating"
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2y8Sx4B2Sk
| hef19898 wrote:
| A laser printer that can print good quality photos would be a
| _real_ innovation so, wouldn 't it?
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| Yeah, but it would likely cost more than a car. =)
|
| The high-speed inkjet-bar systems and Dye-sublimation
| printing kind of specialized in photographic printing.
|
| Patents do expire eventually. I think most people mistake 23
| year old ideas as "innovative" when they enter the high-
| volume consumer markets. Derivative and opportunistic is a
| different business model.
| hef19898 wrote:
| If I pay that much, car prices, for a printer I'll propably
| take a a1 pigment photo printer or some such.
|
| One, propably accidental, innovation was Epsons ET-8550 /
| ET-8500: Dye ink based tank printers in A3+ and A4
| respectively with two blacks and grey. They produce very
| decent photo prints, even B/W, decent color management and
| incredibly low cost per page for inks. They are somewhat
| pricey so, but can double as a home office printer.
| Something a, say, Canon Pro-200 cannot.
|
| And I am not sure if print quality is so much different,
| both being dye ink printers (the Epson ones have a second
| pigment ink which is used for certain media settings, works
| reasonably well on normal photo paper but not great,
| results are supposed to be very good on some fine art
| papers which I haven't tried yet).
|
| I say accidental, because Epson never marketed those two as
| photo printers. There is a reason so why no decent photo
| printer is included in any pay-per-page service, otherwise
| those would be great!
| jll29 wrote:
| > Its official print driver isn't just a PPD but has some
| binary blob Linux executable configured as a filter.
|
| I'm surprised people say no driver is required, auto-recognized
| out of the box etc. In contrast, I agree with the parent post
| that Brother requires a very non-standard binary installation
| that will throw various errors on a clean Intel 64 bit Ubuntu
| 21.04 LTS installation.
|
| I tried this 4 times with 2 printers, 3 times it did not work
| and 1 time it worked. Never got WiFi to work on a Brother
| laser, so had to go by USB, which is annoying.
|
| Edit: Still better than my $450 HP duplex business printer,
| which stands unused due to forced subscriptions and rejected
| cardridges. So far, the best experiences I had with a Kyocera
| b/w laser and Lexware b/w laser (the latter in the office, so I
| did not install it). Brother is okay, but with random driver
| fiddling required.
| Joel_Mckay wrote:
| "Never got WiFi to work on a Brother laser" It will take a
| bit to enter using the up/down arrow keys, and setting a
| static IP/mask on the router and printer can be tricky.
|
| Ubuntu has been going through some issues driver wise
| (glitching after EOL of several legacy repos), and sometimes
| not every program will render out the right pipe. USB shared
| printers never seem to work well in linux. Try the native OS
| printer detection once your network sees the printer mac/ip
| (LPR mode should work). Note too, some printers
| disappear/reappear on network change overs.
|
| What is the make/model/year where you can't reach the printer
| web-page on the IP?
| tragomaskhalos wrote:
| see also: microwaves
|
| A microwave needs two dials - one for power level, and one for
| time. Not a calculator keypad, not buttons with +1 and +10 on
| them or any of that nonsense - dials please. And start/stop
| buttons if you insist. That's it. It does not need a 'defrost
| chicken drumsticks' programme cluttering up the ui, because that
| function is far better fulfilled by a human repeatedly running
| the thing at low power for a few mins then poking the food with a
| finger
| katbyte wrote:
| I hate dials on microwaves, it's annoying to enter an exact
| time. Keypad and start/stop buttons please.
|
| If we are going to get fancy wifi/Ethernet just for ntp so the
| time is always right.
| layer8 wrote:
| Digital dials with a pseudo-log scale are the best and
| fastest to enter and adjust precise times.
| maratc wrote:
| I don't have current time display on my microwave, it doesn't
| hinder my microwave performance in any way, so that problem
| doesn't exist for me.
| bitsandboots wrote:
| Sure the performance isnt hindered. The microwaves will
| keep microwaving. The food will just be blasted into an
| inedible state.
|
| Dealing with this right now; At someone's place with such a
| dial microwave and they work around its incredible lack of
| precision at the consequence of burned or frozen food.
| makach wrote:
| I've had my fair share of printers over the years. They've always
| caused me significant rage and frustration (not necessarily in
| that order)
|
| Last 4 years, I've owned a brother b/w laser printer. I replaced
| the original cartridge with a long life cartridge after the
| original was depleted.
|
| It just works, it prints from my work pc, mobile phones, iPad,
| private computer, and even guests needing to print can connect
| and print.
|
| Previous frustration of low quality, special paper, engine
| failures etc. is nothing but a faint memory.
| hlandau wrote:
| Here are my complaints about a Brother LED printer (HL-3170CDW):
|
| Rasterisation:
|
| - It supports PostScript, but the rasteriser is so slow it's a
| problem. If you print a PDF without any transparency in it it's
| fine. If you print a PDF with the slightest bit of transparency
| in it, expect a 30 second delay of the "Data" light blinking _per
| page_. This destroys the print speed and probably wastes toner
| due to not having the next page ready in time.
|
| - Its official print driver isn't just a PPD but has some binary
| blob Linux executable configured as a filter. This is obviously
| completely unusable on non-x86 platforms. I assume the object
| here is to rasterise stuff on the host before sending it to the
| printer to avoid the above issue, but it is a proprietary
| solution.
|
| - Even using the official drivers on Windows, plenty of documents
| take noticable time to rasterise per page (e.g. heavy PDFs
| containing high-DPI scans taking tens of seconds per page), and
| you still don't get the rated print speed. So the above doesn't
| fix rasterisation time anyway.
|
| The consumables game:
|
| - The toner cartridges for this printer are NOT chipped. This is
| good. It's actually incredible how it works; there is a 1 bit
| mechanical 'register' on each toner cartridge which comes set
| from the factory, and when the printer senses it, it clears it
| mechanically and resets some settings such as page count since
| last cartridge change.
|
| - However, after accidentally buying the wrong cartridges for a
| newer kind of Brother printer, which had a very obvious set of
| electric contacts added, it's become clear that Brother is now
| chipping its newer toner. This cannot bode well IMO.
|
| - Furthermore, the printer will refuse to print after a certain
| amount of time with a given toner cartridge. Sometimes it will
| detect there doesn't seem to be toner in it and you can fix this
| by taking out and shaking it. But, as per the service manual,
| there is _also_ a hard cutoff after which it just won 't print
| (unless you use the service mode to make it pretend you've
| inserted a new cartridge). According to the service manual, this
| is because there is a 'bias voltage' which needs to be adjusted
| over time as a cartridge is used, and this is reset when you
| insert a new cartridge. Hence why they have the 1-bit mechanical
| register. The problem is that their bias voltage lookup table
| with respect to page count so far seems to run out after the
| rated number of pages, so it just refuses to print after that
| even if you have toner in there. You can use service mode to
| reset this and make it act like there's a new cartridge in there,
| thereby resetting the bias voltage to the initial value, but I
| assume this is done for a reason and would lead to suboptimal
| results(?). So the effective result is that Brother LED printers
| will automatically demand a new cartridge after a certain number
| of pages, even if toner is remaining.
|
| I'm currently substantially more happy with a Canon G650 tank-fed
| inkjet. It's been about a year now and I still haven't had to
| refill it, which means it consumes consumables even more slowly
| than the Brother. Of course one of the great things about tank-
| based designs are they can't be chipped and the ink level
| monitoring is open-loop.
|
| I will also say the Brother is now unusable for colour printing,
| as it comes out all garbled. Unclear why this is, perhaps it is
| due to some bad third-party toner (I never buy genuine), so I'm
| not really holding this against Brother, but it is another
| downside in practical terms.
|
| IMO printer manufacturers should be banned from selling print
| cartridges, and should be required to publish specifications for
| their manufacture instead.
| znpy wrote:
| I got the hp laserjet mfp118dw and it's been just fine. it's
| black and white, it does front/back and it works off the built-in
| drivers, over the network.
|
| I was in doubt exactly between this printer and a brother printer
| (similar features) but for the brother printer just wasn't sure
| it would have worked, and during the pandemic I didn't want to
| risk it.
| willvarfar wrote:
| from osmosifying printer recommendations on HN the last few
| years, aren't brother printers becoming enshittened too? Nowadays
| they might try to lock out third party ink and toner cartridges,
| for example?
| josephcsible wrote:
| Yes they are. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
| rmm wrote:
| I got one of the brother mono laser printers. Man it just works.
| I set it up once many moons ago and it has never once not worked.
| I think I got half my office and most of my family onto it. It's
| fast enough, duplex prints and yeah just legendary products
| Aeolun wrote:
| The nice thing about Brother is that their products have so far
| lasted forever, so even if they go bad I can enjoy my current
| printer for at least the next 10 years.
| nicman23 wrote:
| honestly i had had fewer problems with the custom (meaning bad)
| ender 3 i have than HP, espon, whatever inkjet printers. Laser
| printers are only marginally better.
|
| Friday i wasted 3 hours because windows decided it did not want
| to print anything.
| cammikebrown wrote:
| Brother has always been a very good brand of printer. I used to
| be a printer repair person. To me, the article reads like, "Every
| printer brand got way worse, except for Brother!"
| lqet wrote:
| I would argue that what other manufacturers are doing is not
| innovation. It's cargo-cult innovation, adding something that
| _looks_ modern and innovative, but in reality is just a
| regression. This is now commonly called enshittification.
| netchkin wrote:
| I worked at a company famous for making printers on a highly
| secretive and innovative project 8 years ago. You all know the
| fainting goats that get stun because their nervous system shuts
| down when flood with overexcitement? An innovative idea appears
| and suddenly, every single person wants a stake in it so much
| that no movement forward is possible. On top of that, no one
| knows what they are supposed to build anymore. Large and
| inflexible, these corporations are great at hiding the stagnation
| until the budget eventually runs out.
| brazzy wrote:
| Was is the Blockchain printer someone else in this thread joked
| about?
| RantyDave wrote:
| Ahhh. Now you've made me all wistful thinking about HP LaserJet
| 4's.
| timbit42 wrote:
| I have a client still running one. I replaced the drum with the
| only one I could find online about 12 years ago. It probably
| won't last much longer though.
| vidarh wrote:
| I'll add to the voices of praise for Brother. I got mine after an
| Epson multi-function device stopped allowing me to scan without
| first figuring out how to unclog the print head became the final
| straw. I'm not buying another Epson device again.
| pitdicker wrote:
| My Brother HL2240D (ca. EUR100) started to see some wear on the
| wheel that picks up pages after ca 80.000 prints. I combined some
| parts with another HL2250 that had some wear, and was good to go
| for a few more years. Rock-solid devices!
|
| I finally picked up a new HL-L2375DW (and passed on the trusty
| old printer) and have to admit Brother made excellent
| innovations. As far as there were any annoyances, they are fixed.
| I no longer turn it off, it remains in standby sipping <<1W of
| power. And driverless printing is just great.
| oliwarner wrote:
| I agree --we all have a HL20xx on a shelf that still works
| perfectly, right?-- but their SMB colour laser printers are just
| as bulletproof.
|
| These have had some mild innovation and software nonsense which
| I'm sure will age like soft cheese, but you cannot overstate how
| amazing driverless printing is. Linux, Android, iOS all print,
| scan, no setup, full feature-set no questions asked. Blew my
| mind. Three years and thousands of prints later, and I'm certain
| it's the best PS400 spent on a printer. Wish they made a large
| format model at similar specs and price.
| TheChaplain wrote:
| Preaching to the choir here, but yes, my Brother L2357 mono laser
| printer is a really good purchase.
|
| Windows, Linux or Android, all of them connects wireless and
| prints, and no funny stuff with toner cassettes.
|
| Perhaps not financially smart, but I buy my toner from Brother
| just to support them as a thank you for this piece of hardware.
| can3p wrote:
| Their main innovation is the lack of greed. No cartridge lock-in,
| no subscription business, none of this nonesense. Just this fact
| makes them a no-brainer
| hashtag-til wrote:
| This mindset is more like starting from a real problem and
| solving it.
|
| Many companies today start from the solution (yes, LLM, I'm
| looking you) and then looking for the problem.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| New brother printers have cartridge drm chips
| Astronaut3315 wrote:
| The lower end models do, but my "new" (refurbished)
| HL-L8360CDW does not.
| Arnt wrote:
| I've printed on Brothers most of the time since 2003, and... not
| innovating? Each new model adds a feature or two and changes
| something about the innards.
|
| (HL-1450, MFC-8880, MFC-8890, MFC-L3770, some of those at the
| same time.)
| Brajeshwar wrote:
| In India, Brother is not a known brand. They don't advertise at
| all. Almost all stores have also shut down. So, by default,
| everyone almost buys the usual HP, Canon, Epson, etc.
|
| I purchased an Ink-Tank Printer in 2018 and have been using it
| with no issues. I have refilled the printer only once in the last
| 5-years. I live in a close-gated but large community. During the
| pandemic, I help with printing -- a lot, from documents to photos
| to whatnot. It survived.
|
| My daughters use it for school work, printing stickers, taking
| photos, etc. Now, my suggestion is -- Brother. Three of my
| friends have bought them and are all very happy.
|
| Brother works.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Brother works.
|
| It is both sad and fantastic that they could use this as the
| slogan for their company and it'd just be an accurate statement
| (as opposed to their competitors that do not work).
| rwaksmunski wrote:
| The ones before chipped toners were great. I keep on refilling
| the original starter cartridge with $10 toner powder, no need to
| reset or anything like that. It just works. Spectacular
| price/performance ratio.
| criddell wrote:
| It's kind of a bummer that Brother are going down the DRM'd
| cartridge route too. Maybe enshittification is inevitable for
| Brother too, they are just taking longer to get there.
| rwaksmunski wrote:
| Funny thing is, once the original toner is due for
| replacement I'm going to replace it with an original one. My
| fear with DRMed cartridge is not that I can't use aftermarket
| one, it's me buying original that might not work reliably due
| to complexity of the DRM.
| pembrook wrote:
| Brother is just as terrible as all the other printer
| manufacturers but for some reason their refusal to care about
| improving their products is seen as virtuous.
|
| I'm sitting right next to a brand new brother printer that, once
| per month, forces me to unplug it, reboot, and re-enter my Wi-Fi
| password using a nightmarishly Byzantine "up/down" input
| mechanism...into a LCD display seemingly from 2002. Would really
| love even a mediocre mobile app to help with this (somehow mine
| doesn't support it). A quick internet search shows my experience
| is not uncommon.
|
| Brand is a powerful thing I guess. 15 years ago you release a
| somewhat not-terrible product in a stale category...and decades
| later you can do no wrong. Makes sense I guess, how many people
| have had the chance to evaluate first-hand more than 2-3 printers
| in their life.
| c048 wrote:
| I had a similar issue, problem was a problematic WiFi-router. I
| got clued in when other devices were having sporadic
| disconnects once in a blue moon. Turned out that (unlike the
| brother) they also lost connection but managed to usually auto-
| reconnect on their own, hiding the issue. After replacing the
| problematic router all my issues went away.
|
| Not that it'll solve your issue with any guarantee, but if you
| haven't looked into it yet... .
| selimnairb wrote:
| There is a similar phenomenon going on with home appliances.
| Since the reliability of most all appliances has declined over
| the last decade or so (based on talking to repair people and from
| what I read from self-described repair experts on r/HVAC, so
| grain of salt) the advice on what appliance to buy is something
| like: buy the appliance with the fewest features you can get away
| with (oh and avoid the 2-3 brands that particularly have
| trouble).
|
| I think the situation with printers and appliances share a common
| cause, the financialization of firms that is part of "late-stage"
| capitalism as evidenced by the shift between C-M-C transactions
| to M-C-M, and now M-M' (see
| https://www.sparknotes.com/philosophy/daskapital/section2/).
| duckworth wrote:
| Yep, after dealing with all the frustration of "high
| efficiency" washing machines that would constantly have error
| codes mid cycle, not wash clothes well, etc. I ended up paying
| more for a Speed Queen. It uses traditional technology without
| complex electronics that ensures simplicity, longevity, and
| ease of use.
| danpalmer wrote:
| Not Innovating only works when the entire industry has reached a
| certain point. Printers obviously have, the innovation that is
| happening sucks, and the market is likely retracting as more
| things move digital only.
|
| But if you look at, say, fashion, it's clear that the market
| still needs "innovation" (by that I mean new fashions, new
| trends, etc). If you stop doing this, you don't get the next
| generation, and your customers slowly age out and your market
| shrinks. Forget about growth, de-growth is literally
| unsustainable, and businesses need to be sustainable.
|
| Identifying whether the market needs the innovation or not is
| hard. Smartphones are in a weird place right now where each
| generation feels a little less convincing, and people are
| starting to talk about whether innovation is needed. We're not
| quite seeing the rise of "Brother" like products yet, but we are
| seeing an increased focus on longevity which is likely an early
| indicator.
| kgbcia wrote:
| Same for appliances. Too much new tech to fail
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I sold a brother printer when moving country. How often can you
| say that? A printer that last long enough that it is possible to
| sell it! They are my preferred brand since 90s but they are
| venturing into the asshole design with respect to ink costs and
| tactics. I use 3rd party cartridges. Really why are cartridges
| being dumped a thing, why aren't printers taking low waste
| bottles?
| rf15 wrote:
| Our Brother printer and sewing machines serve us well. After
| years of Canon, Samsung and others everyone in my family settled
| on brother products for their reliability and because they forego
| the usual anti-consumer antics of the other manufacturers.
| anymouse123456 wrote:
| I bought my Brother printer 10 years ago and she's still doing
| great work.
|
| There is nothing even close to this brand.
|
| To experience the polar opposite, fire up an HP sometime.
| transfire wrote:
| HP used to be workhorse printers back when they acquired TIs
| tech. They started going down hill about 20 years ago. Brother
| was smart and took the mantle from them.
|
| (I only wish Xerox was as smart. I still miss my Phaser wax
| printer).
| ecmascript wrote:
| Well, just being a great maintainer of a great product could be
| argued to be innovative in today's world.
| globular-toast wrote:
| I have a Samsung laser that just prints. Have they stopped making
| them now? I'll just this one till it breaks. Hopefully by then
| there will still be simple printers available.
|
| This is like with "smart" TVs. I just want a screen. Fuck right
| off with your godawful software. The only easy devices I've found
| for this are projectors. I know it's possible to find
| "professional" market panels, but it shouldn't be that hard.
| hereforcomments wrote:
| I recently bought at a physical store of a large chain an "open
| box", unused HP LaserJet printer. I asked why it was returned,
| they said the buyers could not activate it. I was like "okay,
| lol, I'm a sw engineer, it would take 30 seconds to do that". I
| bought it and spend like 2-3 hours installing-uninstalling HP's
| crap software just to make it work. The quality of the prints are
| great and it works fine now but I'll never buy a HP ever again. I
| just want to plug it in and print. If I need additional settings,
| I'll install the related HP software but forcing it is very bad.
| Also still has not figured it out how to connect it to the WiFi
| so I use USB...
| octacat wrote:
| Enshitification is not innovation. I would love for my sony
| camera to have good wireless connectivity, instead they wanna me
| to buy their cloud service. Just because of how bad and not
| tested their usb-c connectivity is. But all the youtube
| "influencers" would suggest you go get a sony camera (using our
| affiliated links).
|
| Oh, but then I remember AirPlay for audio having all kind of
| weird issues and delays even with hardware which works. So,
| wireless would sound good but would be broken for the important
| session.
|
| Innovations in 2023 are "we stick our cloud in the product even
| if it does not make sense and we will annoy people to death with
| it". Or marketing shit like 100 megapixels sensors and slow
| cards/ports/CPUs to work with these megapixels. But sounds cool.
| Farbklex wrote:
| I want to believe that there is a "a-lot-of-millions" business
| opportunity for open source, easy to repair printers that just
| work without giving you any crap.
|
| Kinda like "The Framework" laptopts but for printers.
| vachina wrote:
| Brother didn't stop innovating, they innovated by figuring out a
| way to make their printer cheaper to manufacture and still
| reliable enough for that once a quarter use.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| At least it's not a garbage Ricoh
| Devasta wrote:
| Not printers, but my TV is starting to give up the ghost, and I
| fully expect I'll be paying extra to ensure its not connected to
| the internet.
| forinti wrote:
| I had to give up on this goal. There are simply no dumb TVs in
| my country.
|
| I even considered getting a monitor, but you can't get one as
| big as a TV.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I can recommend Sony TVs for this usage. They run very
| vanilla Android TV, won't gripe at you about not being
| connected to the internet, and accept firmware updates via
| thumb drive. The newer ones also have a "simple TV" mode that
| pares back the TV's "smarts".
|
| They're not cheap, but that's to be expected if they're not
| heavily subsidized by ads and content analytics like many
| smart TVs are these days.
| ipcress_file wrote:
| I can confirm the "won't gripe" part. Mine has been
| disconnected from Wifi for the last four years. It's been a
| great TV.
| regularjack wrote:
| Brother makes solid products that just work, in my experience.
| They are successful because of that. Their products are not just
| "fine", they are great products.
| hawski wrote:
| I have a DCP-J725DW for around 12 or more years. I used non-
| official ink cartridges for it for most of its life. Quality of
| print declined a bit, but it was mostly, because we did not print
| as much in some years. Now we print more as my daughter like to
| have something printed once in a while.
|
| It is old, but works with Android print service, although it
| takes a good while for it to connect to the printer. Brother's
| Print and Scan application works faster, although it's also not
| ideal. Printing from Linux is not very nice, but at least some
| old Cups drivers are available. I usually do not bother and print
| from Android.
|
| The biggest surprise for me was printing from macOS. It shows me
| all the options I never new this printer had, the biggest thing
| being automatic two side printing. I would like to know how Mac's
| do it.
|
| The scanning is ok on my device, although the paper feeder for
| automatic scanning doesn't work reliably which is a pity.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| Some Brother laser printers have three serious downsides:
|
| 1 - They count pages printed and will simply stop printing when
| they've determined you've printed enough even if you still have
| toner in your cartridge.
|
| 2 - They will not work with third party toner cartridges.
|
| 3 - They won't let you refill your own toner cartridge.
|
| So you are forced in to buying Brother's toner, and and forced to
| do so before you may actually want/need to.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Citation needed? Or at least a listing of model numbers with
| this behavior. I've got a 12-year-old HL-2270DW that's doing
| fine at home, and have installed an HL-L2340D, an HL-L2380DW,
| an HL-L2390DW, and an HL-L8350CDW at work. None of them suffer
| from any of the downsides described to my knowledge.
|
| We run third-party toner in all of them, and they'll keep
| printing until the print quality fades.
|
| I personally haven't tried refilling toner cartridges in a long
| time, it's not worth it when third-party toner cartridges are
| as cheap as they are and the Comprenew up the road takes the
| empty ones back for recycling.
| criddell wrote:
| > https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
|
| At work, we have an MFC-8950DW laser printer and it's not
| very good. It leaves streaks on the paper and the toner
| doesn't seem to fix properly all the time. I end up with
| printed pages that smear or the type rubs off. That printer
| replaced a much older Brother laser and it was better. We
| "upgraded" simply because drivers were not available for
| 64-bit Windows.
| whynotmaybe wrote:
| Might be an obvious question but have you changed the drum?
| criddell wrote:
| I'm not sure if we have or haven't. Mostly what we print
| is pretty ephemeral so nobody seems to be all that
| concerned about it.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _> Citation needed?_
|
| Brother HL-L8260CDW
|
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B06XDS1XW7/R2MQHUVV9JX7N.
| ..
| Astronaut3315 wrote:
| This model's toner is trivially reset with a one-time
| purchase of a $2 reset gear or a button press combo. The
| reviewer must not be aware of this.
|
| There's also a fill port right on this printer's starter
| cartridges. Brother even provided a removable and reusable
| fill plug.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| If you have an old (>2ish years) non Internet connected
| printer, you're probably fine, but they pushed a firmware
| update last year that disabled third party cartridges.
| Luckily, for now you can just pull the drm chip from an
| official cartridge and put it in the third party one.
| Astronaut3315 wrote:
| TN43x cartridges don't have the DRM chip, thankfully. They
| still sell printers that use them. Such printers cost a bit
| more than Brother's base models but to me, it was worth the
| extra.
| otcalex wrote:
| Found an HL-22070DW at Goodwill for $12 and immediately slapped
| some third party toner in there. It's been going strong for
| about 3 years and haven't experienced this at all.
| albert_e wrote:
| Mine is a DCP L-2540DW bought in 2015 for $99 from Staples /
| Office Depot.
|
| #1 is a simple setting in admin console of the printer -- at
| least for my model.
|
| It is called "replace toner" = "continue".
|
| Default setting is "replace toner" = "stop printing".
|
| I print for MONTHS at a time after the printer displays
| "replace toner" message with perfectly dark prints. Even when
| the print starts to fade out -- this setting ensures the
| printer wont refuse to print. Just keeps showing the low toner
| warning.
|
| #2
|
| I have not come across this restriction myself. Happily using
| cheap third party toners bought off Amazon for about 6 years
| now.
|
| #3
|
| Did not try but my guess is that should work too. I was just
| not motivated enough to try because cheap $10 toners on Amazon
| do the job for me.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Can you point to a source? Which printers?
|
| Because I'll chime in with everyone else -- my HL-2270DW has
| been going strong for a decade and I've only ever used third
| party replacement cartridges. And it'll give me a "toner low"
| warning but still keeps printing.
| Astronaut3315 wrote:
| I just bought a refurbished HL-L8360CDW, a current model. It
| reads a physical toner reset gear on each cartridge. Resetting
| the toner is a matter of adding a missing gear (starter
| cartridges) or turning it to the reset position (retail
| cartridges). The printer has absolutely no way to know if a
| cartridge is genuine or reused.
|
| The starter cartridges even come from the factory with a fill
| port covered by a removable plug.
|
| The above applies to Brother printers that use TN43x series
| cartridges. Cheaper models have the reset chip dance.
| tehwebguy wrote:
| I have a 10 year old Brother laser printer (prints black only). I
| bought it when I did because it was basically the same as the
| previous laser printer I had used at work, which had also lasted
| years with few or zero issues.
|
| Highly recommend a zero feature Brother laser printer. Yes, the
| replacement toner will cost nearly as much the printer but if you
| reach the end of the toner you got your money's worth.
|
| You should be looking for one that is black and short, rounded
| rectangular. Like a much larger Apple TV shape. It should have
| like 3 buttons max. Anything else and you are out of my territory
| so who knows.
| tetrep wrote:
| I was hoping this post would have at least an implication that
| they knew how Brother worked internally and that they were
| somewhat certain that the company had virtually no innovation for
| most of their history or something insightful like that. But no.
| It's just some random person who was told to buy Brother printers
| and wanted to say something that sounds cool.
| anjc wrote:
| I have to wonder about a business model where you sell one
| inexpensive device and it works so well that the user never has
| to buy one of your products again.
|
| I'm in the same boat as others here, I bought a laser Brother
| about 20 years ago - EUR100 or so - and it hasn't missed a beat
| ever since. Probably the best purchase I've made and it still
| "sparks joy" for me.
| paultopia wrote:
| If only there were companies with similar philosophies toward
| basically every other consumer product. Imagine, just imagine:
|
| - TVs not stuffed with spyware and "smart" features that stop
| working randomly!
|
| - Appliances, ditto
|
| - Cars, ditto
|
| Although now I feel like I'd better go buy like 10 Brother
| printers, because it's only a matter of time till some private
| equity firm decides the company is leaving money on the table by
| not requiring you to subscribe to the CEO's OnlyFans to get ink
| and buys it out to squeeze out some revenue from the brand before
| poisoning it.
| paultopia wrote:
| Actually, it may already be too late. I just searched amazon
| for brother printers, and it looks like they've rolled out an
| ink subscription.[1] This is clearly the harbinger of doom---
| remember when HP did theirs and immediately made their printers
| worthless?
|
| [1] https://www.brother-usa.com/supplies/ez-auto-
| reordering/refr...
| pdpi wrote:
| My Canon printer is much the same.
|
| The only feature I insisted on when I bought it was that I wanted
| it to be ink tank-based instead of cartridge-based. Other than
| that, it's completely unremarkable. People really need to assign
| more value to "completely unremarkable".
| kaon123 wrote:
| Omg why was I unaware of this? I bought an HP laserjet last year
| and am fighting SaaS software crap every time I want to attempt
| to print or scan. I am tempted to just trash my printer now.
| agnosticmantis wrote:
| Interestingly, the medium of transmission here also backs up the
| message being transmitted: Mastodon is quite barebones and maybe
| not as "feature-rich" as Twitter/X, but holy shit what a breath
| of fresh air it is to read content on Mastodon compared to
| Twitter.
|
| Merely being able to scroll and read the whole thread without
| logging in shows how hostile the overly-innovated alternatives
| are.
| heymijo wrote:
| They didn't enshittify their business when other printer makers
| did.
| wycy wrote:
| Last time this came up on HN, I thought folks were saying that
| even Brother had started to go down the dark path. I'm not seeing
| that sentiment here now, though.
|
| Personally I love the Brother printer I've had for ~13 years now.
| josephcsible wrote:
| They have gone down the dark path. See, e.g.,
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131
| 404mm wrote:
| Just curious, did your monitor flicker randomly when changing
| screen content and while connected to a MacBook?
| delfinom wrote:
| Or counterpoint, Brother is a Japanese company instead of an
| degenerate American company. That is worlds apart in terms of
| business strategies.
| donatj wrote:
| I have had a Brother laser printer for 11 years. I am
| legitimately on my second toner cartridge. I try to tell family
| and friends not to bother with inkjet printers but they don't
| listen.
|
| My dad's big fancy Cannon photo printer has caused him nothing
| but grief. He swears up and down he needs to be able to print
| large-format full color photographs, but I have never seen him do
| so. What I have seen is his black cartridge dry out between uses
| and fail when he needs to print a form.
|
| My wife is occasionally frustrated by our inability to print
| color, but I am more than happy to drive to Walgreens or my
| companies office to print a color item once every couple months.
| An inkjets ink would've dried between prints.
| gilbetron wrote:
| Our 7 year old brother laser printer finally got its first
| cartridge replacement last year :) We don't print much, but
| that's the point, we just leave it sitting there, and when we
| want to print, it prints. Never had a problem with it in 7
| years!
| vidanay wrote:
| The most use my Brother printer got was three years ago when
| my seventh grader needed to print school worksheets and then
| we scanned them to be turned in. This was during the COVID
| lockdown school year, and yet it's STILL on the OEM cartridge
| it came with
| diracs_stache wrote:
| Scored a brother MFC-7340 from someone giving it away. Think it
| was 10 yrs old when we got it a couple years ago, it does a
| wonderful job.
| ilamont wrote:
| We have 2 brothers for our small business, one as the main and
| the other as a backup (which we have also brought with us when
| traveling). We are heavy users, probably >10k pages every year,
| but we have only replaced the drum once and have successfully
| ignored the "optical photoconductor life over" message for
| nearly 2 years.
|
| Once a new cartridge failed ("not recognized" error even though
| it was purchased through Staples) and the brother support
| person walked me through some secret squirrel reset code which
| I of course saved for future use. The fact I could get someone
| from the company on the line to help me was a rare experience
| for tech companies.
|
| My only gripe with the toner cartridges is the requirement to
| enter a serial number to get a recycling mailing label. The
| serial numbers are miniscule.
| rzimmerman wrote:
| One of the best purchases I have ever made is my Brother laser
| jet. I'm still on my first toner cartridge after three years.
| It works every time and never complains or updates.
| otterpro wrote:
| I've bought a $100 Brother laser printer 10 years ago, which
| still has similar form factor today, and I still use it for
| printing anything from receipts, maps, and forms. It is one of
| the most reliable device that I own. I think I'm on my 5th toner
| (cannot remember), and the toner (ink) from 3rd party are
| plentiful and cheap ($15 or less). I think I spend more on paper
| than on ink.
| palemoonale wrote:
| "Don't fix what isn't broken" - should be a mantra especially for
| the myriad of UI redesigns especially for apps, and corporate CI.
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Does anyone know if there are Brother printers\MFPs that can scan
| directly to email? I don't want the scan to go through some local
| computer software.
|
| I have to use HP MFPs because their scan-to-email is actually
| decent and can do authenticated SMTP sign-ins but I hate dealing
| with HP and their shitty toner practices.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| Sounds like it could be an effect of a conservative Japanese
| business culture. For example Sony is one of the few companies to
| still manufacture high-end smartphones with a headphone jack.
| TeeWEE wrote:
| What does a printer do? It prints... Thats what people buy it for
| to print.. Who wants a garden hose with iphone connection?
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I hate my printer, and it is because of all of the options. So
| complex that it doesn't work. They would be better just by not
| having features. Canon, your printer is the worst thing I've ever
| used.
| jcd748 wrote:
| I remember we had an Epson colour printer that we got just after
| we got married: it was able to print photos, and this was a great
| feature, except that this would run through ink like nothing
| else, and ink, well, you know.
|
| When it eventually died I got a wired Brother B&W laser printer,
| and it's been incredible. We've put many thousands of pages
| through it, easily, changed the toner twice, and it just keeps on
| working. It is a simple, boring, wonderful piece of tech.
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Some people want a Tesla; I drive a Toyota Corolla. It gets 50+
| mpg, and it Just Works. I also have a Brother laser printer,
| which Just Prints. We need to have bleeding-edge innovators, but
| not everybody wants that in every aspect of their life.
| nijave wrote:
| I'd argue they still innovated--they just focused on improving
| the core features of their product instead of continually tacking
| on more half-baked garbage.
|
| A print that Just Works with a range of different devices when
| you plug it in is (unfortunately?) fairly innovative.
| codingdave wrote:
| Not innovating got them to the actual goal, which is to create a
| product about which people say: "It just works."
|
| Sometimes you need to change and innovate to get there, sometimes
| you need to stay where you are and keep an eye on it. But "It
| just works." is the quality that sells products for the long
| haul.
| jmyeet wrote:
| Mandatory Steve Jobs quote [1].
|
| There is a deep-seated myth that capitalism creates innovation.
| Capitalism builds enclosures, first quite literally [2] and now
| through intellectual property, rent-seeking, legislative barriers
| and so on to keep competitors out.
|
| Look at the story of Tetris, invented by a few guys in the USSR
| for fun, basically. And what did the Western capitalists do? They
| simply licensed, re-licensed, sub-licensed that creation.
|
| Printer companies maximize profit by creating enclosures.
| Limitations on ink, control of the drivers and so on. There's no
| motivation to innovate. industry is ossified.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGKsbt5wii0
|
| [2]: https://www.joewrote.com/p/the-origin-of-capitalism-the-
| encl...
| exabrial wrote:
| Tangent, but related:
|
| My dad is restoring a 1969 MG Midget. The right turn signal
| stopped working. Using nothing more than a voltmeter, I found a
| disconnected wire and a short to the frame.
|
| I replaced the entire length of wire that was failing with $3
| worth of wire, solder, and heat shrink tubing.
|
| The lesson here is repairability and simplicity.
|
| We're constantly lectured to be "environmentally aware" by
| companies that no longer ensure their products will last a
| lifetime. There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn't be used for
| the rest of your life. My Brother printer is nearing 12 years and
| is still on the same damn print cartridge. My Neato robotics
| vacuum has had countless parts replaced and is about the same
| age.
|
| If you truly want to be a good steward of the earth, stop
| demanding/consuming latest and greatest, endless product and UI
| refreshes, and instead demand 30+ years out of a product (with
| small repairs).
| einpoklum wrote:
| > stop demanding ... and instead demand ...
|
| As if large corporations base their business strategy on
| ethically/environmentally-minded consumer demands. At most they
| will propagandize or triangulate their engineering approach
| slightly - just enough for the media cycle to turn to some
| other issue. Gotta make those quarterly profits stand out!
|
| Also - if you haven't changed a printer cartridge in 12 years
| than you are printing very little (which is fine, but it's not
| a typical use-case by which to evaluate longevity).
|
| Other than that, definitely agree :-)
| fsflover wrote:
| > There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn't be used for the
| rest of your life.
|
| This is the reason I chose GNU/Linux phone Librem 5.
| simonh wrote:
| It'd better have long term support, some customers had to
| wait 4 years from ordering to get one.
| I_Am_Nous wrote:
| A tangent to add to your tangent
|
| >There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn't be used for the rest
| of your life.
|
| At some point we must reach peak tech. In the Elite: Dangerous
| universe, there are quite a few ships you can use, but the
| majority of them are designs that are hundreds of years old.
| They are modular spaceships, of course, so they have received
| upgraded technology as time has gone on, but there are some
| quirky little ships flying around.
|
| Compared to phones though, we'd need to get carriers to
| guarantee their old networks stay functional so old cellular
| radios will still function. Maybe when tech advances enough we
| CAN have a modular phone it will be less of a concern.
| avalys wrote:
| Your 1969 MG Midget is enormously polluting and a death trap in
| a crash. The turn signal is small and dim and barely visible to
| other motorists in bright sunlight. The ride sucks and the
| reason it's easy to repair is there's almost no interior
| structure or noise or thermal insulation to remove.
|
| Over a 200,000 mile design lifetime, a modern car is way more
| reliable and way less work to repair than your MG Midget (by
| virtue of not breaking as often in the first place). Yes,
| today's cars aren't designed to be collector items that will
| sit and rot in a barn not being driven and get easily restored
| by amateurs in 50 years, but why should they be?
| AirMax98 wrote:
| Is it a death trap? Totally. But you could put a cat on it
| and dramatically reduce emissions. Consider also that
| initially producing a car is a major contributor to the
| environmental impact of a car.
| gpm wrote:
| > Consider also that initially producing a car is a major
| contributor to the environmental impact of a car.
|
| Not if you drive it very much/for very long. See this graph
| [1] (from this article [2]) for instance. Note that they're
| evenly diving 173,151 miles across the 13 "years" (and
| don't ask me why they decided to make the x-axis "years").
|
| And that's with a modern fuel efficient car, not some
| ancient one.
|
| [1] https://graphics.reuters.com/ELECTRIC-
| VEHICLES/EMISSIONS/rlg...
|
| [2] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-
| transportation/when-d...
| HWR_14 wrote:
| The reason it's easy to repair seems to be that the wire is
| accessible. That turns out to have nothing to do with LED vs.
| incandescent signals or the lack of a catalytic converter. It
| probably has nothing to do with crumple zones either. It may
| have something to do with the lack of cabin insulation, but I
| honestly doubt it.
|
| But the point being made about repairability (and simplicity)
| seems good.
| exabrial wrote:
| You missed the entire point of what I wrote.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > a modern car is way more reliable and way less work to
| repair than your MG Midget
|
| Modern cars are often more work to repair. They're not
| particularly modular, and to the extent that they are, they
| often bury one module under several layers of others. It
| requires you to disconnect and move working parts and
| assemblies to uncover the broken one.
|
| Modern cars also use replaceable assemblies to speed up
| repairs, but it also means that even for small problems like
| a damaged wire in a harness, you often have to rip out the
| entire system it is "inside" of and replace it completely.
| The manufacturer has tons of ways of requiring you to "over
| replace" parts like this on a modern vehicle.
|
| > but why should they be?
|
| That's not an excuse to make them as disposable as they've
| become. You can't use "the climate" to blindly turn this into
| a black and white issue.
| User23 wrote:
| Using climate change as justification for enshittification is
| a good way to feed denialist narratives.
| m463 wrote:
| I think a better example might be a similar era john deere
| tractor. It was designed to replace expensive human labor and
| was designed to be simple and to be fixed.
|
| I also wonder about the original humvee, which I think was
| designed to be "user" serviced in the field.
| kazinator wrote:
| Most modern cars will be in the landfill while that 1969 MG
| is still running.
|
| The disposability has to be factored into the environmental
| impact.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I used to work as an electronics technician.
|
| To do some wiring that'll be bulletproof and last:
|
| 1. get wiring rated for under-the-hood heat (the wiring sold at
| auto parts stores is no good for that)
|
| 2. get crimp-on connectors
|
| 3. cut the plastic off the crimp-ons
|
| 4. put heat shrink tubing on the wire, well away from the end
|
| 5. crimp the connector on
|
| 6. solder the crimp joint using a thermostat controlled
| soldering iron
|
| 7. move the heat shrink tubing over the joint, and heat it with
| a bic cigarette lighter to shrink it on
|
| 8. voila!
|
| P.S. Crimped connections don't last. After about a year,
| they'll work loose a bit from vibration, and corrosion will
| creep in, and you'll get a loose connection that is very
| frustrating to find. Soldering it prevents that from happening.
| AirMax98 wrote:
| I'm in automotive tech school right now and the advice in the
| context of the automotive sector (not electronics) is to
| always crimp where you can, and only solder if you absolutely
| must.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Crimping is quick and easy. My recommendation is crimp
| _and_ solder, not just solder. Solder by itself isn 't
| mechanically strong enough.
| doublespanner wrote:
| Soldering a crimp is not good practice, a correctly done
| crimp will not come loose (OEM connections are mostly
| crimped), and you risk making a brittle section if the solder
| wicks past the crimp.
| WalterBright wrote:
| A correctly done crimp uses enough force to form a cold
| weld. Unfortunately, without a calibrated machine to do it,
| it is pretty hard to determine if enough crimping force has
| been applied. Without the cold weld, corrosion _will_
| compromise the joint after a year or so. The solder will
| also prevent moisture from getting into the joint.
|
| You're right about not letting the solder wick up past the
| connector. But that's not an issue if the wire is properly
| supported with a clamp.
|
| My experience with crimps is electrical gremlins, with
| soldered crimps, no trouble at all.
|
| OEM crimps also come with a molded housing designed to keep
| out moisture (and corrosion) and provide mechanical support
| for the joint. The crimp-on connectors at the auto parts
| store are vastly inferior.
| topspin wrote:
| > without a calibrated machine
|
| That's called a crimping tool. They grow on trees.
| They're designed to achieve the correct amount of force
| to make a gas tight, permanent connection without
| destroying the contacts. All you need to do is select the
| correct connectors for the wire size you're dealing with
| and squeeze it.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Good luck with that. There are all kinds of crimping
| tools.
|
| I watched a professional cable installer once crimp the
| coax F connectors on. I got the manufacturer and model
| number of it. It's from an outfit that only sold to
| professionals, and cost about $200. Since I was going to
| pull all the coax myself in my house, it was worth the
| money and I haven't had trouble with the results. The
| consumer grade crimping tools from the hardware store are
| terrible.
|
| It's the same story with wirewrap tools.
| winrid wrote:
| Soldered connections are a no go in automotive. Crimped is
| way tougher for vibrations. Corrosion shouldn't be getting in
| with heat shrink or a good connector.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I wrote crimp _and_ solder. Not solder.
|
| Take a look at these:
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Qibaok-Connectors-Insulated-
| Electrica...
|
| Crimp a wire in it. Look at it from the connector side.
| You'll see the bare conductor inside the connector. That's
| where the moisture gets in. Heat shrink tubing won't shrink
| enough to cover that. Wicking solder into it will seal it
| against moisture and corrosion.
| cactacea wrote:
| Yup, and those are garbage - for the reasons you've
| identified. Marine grade or bust. Look I'm no fan of
| crimps but you're giving terrible advice here.
| SlickNixon wrote:
| Soldering crimp connectors (that are not otherwise designed
| for it) will reduce the flexibility of the wire and introduce
| stress concentrations. Those stress concentrations will
| reduce the fatigue life of the harness.
| cactacea wrote:
| I'm curious to know more about how much vibration your solder
| joints see. I agree that most crimped connections tend to be
| sub-par but in my experience that is due to either bad tools,
| bad materials or both. Personally I use Wagos if
| waterproofing and/or space isn't a concern, marine grade
| crimp connections (and the proper tools) if it is.
| Casteil wrote:
| > My dad is restoring a 1969 MG Midget. The right turn signal
| stopped working. Using nothing more than a voltmeter, I found a
| disconnected wire and a short to the frame. I replaced the
| entire length of wire that was failing with $3 worth of wire,
| solder, and heat shrink tubing.
|
| I want to see EVs/plug-in hybrids with similar levels of
| simplicity wherever possible. Virtually all vehicles in the US
| nowadays are completely overloaded with unnecessary
| sensors/electronics that are ripe for failure.
| kazinator wrote:
| > _$3 worth of wire, solder, and heat shrink tubing_
|
| I don't understand how with those three things, you are able to
| renew the blinker service subscription.
| fooker wrote:
| >There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn't be used for the rest
| of your life.
|
| A phone, yes. A 'modern' phone conforming to our 'modern'
| expectations, no.
|
| It would have to be significantly larger, less performant, and
| have a worse screen for it to last even ten years.
|
| To make it repairable you'd have to make sure individual chips
| and capacitors are swappable, which costs ~2x power draw
| compared to a SOC.
| iteratethis wrote:
| My father gifted me 35 year old speakers he had stored in his
| attic.
|
| I installed them on an old Marantz amp, which is also connected
| to my (new) TV. As he visited me, he couldn't believe the
| incredible sound coming from his own speakers. My friends are
| shocked by it too, thinking I'm some audio buff that invested
| 20K.
|
| My dad regretted the gift, went to buy the same amp yet with
| new speakers. Various sets of it, and failed to come close to
| the ancient set.
|
| I'm not sure what exactly was innovated in 35 years of audio,
| but my guess would be costs, not quality.
| Turskarama wrote:
| Something that is frequently underestimated when it comes to
| the sound of speakers is... the rest of the room. Room
| acoustics make a huge difference, and if your room isn't set
| up right then high quality equipment is just a waste of
| money.
| amelius wrote:
| Product idea: a pi-hole that blocks printers from being updated
| remotely and phoning home when you've used a different brand of
| ink etc.
| soap- wrote:
| HP printers completely refuse to print when they can't phone
| home for a month or so. Conveniently, that's right after the
| return window expires.
| amelius wrote:
| IANAL, but that's probably illegal.
| barryrandall wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the VCs reading this are thinking "they're
| leaving so much money on the table, we should buy them."
| ipcress_file wrote:
| As the owner of a Brother manual typewriter, I can confirm that
| this was their business model from the beginning. They made the
| same cheap, tolerable typewriter with different bodies for almost
| 30 years.
|
| The only innovation they ever made was the addition of a repeat
| spacer, which was a nice touch.
| einpoklum wrote:
| But have all other manufacturers been "innovating up the wazoo"?
| OKI? Kyocera? Lexmark? Olivetti? Xerox? I look at their offerings
| - say, for a plain old A4 B&W laser printer, and see more or less
| the same thing. Maybe the LCD panel can get a little fancy on
| some models...
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| I'm going come back and reread these Brother posts whenever I'm
| tech sad.
|
| It's like having 5 min of Tech Christmas[1] away from our still-
| detonating, Florida-flavored[2] tech dystopia.
| [1] Halloween really. It's not endlessly co-opted. No joy sapping
| baggage. No toxic expectations. Halloween is the Brother of
| holidays. [2] In August. In an election year.
| metafunctor wrote:
| Is it innovation if a herd of business people lead a product for
| a couple of decades and drive it into the ground because they are
| chasing their bonuses? Or just bad ownership?
| projektfu wrote:
| I agree with the article and really appreciate that Brothers
| aren't generally enshittified. However, that doesn't mean they
| can't be shit. I switched away from them a while back but every
| printer is potentially shit.
|
| Brother shit: a multifunction printer they had fed the paper
| differently and usually poorly from the manual feed slot. If you
| opened the paper tray, it loudly alarmed for three full seconds,
| classically conditioning me to avoid using it.
|
| A brother laser printer said it was out of toner. Replaced the
| toner and it said it needed a new drum. Replaced the drum and it
| turned out to just be broken. Cost of parts equal to a new
| printer, plus time wasted.
|
| But, you know, every other printer is garbage, too. Inkjets dry
| out (HP, Epson). Electrical faults cause the printer to hang or
| reset (Lexmark). Poorly written drivers cause the printer to
| waste a ream of paper printing junk on each page, probably trying
| to print PCL as ASCII (Samsung). An HP I had literally stressed
| out its own ribbon cable to the print head until it failed-a
| design flaw.
|
| But few things are as garbage as Instant Ink, pop-up ads, and
| needing special online apps to access the basic functions like
| scanning.
| btbuildem wrote:
| I would passionately argue that "innovating" is not the right
| word. Encumber, complicate, enshittify - sure, most products with
| "tech" in them got there through one of those misguided drivers.
|
| Innovation? That rarely ever happens. It might be on corporate
| values lists, but no execs actually value innovation. You don't
| increase profits quarter over quarter by innovating. It's too
| risky and too expensive. It's safer to beat the familiar drum,
| and from time to time buy a startup that actually makes something
| good.
| donatj wrote:
| In the opposite direction, my friend, an engineer who helps
| design engines for a living talks about how the government
| pressing them to be more and more efficient is the only reason he
| and his coworkers even have jobs. He says engine manufacturers
| would be more than happy to just continually pump out 30 year old
| designs otherwise.
| afjeafaj848 wrote:
| Interestingly that actually does happen in the motorcycle world
|
| For example Suzuki still sells the DRZ400/DR650 bikes new in
| the US and both haven't been updated in like 20 years other
| than color changes
|
| The rumor is they are grandfathered in so they can't do any
| changes otherwise they'd have to pass modern emissions rules
| bstar77 wrote:
| As it turns out, printer hardware/software is something I
| specifically don't want any innovation. My 10 year old color and
| B&W Brother (wifi) laser printers are part of a very short list
| of "just works" tech I use regularly that require no additional
| software or firmware updates.
| bluGill wrote:
| Iteration is useful, but not really innovation.
| blopp99 wrote:
| My house brother printer "broke" a few months ago, because I
| started to need it again because of paperwork I need to do for my
| newly founded company I talk to my mom about fixing it. She was
| more inclined into buying a new one, HP. I oppose to it, that
| printer has been working for a few years without major issues, it
| has its quirks but works great. The one we had before was also a
| Brother.
|
| What broke in this one was the Drum, so I dived into printer
| tutorials and information to see that printer Drums are rated for
| an x amount of prints, the repair shop we took it to said it was
| because of that but in a negative way when its pretty normal in
| all sorts of things to break after the rated amount.
|
| In the end, the repair shop owner looked for an used drum locally
| so we can get it cheaper, She got it and sold it to us for $50
| bucks.
|
| I waited to see if I saw any black friday deal to buy it and save
| it but didnt happen.
|
| Model: brother hl-2240
| karmelapple wrote:
| Only bummer: the MFC-9320CW I have had for over a decade now is
| no longer officially supported by Brother on macOS.
|
| However, VueScan [1] - something I hadn't used since my Epson
| scanner in the mid 1990s - saved the day! They support scanning
| for it, and after a quick purchase I was able to scan from it
| again.
|
| This sounds like shilling for the company, but just posting here
| if anyone has a similar problem to me. I wanted to scan something
| but macOS 14 (and maybe 13 or 12?) wouldn't work with my Brother
| multi-function scanner... although the printing still works fine.
|
| Otherwise I'm still very happy with this scanner - one software
| purchase and one set of toner cartridges in over a decade is
| pretty good total cost of ownership :)
|
| 1. https://www.hamrick.com
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Unfortunately, Brother seems to be slowly converging on standard
| shitty printer business behavior. Last year they pushed a
| firmware update that disabled third party toner cartridges
| (relatively easy to circumvent for now, but still).
|
| For now, they are probably still the least bad printer option
| (talk about a low bar), but I'm my opinion they really don't
| deserve the effusive praise they receive.
| passive wrote:
| This tracks.
|
| 15 years ago, I bought the cheapest laser I could find, which was
| a Brother. Put two cartridges in it over the years, and last year
| it died. Some devices couldn't print to it due to driver issues,
| but it was easy enough to send to another device to print.
| Otherwise literally no complaints.
|
| I did some comparison shopping, and while Brother was no longer
| the cheapest, it was still pretty cheap. I'm not sure most of my
| family even remembers it's a different one, other than it
| printing more easily from every device.
|
| I replaced one grey box with another, but I mostly get to ignore
| it, and that's wonderful.
| GlenTheMachine wrote:
| I had the most amazing printer when I was in college. It was a
| NeXT laser printer that I got for a steal when NeXT dropped out
| of the hardware market; the university library had one as a sales
| model, and I was the NeXT sales rep, so they let me have it for
| next to half price.
|
| It was amazing because, when you printed something, it would
| print. 8 pages a minute, guaranteed. When it was out of paper or
| toner a lovely woman's voice with a British accent would tell you
| to add paper or change the toner cartridge, and then it would
| continue to print.
|
| In hindsight, it would have been more than worth it to keep my
| NeXTstation working just to act as a print server for the
| printer.
|
| I now have a Brother laser printer. It prints when it feels like
| printing. Sometimes it doesn't bother to wake from sleep, and
| there's no way to force it out of sleep, so you have to unplug it
| and plug it in again and wait for it to boot. Depending on the
| complexity of the page it can take anywhere from ten seconds to
| 10+ minutes per page. When it's out of paper or toner, there is
| no audible signal. You have to walk over and look at the little
| LCD display.
|
| To be fair, it's loads better than the HP inkjet printer we used
| to have. We held a family activity where we beat that one to
| death in the front yard with a sledgehammer.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| OP is underselling Brother. My Brother printer takes bulk ink
| from bottles and doesn't require stupid expensive cartridges. My
| Brother printer can be left off, turned on for a print job,
| connects to WiFi with no issues, and prints from every single
| device in the house from a ten year old Raspberry Pi to a brand
| new iPad.
|
| My Brother printer doesn't treat me like I'm some kind of
| asshole. Just try an HP printer and see how it abuses you.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| I'm old, what's a "mutual ask"?
| nojvek wrote:
| Got a brother HL-L23800W. Replace the toner every few years. Its
| a printer that prints. Wifi printing is such a gem.
| retrocryptid wrote:
| Also, this seems to imply innovation equals new features. In my
| day, we had an "innovation process" where we found "lead
| customers" with specific requirements they would pay for. If we
| then found a lot of people would pay for the same feature, it
| became a "capital f" Feature, managed by a product manager and
| tracked through the dev process. Mostly we found a bunch of
| different customers with similar, but different requirements. We
| then worked out an API or hardware interface third parties could
| use to meet customer's specific requirements at a price point the
| customer would accept.
|
| But... now we just buy whatever HP or Apple ships and hire an
| intern to manually do the thing we were trying to automate.
| yegle wrote:
| I've done my research and found (circa 2018?) that Brother
| scanner is the only one in the market that allows me to scan and
| save to a Google Drive, w/o a computer.
|
| This makes it extremely easy to archive receipts.
| Mister_Snuggles wrote:
| I feel like I bought the last good HP LaserJet that was ever
| made.
|
| Many years ago, I spotted an HP Color LaserJet Pro m254dw online
| at Costco and bought it. It's been a fantastic printer. The toner
| never dries out, "empty cartridges" don't prevent it from
| printing. It is modern enough that I can use AirPrint to print to
| it, but old-school enough that it has an ethernet port. The
| supplies status page basically says "Just because it's at 0%
| doesn't mean you can't print, but maybe buy a new toner cartridge
| and replace it when the output gets bad." It didn't require any
| special drivers, there's no need to link an HP account, and it
| has a usable web-based management interface.
|
| So far I have the following complaints about the printer:
|
| * After some large amount of uptime (3mo? 6mo? I'm not sure) it
| won't respond to print requests. Rebooting it fixes the issue.
|
| * Toner cartridges are expensive. I priced out something like
| $450CAD for a set of the three colour cartridges. I'm still on
| the starter cartridges and, even though they're "empty", the
| output quality is fine.
|
| * The word "Color" in the product name is not properly localized
| to the Canadian market.
|
| Obviously I'm grasping at straws as far as complaints go!
|
| Honestly, this thing feels like I found a unicorn. I've been
| looking for a similar printer for my parents, but I haven't found
| anything from HP that ticks all of the boxes. The next one for
| them will likely be a Brother.
| i386 wrote:
| Don't buy new carts. Have them refilled. The carts themselves
| are very expensive. The kit below is around $75 CAD to do it at
| home.
|
| https://www.amazon.com.au/DINGLONG-Cartridge-Laserjet-M281fd...
| metadat wrote:
| I've done this... It works, but is messy.
| i386 wrote:
| Yep. As I said to the OP, you can also send them away to be
| refilled. For office environments, you have two sets of
| carts that can be swapped and filled.
| Mister_Snuggles wrote:
| I'm torn about refills to be honest.
|
| One of my first tasks at my first job, like 25 years ago now,
| was to scrape crud off of a LaserJet 4 fuser. My boss
| explained that they tried using remanufactured toner
| cartridges to save money, but they found that these would
| deposit crud on the fusers. Thanks to tight budgets, we ended
| up scraping the crud off of the fusers using a screwdriver
| and only replacing the fusers if they were too far gone. They
| had switched back to HP cartridges before I started there,
| but the results of the remanufactured cartridges were still
| around for a few years.
|
| We also used a product called Rubber Renue to rejuvenate the
| pickup rollers/pads as a bottle of that stuff (which lasted a
| LONG time!) was significantly less expensive than the
| maintenance kit that contained the new rollers.
|
| The savings for that refill kit are significant, but I also
| don't want to potentially ruin my unicorn printer.
| i386 wrote:
| You can also send them away to be refilled! Have done this
| for high use lasers for years.
| https://inkjet411.com/?page_id=4779
| rekabis wrote:
| Vintage HP LaserJets, FTW!!
|
| I have a 4050DTN for regular B&W and a 5000TN for anything wide
| format. These two are absolutely bulletproof, I can get
| cartridges for my 4050 that can do 20,000 sheets at 5%
| coverage; a single cartridge got me through two degrees with
| zero problems. Currently on my third cartridge in almost a
| quarter century.
|
| Will look into your M254DW as a colour option, per your
| experience with it.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Buying a Brother laser printer years and years ago was the best
| thing I ever did to meet my printing needs. But I have to say,
| their WiFi support is quite terrible. Mine is connected by
| ethernet, but I've recommended Brother printers to several family
| members over the years who've used WiFi, and it causes me regular
| support headaches. Printer forgets the password, forgets
| everything, or just forgets how to connect even though it has the
| right information. Rinse and repeat every few months. Got so bad
| with my parents that I just bought them a pair of power-over-
| ethernet adapters so the printer didn't have to use WiFi any
| more.
| iaseiadit wrote:
| I've been buying Brother printers for the past 10-15 years, and
| recommending them whenever someone I know needs a printer.
|
| They're simple, reliable, and relatively affordable, so they've
| given me no reason to seek out alternatives.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| One of the worst offenses I've ever seen as an example of this is
| this trend with newer refrigerators (which I'm sure will brick
| after 2-3 years when the manufacturer stops supporting the
| software) where they have a camera inside that projects to a
| screen on the door. Cool, you can see what food is inside the
| refrigerator!
|
| Do you know how else you can do that? _by opening the door._ We
| need to stop "innovating" features that absolutely no one needs,
| because clearly the result isn't a better product, just a
| messier, more complex one that is frequently over-engineered and
| under-supported.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I see now after having made this comment there's a sub-thread
| under this parent that discusses how useful this refrigerator
| feature can be. I guess I was just born 40 years too late.
| Seems impossibly silly to me.
| Covzire wrote:
| Now if it had cameras in the back on each shelf so you can
| see what someone left back there obscured by other things,
| that might make that display worth it...
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| Can I also put in a request for a dedicated weight
| sensor/camera unit that sends a notification to my phone
| whenever somebody puts an empty milk carton back in the
| fridge?
| COGlory wrote:
| This exists. Look up "Bottomless Coffee" - they have a
| beta for non-coffee products.
| gosub100 wrote:
| The insidious thing about it is that they won't just "let you
| see what's in the fridge", you'll have to sign up to "see-
| your-fridge-as-a-service" with their shitty app (that sells
| your location, buying habits, etc) and a $7/mo paywall. Also,
| since we're talking about Samsung, _never_ buy samsung
| appliances. they are meant to break down.
| bluquark wrote:
| I unfortunately can't find it right now, but I remember
| seeing a semi-famous quote from the 1950s/60s? calling out
| variable-speed windshield wipers as an absurd consumerist
| luxury emblematic of what's wrong with America.
|
| The refrigerator camera sounds like the same kind of thing.
| Modestly useful feature that may well become standard-issue
| someday because the underlying components can be made very
| cheaply at scale.
| lmm wrote:
| "I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions
| to technologies: 1. Anything that is in the world when you're
| born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the
| way the world works. 2. Anything that's invented between when
| you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and
| revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3.
| Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the
| natural order of things."
|
| Your parents' generation probably think a number of things
| that you use every day are "impossibly silly".
| JohnMakin wrote:
| ok but I'm not older than 35
| deaddodo wrote:
| While I definitely won't have insterest in these fridges, some
| of them (I'm thinking the Samsung) scan your fridges contents
| and let you know what's about to run out (milk, eggs, etc) for
| the next time you do a run.
|
| Still not worth 1000usd to me, but more practical than "just
| seeing what's inside".
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Is it local only? It would be pretty handy if you could check
| while you were at the grocery store, I don't always plan my
| shopping list in advance so it'd be helpful to check things
| like "How much butter do I have" or "how full is the milk".
|
| I thought there would also be electricity usage benefits but
| after looking at people online who have crunched the #s that
| might be negligible.
| akira2501 wrote:
| If you want your refrigerator and freezer to save energy then
| make sure there is as little empty space in them as is
| possible. It makes the entire system more efficient, stable,
| and reduces the impact of opening the door.
| demosthanos wrote:
| My first thought was similar, but in the opposite direction:
| the data collected by a non-local camera in a refrigerator
| (coupled with WiFi network details for location info) is
| something that Walmart and friends would pay a _lot_ of money
| for.
| corethree wrote:
| Your comment reminded me of this:
|
| http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=segway_more_...
|
| I'm just referring to the picture on that site of the segway.
| drewg123 wrote:
| The worst refrigerator innovation is including an RFID tag in
| water filters, and refusing to make ice or dispense water
| unless the filter is replaced within a certain timeframe.
| Google for GE RPWFE
|
| The hack is to cut the RFID tag off a blank that bypasses the
| filter and tape it to a cheaper 3rd party filter.
|
| The amusing thing is that its actually cheaper to replace the
| RFID sensor board in the fridge & use a generic filter than to
| use an official GE filter (re-using the cutout RFID tag from a
| genuine GE filter). The RFID sensor in mine died, and prevented
| it from dispensing water/ice. And no, I didn't choose this
| fridge. It came with the house when I bought it.
| gosub100 wrote:
| A great crowdfunded business would be to sell aftermarket
| kits for all the enshittified appliances. This somewhat
| exists already (my samsung fridge had _frost buildup_ on the
| sensor, causing the fridge cycle to never come on!), so the
| business would be to cover 95% of all appliances in the last
| 15 years. The best innovation would be to develop a lego-
| style board repair kit that can be tailored to any specific
| model. So the same board can be used (with nominal
| reconfiguration) to repair /replace a Kenmore icemaker vs a
| GE. A deeper option would be to sell "retrofit kits" that
| allow you to gut everything except the
| motors/compressors/refrig circuitry. Or for a dishwasher,
| toss _all_ the circuits and just use the frame.
| diracs_stache wrote:
| Yes! I have a exercise bike in my garage that is
| mechanically sound but with a terrible monitor, would love
| to have it come up to the level of Concept2 machines.
| supportengineer wrote:
| I have one of these refrigerators. I have to say the water
| quality is outstanding. I don't have to drive to the water
| store anymore.
| ncann wrote:
| Silicon Valley has a scene about this
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcXu4_K1tMQ
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| that's mostly really dumb, but I can see the reasoning. opening
| a fridge takes energy since it temporarily lets warm air in.
| theoretically, a fridge with a camera might save energy, but in
| practice, the difference is probably pretty miniscule
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| More important would be food life. When you open the door it
| dumps all the cold air and your food warms a bit.
| post_break wrote:
| Can I open the fridge while I'm at work to see if I need to get
| more milk on the way home? I believe it can also send reminders
| using AI to see if something is getting low. I thought it was
| dumb the first time I saw it, but there are genuine use cases
| that tempted me to put a wyze cam into my dumb fridge so I can
| get the same sort of features.
|
| The worst example might be windows in the doors, so you can
| look into them. Except you put stuff on the door shelf and
| block the view or you can't really see inside all too well.
| Plus now you have introduce thermal issues.
| SilkRoadie wrote:
| On these smart fridges, I struggle to see how these are
| anything but gimmicks undermining the device's lifespan. Most
| cooking requires items from many sources. You can check your
| milk but what about the flour in the cupboard? AI reminders.
| Is that a subscription service or are advertisers being given
| your data?
|
| How long are these manufacturers promising to support the
| hardware? If the fridge is internet-connected and support
| ends, at what point is that a security risk? This generally
| applies to most purchases these days...
|
| I was looking in my garage and I found a cassette player my
| grandad gave me that still works. When I look around shops
| and at many things I own I see planned obsolescence
| everywhere. Personally, I find it really demoralizing.
| iteratethis wrote:
| Nobody cares what people need, they care what sells.
|
| Don't have the link, but I once read a study analyzing the
| Asian market regarding electronics. The focus was on washing
| machines, fridges, etc. They discovered that more features,
| even if useless, improves sales.
|
| So you'll have a washing machine with 50 buttons, 20 lights, 2
| LED screens. People will buy that over any simpler one.
|
| As long as we consumers behave like this, the other companies
| go out of business.
| pkaye wrote:
| I've had lots of problem with Brother MFC scanner/laser printer
| for a while. Seems to keep getting black dots and lines after
| some time. I did a lot of cleaning and replacing the toner
| cartridge and over a short time it keeps coming back. I never had
| this happen on past laser printers from Samsung and HP. Not sure
| what to do now.
| netfortius wrote:
| This is not even funny. This article came right when I ended up
| with a US made Brother multi-function inkjet printer in Europe,
| and can apparently only use if buying European Brother cartridges
| (different than the US ones), swapping the heads, and resetting
| the chips with a chip reset tool bought and shipped from US, in
| the hope that the assembly would work.
| mikhael28 wrote:
| Rant about Brother laser printer drivers: they still haven't
| added software emulation support for Apple Silicon.
|
| Khhhhhhaaaaaannnnnnnnnn.
| lugu wrote:
| My favorite feature of Brother laser printers, is their hidden
| menu to reset the print count of the tonner.
| pseudosavant wrote:
| I've had a couple of inexpensive (<$150) Brother laser printers
| and they've been awesome. They just reliably print from any
| device you own. My current one is up to 92k pages printed and all
| I've done is replace the toner and drums when they are done. Most
| of the 92k pages were two-side printed even, so the duplexer has
| held up well.
|
| I can just do "Add printer" without having to download any
| proprietary printer software on Windows. the iOS app makes
| printing from there a piece of cake. Brother FTW!
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/brother-introduces-...
| stevage wrote:
| Has anyone built a list tracking when each manufacturer reached
| its peak before starting the decline of enshittification?
| ryankshaw wrote:
| I'm still using an HP LaserJet 5m that I got used from the local
| university's surplus sales department for $6 twenty years ago. It
| was made in 1995, so was 10 years old then and almost 30 years
| old now. I've had to replace the toner once. Works like a champ!
|
| nothing else to add, other than "they don't make 'em like they
| used to"
| EternalUsenet wrote:
| That's incredible. Does your printer offer SCSI?
| ryankshaw wrote:
| I don't know, if that's one of these ports than it does
| https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pOcfLm3yjtwB-
| uIJ_v8Un6afZmX...
|
| oh and here's a bonus pic showing the $6 price tag from when
| I bought it 20 years ago https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oAF
| emqYAfiHp2lWLqjwYCTI4WW0...
| benrapscallion wrote:
| Can someone please recommend a specific Brother color laser
| model, if I were to purchase it brand new today?
| starttoaster wrote:
| In the case of simple appliances like the printer, there is just
| no actual need to innovate. It's like saying the hammer is an
| imperfect tool for hitting nails. There is nothing about the
| hammer that requires innovation because its intended purpose is
| extremely well defined and exceedingly simple. The same is true
| for printers, at least for generic home use. Your kid needs to
| print out their research paper before they turn it into their
| teacher tomorrow, there is no point between hitting the Print
| icon in MS Word and the paper exiting the machine with content on
| it that needs streamlining anymore.
|
| However, if you're thinking I missed the point, that it's
| sometimes better to just... not innovate, you're mistaken. I
| agree with it, but there are absolutely areas where the intended
| purpose is not well defined or simplistic. Innovation is needed,
| it just takes experience to know where and when to innovate.
| kazinator wrote:
| Brother printers are not good at all, in terms of image quality
| and such.
|
| Brother products are roundly recommended because they don't put
| asshole chips in the cartridges. Brother printers do have fake
| counters that indicate out of toner/ink, but those can be reset
| easily and they are not tied to cartridge chips.
|
| In spite of this, the devices are cheap, comparable to their
| competitors whose low prices are subsidized by the ink racket.
| RecycledEle wrote:
| There is a market for simple, reliable, inexpensive, maintainable
| equipment.
|
| I do not want my car to run its own OS or to get over-the-air
| updates. Any update for my car should be installed with a socket
| set.
|
| The fact that we still have not standardized on a (very) few
| kinds if CMYK toners for laser printers and CMYK print heads for
| inkjets is an indictment of the people at the top of every
| printer company.
|
| Ryobi promised to use one battery on their 18V cordless power
| tools many years ago. They stayed with it through the switch from
| NiCd to LiIon. I still buy ONLY Ryobi One+ cordless power tools.
|
| Will someone please standardize on one or two 9" wide toners (for
| 8.5x11 and A4 paper,) and one or two 12" wide toners (for 11x17
| and A3 paper?)
|
| Make the toners standard and every business that hates stocking
| dozens of models of toners will flock to your company.
|
| They do not have to the world's bet toners. They just have to
| work. I suggest they use a common kind of freely-copied toners
| from a laser printer whose patents have all expired.
|
| The printers do not have to be tiny. Leave an extra few inches of
| height to allow for extra capacity toners that only business
| customers will buy.
| davidthewatson wrote:
| I have a Brother business-class (whatever that means) color laser
| printer sitting in my wife's home office. It's so perfect, it's
| beyond even the legendary HP Laserjet 4 it replaced when the old
| reliable fell over six feet from a shelf and went "ouch".
|
| Brother deserves credit for its practice of stealth postmodern
| retrocomputing, for lack of a better phrase, if you will.
|
| Cheap components are durable and scale, whether hardware,
| software, or SoC blurring the lines between the two.
|
| Sadly, what this demonstrates is just how much the cloud dreams
| of Brother's competitors have diminishing returns because they
| are so tied up with authoritarian control regimes that have
| nothing to do with users' experience with their respective
| devices. Quite the converse.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-11-27 23:01 UTC)