Brother have gotten to where they are now by not innovating

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.

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

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.

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.

The risk of posting on HN is having your rhetorical flourish taken literally, deconstructed, and criticized in excruciating detail: QED.

This risk multiplies when you have the audacity to make a joke on HN.

Unfortunately this guy broke the first and most important rule of telling a joke -> it has to be funny.

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.

FWIW, I call this "the virus mentality". Growth at all costs, even if it means the death of the host.

Well they do call it viral growth on ironically, I think the ambivalent moral motivation behind it would be a little better surfaced by calling it the cancer cell mindset

"Growth mindset" has far more and different meaning to "growth strategies of companies"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

An interesting read on grit that was popular on LessWrong, despite not being posted to their platform - https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CyHvCwWh_BwukwNE-y61oBCj...

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

So after losing 90 lbs you lost 300 more and found 5 other romantic pattners and 3 more jobs?

Maintained my weight and found an even better job :)

Touché!

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.

That's not very innovative of you. ;-)

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.

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.

Seeing the date, I would not be surprised if that’s where I originally got it from, in all honesty.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

Aka the coffin corner.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

May the slack be with you !

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.

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.

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.

"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

Most beings kinda do during pregnancy and childhood

Can you expand on that?

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

This is in fact a description of the economy of some western nations, like the USA.

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.

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.

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.

Your description reminded me of this Krazam sketch[0].

[0] https://youtu.be/_o7qjN3KF8U?si=OyKs8ULYBNLOmmcI

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

Big O = Patrick Bateman

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.

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

Stock buy-backs exist, and are controversial for various reasons.

My point is that stock buybacks and dividends are good for the economy.

The point is that they are good for management, share prices and share holders. The economy is made of more than just those groups.

They are also good for everybody else, because they incentivise investment that grows the economy, which means rising real wages.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This...exactly

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stock buybacks and dividends are the same thing economically, I mean both when I say “stock buybacks”. The difference is only in taxation.

I personally prefer dividends conceptually but the tax treatment leads to buy backs which are less good.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

people will start to buy share fractions, with all the shit and overhead that'll bring.

Which is to say, very little overhead

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).

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.

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

That's a good point. However why not just hand out dividends? From what I understand stock buybacks are basically dividends with tax benefits.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That companies should always operate as worker cooperatives and never return money to shareholders?

Workers are the shareholders in worker cooperatives.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Best would be if the company increased salaries, then their employees could invest themselves in stuff that actually benefit them, boosting the real economy.

higher salaries would be captured by landlords.

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.

Most big corporations are owned by institutional investors which represent the 401ks and pension plans of your average citizen.

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.

But big old companies can acquire new companies and startups already...?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They've covered non-logged in engagement into logged in engagement, which lets them target ads better.

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.

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 :-\

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.

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.

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.

I have seen it used only in context of talent itself and people who do not have much skill.

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.

We should have stronger consumer organizations. Want to mass produce a product? Consumer orgs should first okay it.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

Our society's economy is grow or die

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

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).

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

Mine has a camera that shows you the contents of the fridge. It's been useful on many occasions.

Helpful to save you three steps and a lift of a hand to see whats inside?

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”

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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

Sure, there's a way to talk down anything.

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.

You could get a glass door fridge?

That probably wastes more electricity; heat insulators and clear substances don't overlap very much.

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.

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!

It's likely useful when you're at the grocery store and can't remember if you need to buy eggs or not.

I rely on a shopping list like my grandma. Another scenario where not innovating is the way to go.

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.

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

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.

There are 3 cameras inside the door I believe.

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.

You can't see the details certainly, but figuring if something is there or is missing is solving the 80% case.

You can see every corner of the fridge with one camera? How?

That does sound useful. I'd need a camera on each level with the amount I pack onto each shelf.

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.

Remote start could be very useful if you want to maximize self-consumption for your solar panels. Do they support that?

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).

I guess you could also use a small battery to help smooth things out.

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.

Or maybe store hot water and heat it up at the best time...?

The water is too hot to store safely.

You can still slowly heat it up to 70 or 80°C and just add some extra heat on use, but that will still leave a lot of immediate power to deal with.

How expensive would it be, transportation included, compared to an insulated water container of comparable heat capacity?

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

At some point I discovered that the dishwasher I own has wifi.

I will absolutely never enable it.

Exactly this.

Who decided to call useless ideas an "innovation" is beyond my understanding.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

It seems that nobody knows of ecotank... It should be the top reference in this thread.

I have L3150 or L3160 and it is good. 2/3 years mid usage run

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

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.

I have the solution for those labels, even if that hype is over for quite a while now: RFID tags! /s

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?

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.

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.

Mass readability is one of the reasons why logistics isn't using RFID tags atva global scale. Cost is another, and a major one.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

It's an official installation guideline for Samsung fridges.

Isn't being level a requirement for the condenser pump?

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.

Nah, this requires hardware that makes the fridge more expensive.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Like this slice of journalism?

https://www.theverge.com/23642073/best-printer-2023-brother-...

"Tech innovation" these days means gating hardware features behind a subscription tier like BMW or Tesla do.

They have done that for as long as they have been internet connected.

wait what? Any tutorial on how this works?

https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/158082/...

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...?

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.

Where do I find this email?

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Apple did not create CUPS, although they did hire the main developer (and buy the rights to the code) some years later.

Restarting the spooler service often solves those problems

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".

Well it solves it until it happens again ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

I wasn't implying that you can't complain about it!

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.

I have a Canon printer which I use with Windows, and I get exactly the same thing. I think your diagnosis is correct.

Which model do you have?

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.

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.

I changed the original toner yesterday. Mainly use it to print out DHL shipping labels.

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.

Thanks, very valuable information as I look into buying a small printer.

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.

also which MFC (scanner) model? historically drivers have been an issue is this solved?

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Does the Canon not dry up?

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.

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.

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.

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).

printing from a smartphone over Wi-Fi with no extra drivers

model # please.

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

still feels like magic and it's 2023. I am regularly surprised it just works

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!

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.

Mine just works and the scanner shows up in simple-scan over wifi (Linux), it's all very smooth.

Agree, same here

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

But will it blend?

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.

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 20€ in ink every two to 3 years.

It makes me happy to hear it once a week when it cleans itself.

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.

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

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.

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...

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 !

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!

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.

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

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.

"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:

..."

It will just silently "auto-correct" the letter instead.

You don't need deep learning for that... https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...

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.

You're probably right - I'd not make a good printer company executive, I'm not cynical enough.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I must have missed the Blockchain/Bitcoin printers

Oh they exist

https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/press/2020/08/honeywell-depl...

I mean, it's blockchain necessary to accomplish this? Probably not, but they're at least not building on top of a crypto currency.

thanks I hate it. definitely wouldn't bet against you on that.

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.

You don’t have children, do you? With kids, printer is a necessity.

why do you think so?

Probably varies a lot from school district to school district, but mine get a lot of print-at-home things from ours.

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.

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.

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.

Why is that?

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.

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.

I have 4 kids :)

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.

Not sure if I’d say necessity, but it’s damn convenient.

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.

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.

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.

Might be an obvious question but have you changed the drum?

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.

> Citation needed?

Brother HL-L8260CDW

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/review/B06XDS1XW7/R2MQHUVV9JX7N...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have not come across this restriction myself. Happily using cheap third party toners bought off Amazon for about 6 years now.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

Which model do you have?

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.

Cartridges that you can get from cheapinkcartridges.ru and they work just fine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Nice, can you share info on the rpi setup?

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you get a decent quality laser for 50 bucks, well, the question is settled.

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.

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.

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.

you should be able to get a not much used Brother color laser from eBay for less than 150 bucks...

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.

KitchenAid used their advantage into cutting costs, changing pieces into plastic though.

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).

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...

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.

The plastic gear is intended to function like a fuse. It saves other more expensive parts by failing under too much load.

Brother printers also happen to have pretty good Linux support which is amazingly rare for Japanese manufacturers (Epson and Canon never do that)

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.

HP is not a Japanese manufacturer

True.

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).

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.

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

A laser printer that can print good quality photos would be a real innovation so, wouldn't it?

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.

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!

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.

"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?

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

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.

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.

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.

Digital dials with a pseudo-log scale are the best and fastest to enter and adjust precise times.

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.

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.

That's kind of what the Wirecutter was until (irony of ironies) they started "innovating" too.

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.

They're not well made. The Zoom recorder's DACs are incredibly noisy.

Have people forgotten that Brother, too, has become enshittified?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

I had forgotten. Is there anyone left that isn't BS though?

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.

The most interesting comment and there is absolutely nobody commenting on it. :(

And just like the other printer manufacturers Brother now offers an "EcoPro" ink/toner subscription, a copy of HP's Instant Ink model.

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.

Yes, much like Framework has completely upended the laptop industry.

The laptop market was never as bad as printers.

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

I have a Brother printer. Sometimes it just doesn't print, cancels the job with an error. Very annoying

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.

That’s literally what the article says.

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.

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).

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.

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 :-)

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.

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

New brother printers have cartridge drm chips

The lower end models do, but my "new" (refurbished) HL-L8360CDW does not.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

This feels like the workflow for a 3dprinter without Octoprint. I get the feature is there, but why on earth would you use it?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

IANAL, but that's probably illegal.

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

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.

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.

They have gone down the dark path. See, e.g., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

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.

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.

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?

Yes they are. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31860131

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)

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.

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.

TIL protocols other than TCP/IP exist and are used for connecting printers.

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/).

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.

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).

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.

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.

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... .

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.

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...

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.

Was is the Blockchain printer someone else in this thread joked about?

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.

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.

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.

You can likely select another (compatible) driver in MacOS and have it work without the original Dell drivers.

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.

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!

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.

Iteration is useful, but not really innovation.

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.

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).

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.

Had a Brother printer once ... never again. I will just say "Cleaning". 'nough said.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

https://web.archive.org/web/20231127074421/https://retro.soc...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I'm old, what's a "mutual ask"?

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.

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.

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?

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.

My Brother HL2240D (ca. €100) 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.

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".

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.

"Don't fix what isn't broken" - should be a mantra especially for the myriad of UI redesigns especially for apps, and corporate CI.

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.

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 £400 spent on a printer. Wish they made a large format model at similar specs and price.

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.

At least it's not a garbage Ricoh

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.

Got a brother HL-L23800W. Replace the toner every few years. Its a printer that prints. Wifi printing is such a gem.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Same for appliances. Too much new tech to fail

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

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

They didn't enshittify their business when other printer makers did.

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...

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.

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.

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...

Well, just being a great maintainer of a great product could be argued to be innovative in today's world.

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.

Or counterpoint, Brother is a Japanese company instead of an degenerate American company. That is worlds apart in terms of business strategies.

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.

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.

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!"

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.

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

I'm pretty sure the VCs reading this are thinking "they're leaving so much money on the table, we should buy them."

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.

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 - €100 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What does a printer do? It prints... Thats what people buy it for to print.. Who wants a garden hose with iphone connection?

Ahhh. Now you've made me all wistful thinking about HP LaserJet 4's.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Just curious, did your monitor flicker randomly when changing screen content and while connected to a MacBook?