Caught in the HP Printer Cartridge Wars

 

A few months ago, the old computer printer I was using expired, and as I'm working mainly from home these days and need to use the printer several times a day, I spent a half hour or so researching printers and ended up buying an HP 8035 unit.  It's a middle-of-the-line combination inkjet printer/scanner, and as long as the original printer cartridges lasted it worked fine.  And even once the red (I guess the technical name is magenta) cartridge gave out and I swapped a new one in, it was fine.  Then the yellow cartridge gave out, and I decided to swap out both the yellow and the cyan cartridge.

When I turned the unit back on, it gave me an error message that said in effect "These cartridges are not intended for use in this printer."  Now on some level, I was aware of the ongoing battle that printer manufacturers wage with those pesky cartridge remanufacturers and refillers who recycle used cartridges, refill them, and sell them for a fraction of what the manufacturer charges.  And if I'd gone out on the web and bought some of the remanufactured cartridges, I wouldn't have been too surprised to see such a message, as there are software ways HP can use to figure out what kind of cartridge was installed. 

But the cartridges I installed came out of an HP box I bought at the same time I bought the printer, and had HP labels all over them, and their expiration dates (if that's what the little date codes ending in 2021 or 2022 meant) were well in the future.  By all reasonable considerations, these cartridges should work in this printer.  But they didn't.

I ended up finding an odd part of HP's website where it instructed me to do a hard reset of the printer (unplugging it and plugging it back in), and if that didn't fix the problem, to answer a series of questions involving the printer's serial number and the date codes and place of manufacture (China or Malaysia) of the cartridges.  When I did that, I was informed that HP will, some day, send me some replacement cartridges, and in the meantime, here's how to print in black and white. 

HP and I go back a long way, though both of us have changed in latter years.  One of my prize surplus-equipment purchases in high school was a World-War-II era knockoff of the famous HP 200-series vacuum-tube audio oscillator that got the company going back in 1938.  It's still sitting in my garage, and the last time I tried to fire it up, it still worked.  During my brief stint in industry, I learned that of all the different kinds of test equipment out there, Hewlett-Packard gear was the ruggedest and most reliable, and typically exceeded its specifications even after a decade of use. 

Around the end of the 20th century, HP decided its future lay in the direction of computers and computer peripherals, and spun off the division that made the super-reliable test equipment.  That division became known as Agilent, and a few years later, Agilent fissioned into a biological and chemical division, which retained the Agilent name, and rid itself of the electrical test-equipment people, who became Keysight.  In the meantime, HP, which merged with the Houston PC maker Compaq somewhere along the way, was not doing that well, and eventually became known mainly for its printers, as far as I'm concerned. 

The consumer and enterprise printer business is a lot different than the lower-volume, sophisticated-customer test equipment business.  From what I can tell, one way to make money with printers is the way Kodak made money with cameras:  they could give the cameras away as long as people kept buying the film from Kodak.  I don't think HP does that with their printers, judging by what I paid for mine.  But it does seem like they could arrange things so that when you buy a set of printer cartridges that say they will work with the printer you just bought, that implied contract doesn't turn out to be a lie.

Admittedly, HP makes a bewildering variety of printers and an equally bewildering variety of cartridges to go with them.  Some cartridges include the printer head, others don't.  The ones I bought are evidently just little tanks with foam-covered outlets that soak the ink into the printer head, which is a separate unit.  I found out how that works when I tried to fix this printer's predecessor.  After replacing its cartridges didn't get it printing again, I ordered a new printer head (again, from some third-party place—they seem to be difficult or impossible to get from HP).  It didn't help, so I wasted about $60 on new cartridges and a printer head before concluding the unit was ready for the junk pile.  (Actually, I donated it to Goodwill, and if they can get it to work again, more power to them.)

But even given all the complications of selling different lineups of printers in different parts of the world, you would think that HP could keep their supply chains straight so you can't go out and buy a box of printer cartridges that say they will work with your printer, and wind up discovering that no, indeed, they don't. 

I'm not the only one with this problem.  A cursory web search turned up at least two sites discussing the fact that if certain packages of HP cartridges have an expiration date earlier than, for example, January 2021 (which is still a good bit in the future), they won't work with certain printers that they are nominally supposed to work with.  Evidently, this is part of a game, or war, that HP is playing in order to stay a step ahead of the recycled-cartridge people.  But now they're updating things so fast that they are obsoleting lots of their own cartridge inventory that is still in the supply chain somewhere.

This is not how the old Hewlett-Packard company would behave.  But that organization is just a fond memory, and now we have to get used to being caught in cartridge-war crossfire if we buy a new printer.  Some day I'll be able to print in color again, but until HP deigns to send me replacement cartridges, I'll just have to settle for a monochrome world.  And by the way, what about these other new cartridges I bought at the same time?

Sources:  Discussions of HP cartridges not working in their designated printers can be found at https://www.therecycler.com/posts/hp-cartridges-wont-work-in-hp-printers/ and https://borncity.com/win/2019/01/20/does-hp-blocks-3rd-party-ink-cartridges-again-on-its-printers-jan-2019/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia entry "Hewlett-Packard." 

To Brick or Not To Brick: When What You Buy Isn't Really Yours

Mood lighting isn't really my thing, but a number of consumers have bought something called a Hue smart lighting system from the well-known lighting manufacturer Philips.  For maximum enjoyment, you buy a Hue Bridge and connect it to the Internet so it both controls your lights and interacts with some online resources operated by Philips.  For people who get a thrill out of dimming their living-room lights while they're still at work, I suppose this is as good as it gets.  But early adopters who bought the first version of this system up to five years ago are in for an unpleasant surprise, according to Matthew Gault, writing at www.vice.com.

Next month, Philips will cease supporting Version 1 of the Hue Bridge, which means it will then be vulnerable to security issues and the online services won't work anymore.  To retain the full functionality of your system, which can include up to 50 bulbs if you went whole hog with every light in your house, you have to buy a new $60 Bridge and start over registering all your light bulbs and changing accounts and I don't know what all.  My life is complicated enough without having to register light bulbs, so my sympathies are with the unfortunate owners of what are now legacy Hue systems that either have to upgrade or go back to kerosene lanterns (not really).

Gault points out that this is just one example of a larger trend:  the increasing tendency of companies to treat hardware like software, which nobody really buys.  If you hire a lawyer to render that fine-print boilerplate nobody ever reads before saying they've read it in order to use new software, he or she will tell you that you don't own the software even if you pay thousands of bucks for it.  All you get is a license to use it, and the term of the license can vary from indefinitely to a very short time indeed. 

Apply this notion to hardware, and you get such situations as Gault describes with another smarthome company called Revolv.  For a couple of years, Revolv was doing well selling smarthome systems, and then a subsidiary of Google bought Revolv and unilaterally shut down the service in May of 2016, leaving people with hundreds of dollars' worth of useless hardware.  Gault uses the word "brick" as a verb when describing this charming behavior, as in, "They bricked my phone" meaning to disable remotely—to turn a useful piece of electronics into something as useful as a brick. 

Faced with such an eventuality, consumers don't have much recourse.  Suing over the price of a piece of consumer electronics is not cost-effective.  Class-action lawsuits are possible, but that works only if there is a reasonable possibility of a large-enough payout if the defendant loses, so that the lawyers for the plaintiffs, who typically work on a contingency-fee basis, can recoup their expenses and make a profit.  Unless someone is actually physically harmed or otherwise injured, such civil suits rarely succeed.  Having your smart speaker or smart light bulb quit working does not pull on the heartstrings of juries, especially juries of people who can't afford such niceties.  So most consumers on the short end of sticks like this will just grumble and swear not to buy anything from that company again—unless it's somebody like Google, whose services and products are getting to be almost as ubiquitous as water and air.

Where does this leave the companies morally?  Suppose this was the Middle Ages, say, and we're looking for a situation in human relationships comparable to what these companies are doing by bricking or ceasing to support their products.  This may sound extreme, but the only thing I can think of that's comparable is a raid:  to be specific, a Viking raid on an English coastal town.

Say you're a fisherman, minding your own business one day and mending your nets.  You've managed to accumulate a small number of useful objects:  cups, bowls, maybe some jewelry for your wife—imagine whatever would equate to an upper-middle-class living in, say, 900 A. D.  All of a sudden, you see ships on the horizon, and you know they're Vikings.  And you know what's going to happen next.  You can kiss all your nice things good-bye, and maybe your wife and your life as well.

Now, Google or Philips doesn't rape your wife and burn your house down.  But when they brick or otherwise reduce the functionality of their products, they do take something that you thought was yours, and they don't give anything in return.  In their defense, the companies would say that they delivered a certain amount of service over the useful life of the product, but surely we didn't expect the device to work forever, did we? 

That's a hard question to answer.  As I get older, my perspective on technological progress has changed, possibly because I've seen so many technologies come and go:  8-track tapes, videotapes, cassette tapes, floppy disks, CRT displays. . . . For some reason, the image of a spoiled child picking up and then discarding one new toy after another comes to mind.  Sometimes he tires of the toy and throws it down and demands another.  Other times, the toy is taken away before he's finished with it and he throws a tantrum.  But he's never truly happy or content either way.

Unless we all become lawyers and refuse to buy anything without executing a custom-written contract with every company we buy from, specifying the term of service we expect from their products, we will continue to be the spoiled children playing with toys whose usefulness is at the whim of the manufacturer.  There are too many lawyers as it is, and I also agree with Gault when he says that governments don't seem willing to be the playground supervisor who enforces fair play. 

So a phrase that dates from even longer ago than the Middle Ages seems appropriate here:  caveat emptor.  The buyer should beware that any product involving software, which is increasingly almost any piece of electronics these days, may up and quit on you at any time—not because it breaks, or because you misused it, but because its maker found it uneconomical to keep it going.  And you'll just have to deal with it if it does.

Sources:  Matthew Gault's article "Philips' Internet-Connected Lightbulbs Will No Longer Connect to the Internet" appeared on Mar. 6, 2020 at https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgead4/philips-internet-connected-lightbulbs-will-no-longer-connect-to-the-internet.  The announcement Philips made about the Hue Bridge is at https://www2.meethue.com/en-us/support/end-of-support-policy, and the story about bricking the Revolv smarthome systems is at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/05/revolv-devices-bricked-google-nest-smart-home.

For Consumer Electronics, The Fix is Out—Or Is It?

Did you know that Apple can tell if you break your iPhone screen and take it to get fixed by somebody who isn't in Apple's authorized repair network and uses a non-Apple screen to fix it?  Not only can they tell, they can intentionally disable your phone when they find out. 

That's exactly what happened to Antonio Olmos, a news photographer covering the refugee crisis in the Balkans, when he broke his iPhone screen and couldn't find an Apple-authorized repair facility in Macedonia.  But he did find somebody who fixed it with an aftermarket screen, and the phone worked fine until a routine sofware update a few months later.  Then, wham—Apple turned his phone off.  When Olmos inquired, he was told that Apple did this as a "security measure" in case some of the unauthorized parts were defective.  But that wasn't the problem—the phone worked fine until Apple broke it in an act that looks suspiciously like punishment. 

Olmos had enough connections with the media to raise a public stink about the issue, and eventually Apple caved and quit turning off phones that have been repaired by non-Apple facilities with non-Apple parts.  But with his inquiry, Olmos turned over a rock to reveal just one of the many ways that manufacturers are increasingly trying to discourage repairs of their products by anyone other than their own limited number of authorized repair facilities—and sometimes not even then.

In an article on the website of the professional engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum, two leaders of the "right-to-repair" movement, Kyle Wiens and Gay Gordon-Byrne, describe how this is happening, not only with consumer electronics but with items as big as tractors.  For example, John Deere, the agricultural-equipment maker, took the position that in selling a tractor to a farmer, the company didn't really let go of the tractor—they only granted an "implied license" to operate it.  John Deere reserved the right to repair it or say who was going to repair it—certainly not the farmer.

This didn't sit well with farmers, who complained, and the U. S. Copyright Office ruled that John Deere was wrong—when a farmer buys a tractor, he can do anything he wants with it, from fixing it himself to driving it into a lake. 

These are only two of the most egregious examples of manufacturers who try to discourage consumers from fixing their own stuff, or using independent repair shops who use aftermarket parts.  As anyone who has been to a non-dealer-owned auto repair shop or an Autozone knows, independent repair facilities are often cheaper than dealerships and can do work of just as good a quality as the dealerships.  And many aftermarket parts are comparable in quality to OEM (original equipment manufacturer) parts.  So why do the makers seem to hate it if you fix something of theirs that breaks?

Well, the obvious reason is that as soon as a company sells you one of their products, they are competing with themselves.  If the product breaks, you have two choices, in principle:  fixing it or buying a new one.  The maker wants to sell you a new one, of course, and anything that can be done to make fixing difficult or impossible will tend to tilt your decision in the direction of a new purchase.

This helps a maker's bottom line, but it also contributes to the millions of tons of electronic scrap that goes into landfills worldwide every year.  As economist John C. Médaille put it, "Only by constantly buying what we don't need or already have can the system sustain itself; the size of the garbage dump becomes the true measure of our 'wealth'."  So what should be done?

The answer that Wiens and Gordon-Byrne favor is legislation at the state level to prohibit manufacturers from monopolizing product repair or preventing it altogether.  While this has some chance of working, it is only part of the problem. 

The things a culture values can tell you a lot about the culture.  Multinational corporations have encouraged the development of a worldwide consumer culture that values things that the corporations can sell at a profit.  And in the absence of strong counterforces from custom, religion, or politics, the consumer culture increasingly dominates the lives of not just millions, but closer to billions of people.  In 2016, almost two-thirds of the world's population owned a mobile phone.  That's about the same percentage of the globe's population who, as of 2013, do not have indoor plumbing (flush toilets, in other words).  Now don't get me wrong—having a smart phone, or any kind of a phone, is a huge leap forward toward all sorts of civilizational goods:  the ability to call for emergency services, to participate in a market economy, and so on.  Mobile phones can on occasion be lifesavers.  But so can flush toilets.  There are good reasons, however, that Apple is in the smart-phone business and not the flush-toilet business. 

State laws protecting our right to fix things can redress some of the grievous wrongs that companies are trying to put across with regard to product repairs.  But even if all service manuals were posted for free on the Internet and you could find a competent independent repair shop in every city and town, many of us would still be just waiting for our phone to break down to give us an excuse to buy a new one. 

This is a moral issue, really, and to explore its depths would take us far beyond the limits of this blog space.  But the heart of the matter is whether we believe what the manufacturers want us to believe, namely (as Médaille again puts it), "that our happiness lies not in persons, but in things, and not merely in things, but in constantly new things." 

That notion is, to put it indelicately, a lie.  But it's behind much of the advertising and marketing that we are subjected to all the time.  Until we recognize that lie for what it is, and change our ways of living and using our resources to reflect our realization that it's a lie, all the repair-protection laws in the world won't make much difference in the flood of electronics that goes from store to user to garbage dump faster every year. 

Sources:  The article "Why We Must Fight For the Right to Repair Our Electronics" by Kyle Wiens and Gay Gordon-Byrne was posted on the IEEE Spectrum website on Oct. 24, 2017 at https://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/conservation/why-we-must-fight-for-the-right-to-repair-our-electronics.  The statistic on worldwide mobile phone use is from https://www.statista.com/statistics/274774/forecast-of-mobile-phone-users-worldwide/, and the one on flush toilets is from http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/02/22/_60_percent_of_the_world_population_still_without_toilets.html.  John C. Médaille's book Toward a Truly Free Market (ISI Books, 2010), pp. 194-195, is the source of the quotations attributed to him.

The Sudden Death of Windows XP

Okay, it wasn't that sudden:  Microsoft announced as long ago as 2012 that, as of April of 2014, it was going to end all support of its creaky but still serviceable Windows XP operating system, so it's not like it happened without warning.  And strictly speaking, computers running Windows XP didn't die on April 8, 2014:  they just became instantly vulnerable to malware, hackers, and others who had been kept somewhat at bay by security upgrades from Microsoft.  As it turns out, this includes well-intentioned network managers such as the ones at my university, who now sniff out any PCs on their network still running Windows XP and simply snip them off the network.  But the whole episode has occasioned some thoughts on planned obsolescence, and how different computer technology is from other kinds of technology.

As it turns out, I have a dog in this fight:  an old Dell laptop in my research lab that runs a number of applications I use in my research, and its operating system is Windows XP.  The applications all run with expensive hardware I have accumulated over the years as funding intermittently became available.  One such item is a high-speed camera that cost about $15K new when I bought it a decade ago with a combination of grant and department money.  Another is a $10K spectrometer that I happened into after I met my department chair in the hall one day, and he asked me if I knew of a good way I could help him spend ten thousand dollars real fast.  The software for these items will not run on anything other than Windows XP, and the laptop is so old I don't think I can upgrade the operating system to Windows 8 in any case.  I have a little grant right now, but I've obligated most of the money toward other items and there's nothing left for software or hardware upgrades. So what's an impoverished researcher to do?

I wasn't the only person caught with my operating system down on April 8, by the way.  One estimate (www.netmarketshare.com) says that about a quarter of all PCs are still running Windows XP here over a month after the drop-dead date, so I'm sure there are millions of computers out there in the same slowly sinking boat that my laptop is in. 

In a lot of ways, the end of XP support resembles the old Y2K scare that those of us old enough to be computer-savvy in 2000 can recall.  Because programmers dealing with the limited memory in mid-20th-century computers didn't always take into account the possibility that their software might still be running on Jan. 1, 2000, they sometimes wrote dates in a way that would make the software bomb if you tried to keep them running past Dec. 31, 1999.  Fortunately, the turn of the century was highly predictable, and despite certain fringe elements who predicted a digital Armageddon, nearly all software had been successfully upgraded by New Year's Day on 2000, and the big Y2K scare turned out to be a bust.

Similarly, judging from the cricket-filled silence on the Internet concerning any dire consequences of the end of XP support after April 8, I think things have not turned out to be as bad as some people thought.  Still, I can't connect my PC laptop to the internet without getting it squelched by IT support now, and if anything goes wrong with any of the software or hardware it runs, I may find myself up a creek.

Those involved in the computer and software industries rarely think in terms of indefinitely lengthy stretches of time, although I will give Microsoft credit for announcing the end of XP support so far in advance, and sticking to their commitment.  Every design of an engineered product is an act of faith:  the designer rarely knows exactly who will use the design, how they will benefit, or how long the design will be useful.  The business model of software companies is a constant scramble to issue upgrades and new products, and in a competitive global economy, it can't very well be otherwise.  But in the rare cases that a thing shows unexpected fruitful longevity, it seems that there is a kind of nobility or merit attached to that fact that most engineers rarely recognize, having been trained in the philosophy of "old = bad, new = good" from their college days. 

I recall the story of a mechanical animation stand and camera that begin its existence back in the 1920s, and was used to make some of the earliest animated cartoons.  The same stand was still in use in the late 1990s for commercial film production, because the mechanical standards of 35-mm film had not changed in all that time. 

Animation stands are junk now, rendered that way by the advent of computer-generated images (CGI).  And motion-picture production companies that have switched to all-digital production find that it costs them a bundle simply to keep a movie on the shelf, because all the software and memory standards associated with the huge pile of digital information that goes into the movie are constantly changing, and it's a full-time job for several people just to make sure that the movie is still in shape to be played from month to month.  It brings to mind the words of the Red Queen in Lewis Carroll's story Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There:  "Now here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.  If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Those who have the resources to run twice as fast have long since upgraded their old PCs (or not so old PCs) to Windows 7 or 8 or 13 or whatever the latest version is, and will continue to keep up with the times.  And those of us who haven't, will just have to deal with the situation any way we can. 

Sources:  The online journal Computerworld carried a debate as long ago as December 2012 at http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9234316/Experts_question_Microsoft_s_decision_to_retire_XP in which experts differed as to whether Microsoft would really stick to their announced deadline, as they in fact did.  Some good advice to those who can't afford upgrading from Windows XP appeared in PC Pro's online edition at

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/features/387022/what-to-do-if-you-re-still-on-windows-xp-should-i-upgrade-from-windows-xp.  The statistic about the percentage of PCs running Windows XP is available at http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx.