Decades of innovation that have been invested, not to make a better product, but mostly on how to extract more and more money from their victims, I mean "customers".
I would like to own a printer again, but for printing something like once a month, I just can't financially justify spending several hundred bucks on a device that might, at the whim of the manufacturer, decide that the way I'm using it is not okay anymore, is probably designed to break after two years, requires me to sign up for a subscription service for ink, or whatever BS else the decision makers in this space come up with.
This is the dying gasps of an industry that is mostly irrelevant in the modern age.
When I was growing up we always had a printer, and while ink wasn't cheap, it wasn't too bad, so we used it a lot and printed everything we needed. The industry grew to expect this, most households with a computer also owning a printer and regularly buying ink for it.
This isn't the case anymore. So much of our lives happens "digital-only" that printers aren't needed by most people, and those who do need them don't need as much ink. I have never owned a printer myself, and my parents still own one but buy ink on a yearly basis now.
The market should be shrinking naturally, and so every printer company is trying everything they possibly can to grow or at least keep from shrinking as much. In the panic they are in, it's understandable that this will lead to crappy business practices.
Coupled with the concentrating monopolisation of the economy, this creates a phenomenon where helpless consumers are held at ransom: the ultimatum being that they either continue to be exploited in ever more devious ways, or to simply do without. Small businesses that spring up to fulfill the void are bought up quickly in order to squash any hope of real competition.
This is not an economy that works for ordinary people. Ordinary people does include temporarily embarrassed millionaires (and real millionaires, and startups and micro-businesses for that matter) on Hacker News.
The only people who are benefiting overall from these practices are major shareholders and those chasing endless quarterly growth targets.
I consider myself pretty ordinary and my life is impacted almost 0 by the forces of elastic markets.
https://equalitytrust.org.uk/scale-economic-inequality-uk
Businesses are choosing to use their profits to perform stock buybacks instead of innovating or improving standards for their workers:
https://hbr.org/2020/01/why-stock-buybacks-are-dangerous-for...
Meanwhile the cost of living is going through the roof:
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-...
And pay is not catching up, further aggravated by inflation:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1272447/uk-wage-growth-v...
In the UK we also have a 54% increase in the residential cost of energy (within the context of extreme profiteering from energy manufacturers):
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/02/03/business/energy-prices-uk...
And 9.1% inflation:
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/uk-inflation-rate-hits-...
This is true across the world. I'm not sure what your life is like, but it sure as hell doesn't match the lived experience of many.