zlacker

>>pjmlp+(OP)
Consumer printers are a dying market, in case you havent noticed. Sales are trending down roughly 25% over the past decade. HP itself has seen its printer revenue drop from $29B in 2008 to $18B last year. Unit sales have seen a similar decline.

This is what desperation looks like. Nothing they can do will reverse the trend--its bigger than a single company. HP has its numbers to hit.. but are completely powerless to make it grow. So they do things like this, trying to slow the decline for themselves personally... but push more consumers away, accelerating the trend and the decline of their business.

I think the model is starting to show its cracks.. the old model was: buy a printer at a discount, pay us for ink. But if consumers are printing less, they're buying less ink, making it even harder to get back that printer discount. So HP needs to squeeze all of the ink sales out of the consumer they can... maybe if they can push out 3rd party ink, they can delay changing the business model for a little bit longer. But thats going to get harder every single year (if its even realistic).

I've owned lots of printers over the years, including a few HPs... I currently own 0 printers. And dealing with stuff like this is a small part why, but the bigger reason is: dont need a printer.

>>rgbren+pz
I can imagine additional things that'd be nice tac-ons. Like having some kind of printer is useful a few times a year, same with scanner, next obvious thing to add IMO would be a laser cutter that can cut cardstock. There are probably other things that could take advantage of the box with moving head form. So basically I can imagine the all in one merging with a cricut I guess. But yeah, not going to have tons of disposables or grow the market. And there's not really any reason that a printer shouldn't last a decade or more, which means yearly volume ought to be small...