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Comment by 3chelon | Hacker News Reader

I once got a full refund on a laptop outside of its warranty period because a software update (Windows 8.1) effectively bricked the machine. I demanded it under the UK Sale of Goods Act, which states that a product must be fit for purpose, which it clearly no longer was once the automatic update had happened.

I do wonder if this can be more broadly applied to consumer products that effectively change their behaviour after a software update. Is it the same product you originally bought? I would contest not. And surely lawyers could have a field day with this one?

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It would be interesting to return notebook after 1 year, because you disagree with Windows EULA.

I can't recall - do you have to agree to the Windows EULA before or after the automatic update?

You have to agree during the initial setup of a windows machine.

The issue is why do people in UK/USA put up with this Orwellian customer control business model?

In Asia if a company were to do these things the business would be burnt to the ground, and/or family selling the inferior by design products.

...

This is silly, the printer biz has always been 'give away the camera, and take the first born when they need film'

You go abroad ASIA and every printer ink or cartridge, as a bladder attached outside where you have an infinite pool of ink/powder for printing, you buy the printer, and walk out the store with the bladder attached.

Now only in the USA do they sell the SIM card for the phone by ID, or make it a felony to put free ink or powder in a printer. HP? Canon and all have been doing this for years, but why is it that in USA you still walk out of the store with a boxed printer that has cartridge with a 1/2 life of 10 prints and then the ink/powder costs the same as the original printer?

The USA like the Epipen fiasco is FULL retard on screwing people, HP is just on the band-wagon.

...

From poor medical care, to Epipen, to all the silly things that USA/UK people put with, its amazing the CORP Fascist government has such willing lemmings to go along with this BS.

>.. Orwellian customer control business model?

When I think of "Orwellian" I think of government control that is forced upon the individual, not simply bad practices of a few players in a single industry. Of course someone could just buy another make of printer. It's not like they have no other choice, lots of people suggested Brother printers as good alternatives when this story first made the rounds. They could make prints at an office supply company or even their local library.

Government control like DMCA is very much put in place by big corporations trough the corruption of congress. I'm not saying the control is total but we're certainly getting there. Even if there are alternatives today they are getting slowly stripped away through more regulation and reallocation of funding. It's not a far stretch to entertain the view that we're under Orwellian control.

That does not make the term apply to this situation. Orwellian is strictly about the relationship between the people and the government. It's a good term, great to use, but not applicable in this case.

Here, HP is allowed to exploit the rules of the free market in a way that is both wasteful and unethical, but legal. Not because of Orwellian practices (we are not told by the government to use HP unquestionably) but rather quite the opposite: the government is in fact explicitly NOT allowed to formalise the ethics here through law. Any kind of governmental regulation here is seen as "the government interfering with the free market", and as idiotic as that claim is, it seems deeply entrenched in the thought patterns of those who can influence the legal landsdcape.

Someone I know recently bought an HP DeskJet GT 5820, which has a "bladder" built into it. The package included 4 full bottles of ink, ~60cc for each color. That's enough ink to print thousands of pages, and I don't think the printer even has any way to detect whether it's been refilled with genuine HP ink. You just open the top and squeeze ink into one of the four color-coded tanks. The whole package, including more than half a pint of ink, came in at around $200.

But it's Asia here, so I don't know if the same model is available in the States. Maybe HP will sue you if you try to import it, like what happened to that Asian kid who tried to import cheap textbooks.

Meanwhile, my HP LaserJet 1022n has been going strong for 10 years now, and 4 of those years have been with $10 recycled toner cartridges from a local seller. I'm not sure whether HP even has the ability to brick my printer if they knew what I was doing, because I haven't seen a driver update for ages, let alone a firmware update.

So yeah, maybe HP does crappy things only in countries where they can legally get away with it. Stop letting them get away with it.

AFAICT that HP is not available in the UK, and the only real references to it I can see are in India and Korea, so I guess Asia only.

Which shows that in Asia they feel the need to compete, where here in the UK they're trying to sell us ink subscription plans, where we pay them a set amount per month to use our own printers, with the printer reporting how much we use, and they send new ink when necessary.

Why compete when you can spy?

Because people in the US don't understand value, only cost.

A lot of what you discuss fits into this pattern. Buy a cheap $30 printer on sale, and then spend $30 more per ink cartridge for the life of the printer. A lot of people when they run out of ink literally buy a new printer, because it comes with ink, it's almost as cheap and they 'may as well'. They don't realize that it doesn't come with a full tank of ink, or that spending more on a printer means a better quality printer that lasts ten times longer.

Likewise health care. People don't want to pay more (or perceive that they're paying more) in order to have a better-functioning system that works better for everyone. They don't understand that everyone paying slightly more into the pot means a health care system that doesn't turn you away because the nearby hospital isn't 'in-network' so you have to go across town for your insurance to cover your emergency. My wife had to go to the ER the other night, and she chose based on reported wait times of nearby hospitals, rather than which one our insurance would actually pay for. Likewise, not having to pay a $25 co-pay every time you go to the doctor means that you can go to the doctor more often and keep your health up to date, rather than waiting until things are dire before you cough up the $25.

I've also seen lots of people buy Android phones because 'it's like half the price' of an iPhone or a premium Android, and then find out that they were never going to get software updates from the manufacturer again, that the performance was awful, and then turn around and end up buying a new one a year later. Meanwhile, people on the iPhone 5 (five years old) are reporting that iOS 10 actually works pretty well on their device and doesn't slow it down as much as they'd expected, and I know people with a Nexus 5 (three years old) who are still going strong on the latest Android updates because they paid slightly more at checkout.

Fundamentally, commerce in the US has become a race to the bottom: who can offer the cheapest product without consumers realizing that it's cheap because of cut corners and misfeatures.

Because, from healthcare, to consumer products, to software, to books, the US is paying full price to subsidize the cost to much of the world. The US is the profit center that makes possible the steeply-discounted-almost-free sales elsewhere.

The "full price" here was 15 percent of GlaxoSmithKline's revenue last year. They spent 40 percent on marketing. When can this myth die?

http://www.bizjournals.com/triangle/news/2016/07/19/where-gs...

Probably about the same time as people stop equating "general and administration expenses" with "marketing". Marketing is a subset of that.

Yes, it also includes buying lunches for doctors and private jets for the executive staff. What it does not include is R&D in any shape or form. The fact is R&D isn't making drug prices high.

Oy. It also includes paying the janitors, the property taxes, and the myriad of other costs that come with running a company.

> The fact is R&D isn't making drug prices high.

Neither are their SGA expenses. The two combined are just under half GSK's revenue.

Anyway, that's irrelevant to trying to score cheap points with a false equivalence.

"the US is paying full price to subsidize the cost to much of the world. The US is the profit center that makes possible the steeply-discounted-almost-free sales elsewhere."

Yeah, right. So why we pay ~30% more[1] for the same iPhone in Europe? I've seen this "we pay for the rest of the world" myth over and over again, but never reliable proofs or sources that support it. Sure, I bet Apple gets most profits from USA, but it's because it sells most of phones there, not that they are "given for free" elsewhere.

1. http://micgadget.com/36729/iphone-7-price-in-usa-china-europ...

Because the consumers here are richer?

$30 for an American is far less expensive than $10 is for an Indian.

So Americans and Europeans are capable of paying more than Asians, and companies know this, and are able to price their products accordingly.

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