Asger Risom
Buying a cheap printer is a trap. The hardware is a Trojan horse designed to force you into a predatory ink subscription, using malicious firmware updates to intentionally block affordable third-party cartridges.
We all know the sheer, unique misery of fighting with an inkjet printer. It is the one piece of technology in the modern home that actively hates you. But over the last few years, the frustration evolved from paper jams and dried-out nozzles into something far more predatory: corporate hostage-taking.
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s (EFF) definitive teardown on hardware lockdowns, Ink-Stained Wretches, the modern printer is no longer a peripheral device you own. It is a Trojan horse designed to trap you in a permanent, inescapable subscription model.
The firmware trap
In the 1990s, when we bought a piece of hardware, it belonged to us. If a printer ran out of ink, we went to the store, bought the cheapest generic refill we could find, and slammed it into the tray. It worked perfectly.
Today, printer manufacturers use malicious firmware updates to intentionally brick third-party ink cartridges. Under the guise of “security updates,” companies push code directly to your printer over Wi-Fi that scans for a proprietary DRM microchip on the cartridge. If it detects a third-party, affordable generic cartridge, the printer simply refuses to function.
The industry explicitly views hardware buyers as cash cows. In 2024, HP’s CEO bluntly stated that their long-term objective was to make printing a subscription, going so far as to call customers who don’t continually buy their overpriced ink a “bad investment”.
Hardware as a service
Buying a cheap $60 inkjet printer is a trap. The hardware is sold at a massive loss specifically to get the DRM-locked ecosystem into your house. Once the starter cartridges dry up after 15 pages, you are hit with replacement costs that make printer ink literally more expensive than human blood per ounce.
Even when major manufacturers face legal consequences—like the 2025 class action settlement against HP for treating firmware updates like malware—they simply write off the minor payouts as the cost of doing business. The core strategy never changes. They want you locked into a monthly subscription fee just for the right to print a black-and-white shipping label.
We successfully traded the simple transaction of buying a machine for a dystopian future where our own hardware shakes us down for lunch money every time we hit CTRL+P.
