Spent about three hours of my Saturday afternoon fixing my parents' printer. Not writing code, not reading anything interesting, just standing in my mom's home office watching a progress bar lie to me over and over. It's an HP OfficeJet, maybe four years old at this point, and it decided sometime last week that it no longer wanted to talk to the wifi. Every other device in the house connects fine. Just the printer.
I bring this up not because it's some huge story but because it reminded me how weirdly stagnant this one category of consumer tech has stayed while everything around it changed completely. We've got phones that can edit video better than my old desktop could, laptops that go two days on a charge, and a printer setup app in 2026 that still makes you install four separate pieces of software just to scan a single document. The HP Smart app wanted an account. Then it wanted me to accept a firmware update that took eleven minutes for a document that is, functionally, a fax machine with a USB port.
At one point it asked me to sign in to print a test page. I'm not exaggerating. A test page.
I ended up fixing it by doing the thing you always end up doing with printers, which is turning it off, unplugging it, waiting a bit, and starting over like it's a toddler who needs a nap. Fifteen minutes of factory-reset nonsense fixed what an hour of "troubleshooting" in the app could not. My dad, who was hovering the whole time offering theories, said "you'd think by now they'd have figured this out." Yeah. You would think.
the ink thing still bugs me
The part that actually annoys me, more than the wifi drop, is the ink situation. They're on one of those subscription ink plans now, paying something like $6 or $7 a month for a print volume they almost never hit, because the cartridges the printer shipped with were deliberately underfilled to push people toward the subscription. I did the math while I was there and they'd have been better off just buying compatible third-party cartridges twice a year for less than what a year of the plan costs. I know printer companies make their money on ink and not on hardware, I've known that forever, I just didn't expect the subscription version of that model to still feel this predatory almost a decade after it started showing up everywhere.
My own solution, for what it's worth, has been to just not own an inkjet anymore. I've got a small laser printer, black and white only, that I bought used for about forty dollars off a local listing site three years ago and have refilled the toner on exactly once. It does not have an app. It does not want an account. You plug it in, it shows up, you print. I genuinely think this is the correct amount of technology for a printer to have, and every time I have to deal with someone else's inkjet I get a little more convinced of it.
Anyway. None of this is a grand statement about the industry, I just spent my Saturday doing tech support for my parents like probably half the people reading this have also done at some point, and it put me in a mood to complain about it here instead of just venting about it over dinner. My mom, for the record, was extremely happy the printer worked again and did not care even slightly about the ink math I was doing in my head the whole time. She just wanted to print a recipe.
The wifi did go out again two days later, by the way. I haven't gone back over yet. I have a strong suspicion it's going to be the router's 5GHz band doing something weird with the printer's older wifi chip, but I'm saving that investigation for a day when I have more patience for it. Some problems you just let sit for a bit.