I just want to be clear, because this headline is borderline clickbait.
HP is not bricking the printers. The printers will continue to work if you put the HP cartridges back in.
I'm not condoning HP at all, not in a million years.
But the verb "disable" carries connotations of permanence, so it seems like a disingenuous word choice at best, if it's not outright clickbait. Just so people aren't confused here.
in a free market shouldn't hp be forced to lower it's prices to compete with 3rd party to a little more than their price since it technically is OEM? I mean like car parts
They are at a minimum destroying value of the ink, as the ink already put into the printer is useless now. At least the running combination is permanently disabled as long as you do not buy something from HP. With printer prices often as low as the ink prices that is a big deal.
At least they should be required to compensate the users.
Thanks for clarifying because that’s the impression i got from the headline too - while the practice is pretty bad, from the comments in here I suspect many others also had the same interpretation.
It is clickbait. Nothing borderline about it. Still terrible behaviour from HP, but very unsurprising as opposed to the idea of actually bricking printers.
Before the firmware update, the printers were able to print with third-party cartridges. HP disabled that ability. Their customers' printers are now disabled.
By that definition of "disable", HP is disabling their customers' printers regardless of whether they use ink cartridges from another manufacturer. It's clear that that is not the intended sense, however, because the headline says "if they use...".
If that meaning was intended, the headline should read "HP disables the use of third-party ink cartridges on their customers' printers with a firmware update", or something like that.
I agree with OP that as written the headline is misleading.
Before reading the article, I interpreted the headline to mean a permanent disabling. Like disabling a tank. Or a disabled person. Merriam-Webster may agree with you, but I felt the wording was misleading
Actually your interpretation of “Permanent disabling” is the grammatically correct interpretation here, because “if” is used. To indicate concurrent behaviour we need to see a sentence using one of these: when, while, or whilst.
I suppose you could say that, but it would mean something quite different from what bricking normally does. And I wouldn't advise it because it sounds like a soft brick rather than "beep boop replace cartridge".
It's this mentality that makes internet discussions so polarized. If you allow the slightest nuance or point out that something is factually incorrect, and it happens to go against the prevailing narrative, you're accused of being a shill.
These people can’t separate an idea from a side. They’re incapable of holding useful debate because all thoughts must be categorised as “us” or “the enemy”.
It provides no route for correcting ourselves and no tolerance for enhancing our arguments.
HP is not bricking the printers. The printers will continue to work if you put the HP cartridges back in.
I'm not condoning HP at all, not in a million years.
But the verb "disable" carries connotations of permanence, so it seems like a disingenuous word choice at best, if it's not outright clickbait. Just so people aren't confused here.