Well. It's on purpose, obviously. Money is made on service and ink cartridges, far moreso than the printer sales!

I have no evidence, but I submit this video as people's exhibit A.

I have a Samsung full colour laser printer.

I bought it brand new for less than the cost of replacement cartridges.

When it's final out of toner, I will throw the printer away and buy a new one.

It's just cheaper that way.

Don't throw it away. That would be a wiener move. Give it to someone on craigslist for fifty bucks or something. Better than the trash, that is just stupid.

Well, honestly, I have yet to run out of toner, I was just being sarcastic.

I also 100% promote lasers over inkjets. When you run out of toner, the cartridge is pretty much empty. Also, if you're like me and print something once every 2 or 3 blue moons, toner is already dry, and stays completely useful 10x longer than ink.

I hate (end-user) printers, hated them 25 years ago and I still hate them today. Haven't printed anything in colour in years. Want colour? Get a pack of crayons.

It was always inevitable that the printer industry would shrink significantly as things become more digital, but it's always baffled me that they responded to that by making it harder and less desirable to print things.

Hardware is worse than it was 20 years ago, the drivers are much, much worse, and ink is more expensive. At this point we should have had rock-solid printers that you top up once a year from a litre (or bigger) refill bottle.

But hey, free market, right?

Upvoted for the shameless dig at libertarianism!

Consumer printers seem like the lightbulb cartel of the computer industry. They know we need them and they know how to make them last, but those two two things are somewhat incompatible when profit is the only measure of success.

Of course this is all the evil governments fault and could in no way be addressed by offering subsidies to companies which avoid such abusive practices....

......filthy filthy socialism.....!

New printers now often contain half full ink cartridges to avoid people buying new printers instead of cartridges.

For us interested in photo quality print: Large, expensive ink jet printers are often much cheaper per page than cheaper printers - and you often save the extra cost of the bigger, better printer after a couple of ink refills.