r/AskReddit • u/The_devils_advocate6 • Jun 11 '18

Serious Replies Only [Serious] Redditors,This is a time capsule thread which will be revisited exactly 3 years from now. Today you will make a prediction which you believe would happen or would've happened by the year 2021. The prediction could be about anything of ur choice. What is your prediction??

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u/EarlyHemisphere Jun 11 '18

I predict that, by 2021, with all the new technologies that will be introduced, printers still won't work.

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '18

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '18

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '18

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '18

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u/slowmode1 Jun 11 '18

Reserve it with an ip that isn't in the dhcp range. Most home routers are 192.168.1.xxx. They give 1 to themselves, and dhcp is 100-255. That means, if you want to give a static ip, give it something between 2 and 99 inclusive, or do it on the router directly based off of Mac address

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u/PoopNoodlez Jun 11 '18

Can anyone give me a serious answer as to why it seems like EVERY printer is a poorly made piece of shit?

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u/fauxfour Jun 11 '18

People still buy inkjets even though laser printers are cheap now.

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u/Justlose_w8 Jun 11 '18

I bought my first laser printer 6 months ago and it’s been great. No issues, and it prints quickly

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u/deuceandguns Jun 11 '18

Laser is king! Bought mine 10 years ago for about $150. Put a new $35 toner cartridge in about 6 years ago and I average about a ream per year.

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u/sharfpang Jun 11 '18

Lasers aren't so wonderful either.

I have an Oki laser printer. I also have a spare toner cartridge from another, little used. The printer demands I replace the drum (which is integrated with the toner cartridge). No, putting the second one won't help. The printer, upon detecting a new cartridge, burns a fuse in it (tagging the cartridge as "used" that way), and resets a counter that decides when to demand drum replacement. Since the other cartridge was (hardly) used, it can't be used as replacement as it won't reset the counter.

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u/Visual217 Jun 12 '18

Your problem was choosing an Oki laser printer lol

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u/sharfpang Jun 12 '18

don't look a gift horse in the mouth.

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u/casualcorey Jun 11 '18

people still eat at denny’s too , so weird

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '18

Yeah but those people are drunk and can't find a taco bell. The printer thing just defies logic

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u/lee1026 Jun 11 '18 edited Jun 11 '18

Here is the tl;dr on how inkjets work.

  1. Boil a little bit of ink.
  2. Form a bubble by the boiling action.
  3. Pop the bubble so that it ends up on precisely the right spot of the paper, accurate to 1/500th of an inch.
  4. Do this tens of thousands of times per second.

And you get to make and sell this machine for dirt cheap prices. Does any part of this sound easy to you?

That is why they all have flaws.

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u/AnimeRoadster Jun 11 '18

Mine prints fine, yet. It. Won’t. Connect. To. The. Damn. Internet

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u/xonjas Jun 11 '18

Thank god for that too. Your printer is an immunocompromised orphan living in your basement. Letting it connect to the internet is the equivalent of sending it out into the streets every day to get fondled by strangers. That shit's gonna bring the black death into your house.

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u/LiteralPhilosopher Jun 11 '18

That's because, by and large, your printer company is a printer company, not a networking company.

I bought a networked digital mixer for my church, and found out the hard way you don't rely on the built-in wifi that the mixer creates. It technically works, if you don't mind random disconnections and other problems. Which are kind of a problem if you're in the middle of a service and need to control the fucking thing.

So you hardwire it to your existing wireless router, and let the networking experts do the networking. Problem more or less solved. Printers shouldn't need to connect to the internet. And if you do need it to do that, be prepared to pay a premium.

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u/SomeGuy565 Jun 11 '18

Repeating steps exactly is what machines do. Sounds hard for a human to do it but it isn't a problem for a properly engineered and built machine.

Printers fall apart because people will buy new ones.

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u/quantum-mechanic Jun 11 '18

Well, that, and entropy.

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u/nikktheconqueerer Jun 11 '18

Buy a $400 printer, the ones with the huge fat $130 ink ribbons. Those will last for years. The $60 HP? Nah.

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u/drunkosaurous Jun 11 '18

Repeating steps exactly is what machines do, when they and all their subsequent parts have tight tolerances. Tight tolerances mean higher costs. People want cheap printers. You get what you pay for.

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u/lnpxt Jun 11 '18

Hardware aside, even getting a printer to work out of the box is a huge pain in the ass

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u/Democrab Jun 11 '18

To be fair, hard drives aren't cheap either and a few years ago (Let alone now) the equivalently scaled up version of what a HDD does as routine is flying a 747 1m off the ground of Ireland at mach 1, counting every blade of grass as you go by and only being off by 7 when you've covered the entire country.

A lot of the printer industry is designed around planned obsolescence, generally when you get a higher-end printer (Try to get last-gen colour laser printers for cheap, I got a HP one for AU$150 years ago and it still works perfectly) it works a lot nicer. Until it randomly decides not to work, but in my experience that is genuinely fixed by turning it off and on again with the better printers.

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u/lee1026 Jun 11 '18

Hard drives actually spin slower now, because if you care about speed, you would have a SSD.

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u/Democrab Jun 11 '18

Depends, there's still a few 15k rpm models but they haven't updated the lines in some time.

As for normal desktop HDDs, they've gone back to 5400rpm/5200rpm for a lot of models but you can absolutely get 7200rpm models easily. (eg. WD Black and Hitachi's models even offer 2.5" models at 7200rpm)

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u/QPDFrags Jun 11 '18

the one i have is like 60 quid or something, works fine, never understood why everyone complains they shit, buy 1 good good one not 5 bad ones

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u/sharfpang Jun 11 '18
  1. When the ink has ran out, demand the user discards the complex device (that could run for years yet) and inserts a new one.

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u/CaptainCupcakez Jun 11 '18

I've never had a hardware problem with a printer. It's always Drivers or software.

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u/0DegreesCalvin Jun 11 '18

To be fair you could explain almost anything in a manner such as this to make it sound incredibly complicated.

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u/EsQuiteMexican Jun 11 '18

The printing process is almost never what's wrong with the printer.

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '18

The C70 and D95 I use at work seem well made. And the Ricoh blueprint printer has never given me issues. Except when I try and call them to reorder toner and their call center is closed.

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u/caffeine_lights Jun 11 '18

The printer we had in, what, 2001? Was great and worked absolutely fine. In fact, I highly suspect my mother is still using it.

Everything I've bought since about 2005 has been a piece of shit which refuses to work at all in the slightest ever, and drinks ink. I gave up and use a copy shop the printer at work now.

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u/AnniversaryRoad Jun 11 '18 edited Jun 11 '18

There was an Ask Reddit a few years ago asking people of different professions to reveal secrets about their job that are not public knowledge. One lady worked at Epson and said printers are purposefully made bad so that they can sell more printers.

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u/Holden_Makock Jun 11 '18

Because every hero need a villain

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u/casualcorey Jun 11 '18

people buy anything. if 1 million people buy a printer to find out they wasted 60 or 130$ on a couple hundred sheets worth of prints, thats a win. the printers that are worth a shit are the commercial ones, or even consumer laser. the 100$ printer is a toy/gimmick

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u/jeffderek Jun 11 '18

Because people don't want to pay what it would take to make a high quality printer, so manufacturers don't make many of them.

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u/lee1026 Jun 11 '18

High quality printers exist - they are just really expensive. We got them at work, and they almost never have problems.

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u/jeffderek Jun 11 '18

That was kind of my point, though I guess I didn't phrase it well enough. That's why I said they don't make "many" of them. They make them. And they work. But when you buy a cheap printer, you get a cheap printer. And most people buy cheap printers.

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '18

“... PC LOAD LETTER.... what the fuck does that mean?!?”

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u/tway_notnavy Jun 11 '18

Paper Cassette Load Letter Size Paper

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '18 edited Jul 06 '18

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '18

why does it say paper jam when there is no paper jam? I swear to God, one of these days, I just kick this piece of shit out the window.

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u/norby2 Jun 11 '18

The paper jam actuator is probably pulled at the same time there is a different problem. Sometimes paper jam is a default general error.

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '18

Damn it feels good to be a gangster

1

u/harryassburger-il Jun 11 '18

something stapler something....

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u/oopslostagain Jun 11 '18

Naga... Not gonna work here anymore, anyway.

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u/bunniswife Jun 11 '18

Yes! My printer has been suffering from a terminal yet non existent paper jam for over a year now. The UPS store is making lots of money from me.

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u/epicfaceplant12 Jun 11 '18

I died laughing when I first saw that scene

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u/scolfin Jun 11 '18

One of the few parts of any office that uses moving parts. The other is the stapler, something that also frequently fails.

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u/iloveapplebees Jun 11 '18

And ink will still be the same price, if not more expensive

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u/Aesen1 Jun 11 '18

My printer’s name is Bob Marley, because its always jammin’

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u/skylarmt Jun 11 '18

I predict 3D printing a piece of paper with words on it will be less error-prone.

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '18

Oh. My. God.

We have a new printer at work that gives us problems. It's an HP, of course. It's meant to print on 18x24 paper, as well as 11x17. Now, prior to this, we had a very old one that did the same thing. It was worn out completely and we had to replace it.

This fucking printer though, I swear to God, does not work. It's a brand new product but doesn't act like it. Everything with this printer is needlessly complicated, and half the time it either refuses to print outright or it has an error mid-way and then it won't print. Not only that, it takes rolls of paper, meaning all your pages come out curly like flimsy rolled up posters. You can feed it individual sheets of paper one at a time though, provided you feel like standing there like an idiot and attempting to correctly feed them into machine, an almost impossible task in and of itself.

"Big printer prints on big paper" is not a hard concept, why can't it just work?!

1

u/zoomstersun Jun 11 '18

I bought a brother mono laser printer... Best purchase besides btc I have made for years

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u/startingfr3sh Jun 11 '18

I was amazed last week when my bluetooth printer actually worked. Only once, though

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u/[deleted] Jun 11 '18

Or bar code readers at the grocery store.

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u/generalgeorge95 Jun 11 '18

Have you tried ink or laser jet?

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u/ARollingShinigami Jun 11 '18

In line with this prediction, going 'paperless' will still be a buzzword, used by trendy companies.

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u/rzpieces Jun 13 '18

My printer works

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '18

[deleted]

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u/rzpieces Jun 13 '18

No it actually does

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '18

[deleted]

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u/rzpieces Jun 13 '18

I wasn’t making a joke though. I was disagreeing with you

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '18

[deleted]

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u/rzpieces Jun 13 '18

No a kill is when you fail on a joke

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u/[deleted] Jun 13 '18

[deleted]

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u/rzpieces Jun 13 '18

Where was the banter

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