NEWS
Matt Prior
TESTER’S NOTES
Active and passive safety are now mandatory, but can we lose the annoying bongs?
I
wonder if anyone outside of the world of printer sales is sad that we’re buying fewer of them.
In its annual ‘How We Shop, Live and Look’ report in October, the department store John Lewis said that its sales of home printers had fallen by 26% during the past year.
It even conceded that the printer is “resented… a destroyer of homework, voracious devourer of ink” – and it usually tries to be nice enough about things it sells that you will buy one.
Is there a more hated domestic device? The printer industry has a horrible reputation for adopting the worst bits of the tech world, trying to control our behaviour by forcing the purchase of specific expensive ink cartridges, even if the colour you need hasn’t run out, automatically updating software to reduce capability, locking out microchipped cartridges and trapping us into subscriptions. My toaster doesn’t do that.