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HP To Combine PC, Printer Divisions
itwbennett writes "Apotheker wanted to sell off HP's PC division, Whitman vowed not to, and now HP is combining the PC division with the printer division in an effort to cut costs, unnamed sources told the All Things D blog. Given that both divisions reported declining sales last quarter, is HP hoping that two wrongs make a right?"
Oh wait, they already do that.
HP will now start shipping all their PCs with 32 MB of RAM, but you can buy an additional 256 MB for just $100.
HP used to make the best printers in the world. This is sad.
PC with built in printer. Just one unit, hopefully it will be a laser printer cause if its not you'll be stuck with a useless printer module in your PC for however long it lasts.
Never had a HP inkjet that lasted longer than the first set of cartridges
No, but the power supplies will have chips in them that run out every 6 months, and you'll have to get a replacement - which costs about 75% of the cost of a new machine.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
"PC Load Letter" will finally mean something! The fact that it means that your motherboard won't POST until you refill the paper tray and replace all ink cartridges with cryptographically verified and datestamped new ones(see also, HP 'all-in-one' devices that refuse to scan if the printer's consumables are not in good order...) is sort of a downer; but at least that puzzle will finally be solved...
More seriously, I imagine that there might be some economies to be wrung out of combining two divisions that both specialize in the logistics of rebadging and regurgitating plastic shit; but I cannot think of a single positive design or engineering lesson to be shared between the two.
Desktop PCs and printers:
Buggy whips and horse shoes?
Fat collars and bell bottoms?
Sextants and paper charts?
(He quipped while typing on his desktop PC and printing the morning meeting agenda...)
That is actually a part of their corporate philanthropy policy: By setting the price of their printers at approximately what they are worth, rather than their cost of production, and the price of their ink as though it were FDA-approved for human surgical applications, HP has contributed more free steppers and sensors to the hobbyist robotics community than just about anybody else...
Five years ago, HP made pretty nice printers and pretty crappy computers.
Now they make pretty nice printers and pretty crappy computers, but the print drivers are so horrible (and bloated) they might as well give you a rock and call it a printer.
i haven't had a printer at home for years now and hardly miss it
photos? - CVS or any of the online places and either have them shipped or go pick them up. $.19 cents a photo can't be beat
if i need to print a few pages every few months i'll do it at work
a big job like 50 pages i'll pay the $7 to fedex/kinko. but i only need that once a year or so
what is there to print that people see a need to buy these things for home use other than for a home business?
The Current HP makes cheap crappy printers even in their business range of laser jets that always have problems. Their PC division makes cheap crappy PCs that are no better than anyone else. Is it just me or do these things sound like being similar enough that maybe they can be formed into one division that makes crappy Printers & PCs? I mean how much work is it to make crappy devices anyways? So cut the engineers in half again by making them work on both... They are already crappy so it's not like they can go much further down at this point...
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
If HP hadn't more or less gutted itself(between spinning off the good stuff as 'Agilent' and the Carly era), there might have been one thing to hope for:
Purely for the pointless nerd-value, who among us would not smile to see a line of x86 PCs that, instead of a BIOS or EFI, had a firmware based on the unholy fusion of the design principles of Open Firmware; but with an extended PJL command set, rather than Forth, as the underlying language?
It'd be magnificently pointless(as would the postscript and PCL RIPs implemented entirely in SMM); but the world would be a better place for it having existed...
I don't know what the revenue breakdown is between consumer and pro markets, but HP's printer division also produces really high-end devices. The sorts of printers that print huge banners and posters - they'll take paper a couple of metres wide and of any length. These are really expensive, but you buy the ink in huge bottles for about the same price as a tiny cartridge for their consumer printers.
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Maybe the printer folks would not be having so many issues if they built the printers like the LaserJet 4 - long lasting and rugged - not like the disposable junk they make now full of even more flimsy plastic and circuit boards that need to be "toasted" in the oven from time to time to keep them working.
Last decent printers I purchased form them was the LaserJet 8150 - even with their tendency to eat low-voltage power supplies (at least I could get the parts to fix 'em myself) First one that was a sign of things to come: HP 9000 - the paper jam queen.
Old batches of Vectra VL420 PCs and Omnibook 6000/6100 laptops lasted forever for us.
More likely they are combining their losers in preparation of either selling them to someone, or spinning them off into their own company.
Putting them together makes jettisoning them at some point easier.
HP REALLY need to tell people that they still intend to make PCs via a publicity campaign and it was a mistake. And they need to patch their errant 8M GPU models BIOS (or what ever) so they are not radio crash-able which was the only item that was dud and caught bad press ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
That's because they assume that unlike consumers, professionals factor the price of consumables into the buying decision.
As of Postgres v6.2, time travel is no longer supported.
This is not a troll - I actually want to know. I have not owned one for most of the past decade, and do not intend to change that. I just don't understand the point of owning one.
1. I print all work-related documents at work, and my employer provides print resources for mobile workers. That's if I don't just put a presentation or collateral on a tablet and distribute it beforehand via PDF, which is always sexier.
2. There is no need to print photos at home - any print shop will do it cheaper, with less headache, and with higher quality. They'll even frame them and ship them for you for a pittance.
3. With any freely-available PDF authoring tool, I can add a genuine signature to a contract and email it back, bypassing the entire "print, sign, scan" paradigm.
4. For the small-business owners, there are at least half a dozen copy-shops within 10km which will accept your print jobs via email.
So I'll ask again - why does anyone buy a desktop printer? What do you do with them that's worth the cost of replacement parts, ink, warranties, paper, and headache?
This actually might not be a bad idea. If we could apply the miniaturization craze to printers that has been used on computers, maybe we could end up with a laptop that can spit out hard copies on request. Obviously it wouldn't have a huge reserve of blank paper, but for things like a boarding pass, movie ticket, or even just a quick print of the photo you just took, this could prove to be a useful idea. As small as current gen laptops have gotten I think you could combine one with a printer (and scanner too) without exceeding the 'reasonable to carry in a shoulder bag' size limit.
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Having them outsource my job to India in 2004 was the best thing that could have happened. Better to get off the capsizing ship before the rest of the rats have to.
Remember when some CRT TVs had integrated VHS decks? I hated those things. So cheap. So ugly.
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That is because they are from other manufacturers. I'm not even sure if HP actually makes the DesignJets any more. And apparently the firmware has been farmed out...there have been a number of inconsistencies in recent HP SNMP MIBs which suggest a possible lack of QA.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
To be honest I could care less what happens to their computer department. Their calculator department on the other hand is what to know about, as HP is one of the few companies who still make RPN-Capable calculators.
more likely it is because these things are always purchased with corporate HP support contracts, which are the "ink cartridges" of the business world.
I happen to work for said behemoth...so take this as you will. HP has a driver that works with ANY HP printer, it is called the Unified Printer Driver, or UPD. Light weight and trouble free...if you have driver problems, give it a try, it will make you happy again. Combining the PC and Printer divisions is not the only changes being made, they are also combining some of the sales forces, streamlining the Enterprise Services divisions and attempting to focus on Cloud, Security and Big Data. I believe Meg has the best intentions, but it may be too late. HP is such a behemoth of bureaucracy and idiotic busy work that I doubt it can be saved, more likely it will be like watching a large air ship crash...really slowly waffling and coming to rest on the ground without much of a crash, or it may crash like an F-16 doing MACH 3 and hitting a brick wall. Anyway, I digress. HP has too many old timers at the helm that won't allow the company to become more agile, they have to fill out form H-1165537u3 in triplicate in order to sell a customer with cash in hand a $400 laptop. I happen to work for the Enterprise Services group and have been working on a deal that is worth $40,000.00 US, and it has taken nearly 2 months to get through the paperwork (digital as it may be) in order to help a customer implement something that will take about 6 days. That is what HP has come down to. Peace & Love!
Actually, if you price them out, the commercial supplies come in at exactly the same cost / mL as consumer cartridge ink. I've only compared Canon ink to their commercial inkjet printers, but commercial prices range from about $0.34/mL to $1.03/mL (PFI-103MBK, 130 mL tank, about $45-$140 retail). Small format cartridges, (BCI-6BK 14.5mL, $5-$15 retail), cost anywhere from $0.34/mL to $1.03/mL.
The difference is that a printing shop charges their customers enough to cover all their costs and make a profit. If ink prices go up, so do customer prices. A customer is far more price sensitive, as they see those ink prices directly.
John
Didn't they learn from Fiorina fiasco?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Make that a 3d printer and the printer could print the pc. Think of the savings in delivery charges, returns handling etc.
Fat collars and bell bottoms? ...being "dinosaur".
I happen to run a haberdashery in Vegas with a thriving business, supplying all the Elvis impersonators with various attire.
I've now observed the computer industry for some decades, and I think this move by HP is a loser. Two wrongs don't make a right. If the PC division was not profitable on its own, combining it will only make it less efficient.
HP's PC business is in trouble because the Windows ecosystem is broken. The last HP PC I saw had 2 hrs worth of spyware removal, old drivers, no customization to make it easy for the user, 200 programs in the start menu, and annoying registration pop-ups. Although I will never trust Cupertino, if you buy a Mac you have none of this. Users want stuff to just work. HP's business model is based on selling cheaply made PCs to idiots and profiting from the advertising. That's not a real business model. They need to find a way to make fewer types of machines, and make more of them, so that they can use economies of scale to make good profit. They also need to cut out the spyware/spamware and configure these machines for your grandmother to use them to web-surf, email and word process. And for the love of whatever absent gods you believe in, install Chrome or Firefox but not IE!
HP's printer business is in trouble for the same reason. About 15 years ago they realized that the product was the ink, not the printers, and started selling really expensive ink in cheapie printers because they realized most people don't print much and don't think about it until they have to. The problem is that now the old rule, "You can trust any printer you buy from HP," is no longer true. Their brand is worth a lot less as a result and the new printer manufacturers are eating them alive. Again, they got fat and lazy on the easy money from the oblivious cows of the mid-American middle class consumer.
Someone else here on Slashdot said something that I've known to be true from my own experience:
HP suffers from too many cooks in the kitchen. As soon as the easy money rolled in, they got greedy and hired a lot of idiots to cover their tracks. Now they can't manufacture a PC at low cost, or act quickly, or do anything without 10,000 committee meetings. The human disease has taken over. It takes very little brainpower to make a great PC for $600 with $50 in profit to the maker. If you had the bulk purchasing power that HP does, you could make that same PC for $50. It's a mystery how they're losing money in this market, until you look at how big and bloated HP has become over the past 15 years.
What if the 3D printer created another 3D Printer which created another 3D printer...
You think Tribbles are bad? Imagine tribbles that consume HP ink everytime they reproduced. The economy would collapse. Iraq would be invading US to get access to a black liquid, ink.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
Back in the day, Sony had some hideously expensive dye sublimation printers that were only slightly larger than the 4x6s they were capable of printing.
More recently, the sad, pitiful Ghost of Polaroid Future has been flogging a few products based on the 'zink'('zero ink' because we built the proprietary ink right into the proprietary paper!) based products of similarly miniature persuasion.
In the black-and-white world, Zebra and friends have had ruggedized and portable thermal label printers with varying levels of built-in logic(anywhere from a keypad and the ability to accept short strings up to a wireless WinCE PDA that plugs right into your warehouse logistics database thing and prints labels based on a combination of what the warehouse guy just scanned and what the database says about where that box should be going. Not terribly general purpose, the sort of thing that would come with an integration contract; but pretty cute).
Canon NoteJet 486. It even offered an "optional facsimile modem."
I have a Samsung laser printer/scanner all-in-one. It's useful for printing tickets I buy on-line, labels for packages I need to ship, text I don't want to read off the screen. It's really convenient, and it cost me peanuts, and the toner lasts forever. I can also copy & scan quickly. I used to print maps for unknown parts of the city if I need to go out, but now I have an OpenStreetMaps & GPS in my mobile. Guests who visit me do not though, so printer is useful again.
Ok, I still do print, sign, scan, probably because it's easier for me than PDF authoring. Oh, and I'm quite happy with Samsung drivers in Windows- I didn't get any unnecessary crap and it just works. Under Linux though, splix (http://splix.ap2c.org/) sometimes misbehaves.
--Coder
I think the cost cutting is the $10 million or so per year that Vyomesh Joshi makes since he's retiring. I think that's a good chunk of savings right there.
That was before they started using standard dc motors with optical encoders some years ago, and their steppers where the 7.2 anyway. But yes, salvaging old hp printers where a good source of steppers.
I think it's a completely BAD idea. I chose my notebook because it was small and light, yet had a big enough screen. Paper is bulky and heavy, and I don't often print anything at all, even at work.
And despite the added size and weight, even with a desktop it's a dumb idea. Printers have too many moving parts and break too easily. It's like a VCR/TV combo; the VCR will die years before the TV part does.
I do think incorporating the computer and screen in one enclosure would be a good ides -- oh wait, that's called a "tablet" and they already have them.
Free Martian Whores!
I did, but not since the 870C and 1600C were current models.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
So useless if the screen failed, which was quite likely since putting the two components together indicated that both were likely of poor quality.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
The problem is that Samsung and Brother are somehow making consumer crap that only costs 1/2 as much. Why buy a HP when I can get a Samsung or Brother laser printer for under $60?
Carly Fiorina combined PCs and printers in 2005. Mark Hurd un-combined them during his reign. Now Meg combines them and under Bradley. Bradley should have been fired with the Touchpad fiasco but now heads HP's most profitable division. What's wrong with this picture?
We're merging the PC and printer divisions because, they're, like, one product, you know?
They both plug in to the wall.
They both plug into the network.
So they're the same thing. :P
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This means that they will now be making PCs with RAM that needs to be replaced every month and can only be bought from HP.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
For the really big HP ink tanks (HP 91s, they hold 775ml of ink), MSRP is $293 or about $0.38/ml. Still right in the same range as smaller cartridges...
0 1 - just my two bits
That way, inventory will be forced to move, and they can even mark-up their printers a bit, and let the toner be refillable. That would allow them to lower cost of the ink, bump up printer prices and not worry about the PC's competition, such as Dell.
Next move would be to integrate the monitor bases w/ the printer and make it one unit, so that they can raise that price even more, while throwing in a Touchpad w/ it.
In other news, Polaroid has purchased Smith Corona and will be merging instant film cameras with the venerable typewriter to create a new streamlined company and product, the PhotoWriter!
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Agreed, I would never buy such a monster. Heck, I wouldn't even recommend it to my mother, who prints photos with wild abandon.
One of the more novel bits of old TV-based technology that I saw was a wooden-case-era CRT TV with a built-in mini-printer that allowed the viewer to print out hard copies of teletext pages.
Wasn't that the intire primiss of the movie batteries not included
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I've been buying them for a couple decades and the latest models have fewer problems than their older counterparts. HP has plenty of issues: their Universal Print Driver is a nightmare, they have too many models with little to differentiate them (think Apple mid-1990s), their pricing on printer memory is beyond ridiculous, and their website sucks balls. But their hardware is still solid, at least in the $1000+ market.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
HP, hardware engineers that can stand with pride behind their work.
Software engineers that are a step below drunk chimps at a poo flinging party.
I have nothing but a facepalm for this news.
I am John Hurt.
I've got a HP inkjet sitting on my desk that's over 10 years old and is still working. Granted, it hasn't been in use all that time, but it still has several years of use on it.
Fuck Beta
I understand why you'd ask ... but I still find a desktop printer fairly useful. I don't print very often, so I actually prefer a good networked color laser that all the machines on my home LAN can share. (With a laser, the toners don't "dry out" if they're not used quickly enough and they don't clog up like the inkjets do.)
I get the most use out of my printer doing things related to my side business of on-site computer service/consulting. For example, I usually print out my own invoices, in advance, when I go to a client. That serves the dual purpose of giving me a sheet of paper with their address and phone number(s) on it, so I know how to get there and who to call if I run late or what-not, AND gives me something to leave with them when I leave. (Sure, most people could deal with me simply emailing them the invoice later that evening, after I tell them what they owe and I get paid. But I usually put some hand-written notes on the invoice as I work ... such things as what wireless network key I configured their new wi-fi router with or what static IP I assigned to some device I set up.)
I've also printed up my own business cards before, saving some money over paying a printer to do it, and printed some 3-fold color flyers which I mailed out - and got some new business from.
Another thing we do with the printer from time to time is print out online coupons. Many of these are bar-coded and require you bring the paper in to the restaurant or shop to redeem it. I wish they'd get it so you could do all of this by showing a clerk a screen or code on your smartphone instead, but not everyone is at that point yet.
Lastly, I'll print out step-by-step installation instructions for things now and then. For example, we bought a used platform bed last year off Craigslist, and the owners no longer had the instructions for it. I was promised "it's not that hard to assemble!", but realized that wasn't quite true after I got it all home and tried to figure it out. I was able to download a PDF of the instructions, but printing it out on 8 or 9 sheets of paper and stapling them together made for something much easier to read while working than, say, viewing it on my iPad while I had tools and parts in hand, with stuff scattered all over the bedroom floor.
Remember when some CRT TVs had integrated VHS decks? I hated those things. So cheap. So ugly.
While they weren't a great idea for general use, I can see that they had some potentially useful niches. I remember one job I had in the late 90s where I was sent into a room to watch some stupid corporate video on one of those.
It occurred to me that this was one use where they might be beneficial over separates. It was a simple manner for them to haul out the portable TV/video, plug it in and start the video, then put it away again when I was finished. Nice simple box that fits in a cupboard.
Had that been separates, they would have had to get them out separately, connect them up, possibly faff around selecting and/or tuning in the correct channel, and then disconnect them and put them back in the cupboard. (Or I suppose they could have had them set up permanently on a bulky trolley, but why bother?)
Not that big a deal, but you can see that it might have been useful under those circumstances. For general household use though, they weren't that great- someone I knew had one that only had one tuner so (unlike a normal TV + Video setup where the TV and video recorder have separate tuners) you couldn't record one thing and watch another. Also, as the other reply says, there was the old "one part fails, whole thing has to get sent off" issue, compounded by the fact they were normally made with the most el cheapo constituent parts.
Probably also explains why "double decker" video recorders (similar to double audio cassette decks but with VHS) never took off. Amstrad- a low-end UK brand- had one in the late 80s or so, and I saw another low-end model six or seven years back, but that was it. Probably because they would have cost almost as much as two separate recorders, and the convenience for dubbing- not something people would have done *that* much- would have been outweighed by the fact that (I assume) you couldn't use each individual deck on a different TV or in a different room.
Some of these are specific to the particular technology involved, but the principles may apply more generally.
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Actually, they sort of already do this. When you purchase a new inkjet, the cartridges are rarely the same as in the specified standard inkset; these are the special ones used to fill and test the machine's ink lines, and typically have 1/3-ish the ink of a new cartridge. Lexmark, especially, was notorious for this, and had some desktop printers they'd sell for less than the price of a new inkset.
Printer manufacturers have a vested interest in having you buy their ink, from the little 8.5x11 printers to huge 128" solvent machines (both of which, by the way, HP has in their DeskJet and DesignJet product lines). Even in my shop, I spend more per year by FAR (3-4 times more, actually) in ink than I do on the machine lease, and anybody printing tons of photos at home will too. A printer is just an ink vending machine, you know.
And now I just read your comment text again. So.... yeah. Agreed.
Heck, I used to have a thermal printer with a roll of thermal paper to print out inventory tags. It was small, handheld, and reliable.
With all the people gone, the rest may as well share a common office now.
So now does that mean that the printers will actually have been tested with a real computer before they go to market?
If we could apply the miniaturization craze to printers that has been used on computers,
I wish, printers weigh half of what my new 13" Asus does (2.06 KG) but take up 3-4 times the desk space which is precisely why I dont have one. I just want a small printer, I dont give a crap if it's A5 and I have to feed the sheets in myself, I use one about once a month to print out a map or something.
Tablets and phones are not an option here as I cant leave them with someone else and it's dangerous (and illegal) to use them whilst driving.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
It's an application specific device. I could use such things for industrial or commercial applications like the GP mentioned: ticketing, sales, proofing. I agree with you that the average tablet owner would never want one.
John
...and you can't buy their equivalent for under a grand. I won't argue whether their low-end stuff is crap, I have one on my desk and it's been OK, but that hardly constitutes a significant data set. I'm just saying their enterprise products are still good. I did hear a story once that when Carly arrived she gave a speech complaining about how their products were built too well so they lasted too long and customers weren't replacing them fast enough, but in my experience their quality did not decline.
I do see a lot of people using the Ricoh Copier/Printers, they seem to hold up well.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.