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Enshittification- “the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking.”
We have witnessed this word in action as we talk about printer technology and quality. Printer quality is something that has been sliding in the past decade as companies try to cut costs by using cheaper and cheaper components. For many printer brands this has caused a significant dip in quality. Printers from HP and Xerox that used to be solid 10. 20, and 30 years ago have been caught replacing metal parts with plastic ones resulting in new failure modes especially in things like gears that may be used in the paper feed mechanism. We have had quite a few Xerox printers fail in rooms where the ambient temperature of the room was 80-90 degree F since someone decided the AC didn't need to be on since there was no one in the room most of the time. The high warm temperatures. The plastic gears soften and cause the teeth to be stripped during use. Once the gears are stripped the printers no longer function properly since they can no longer advance the paper through the system. We have also had HP printers fail with bad control or networking boards causing the printers to be unusable.
A printer brand that we have had pretty good consistent multi-year success with is Brother and so we’ve been recommending the Brother brand for their printers. Users are free to choose any brand they are comfortable with. We recommend users ALWAYS check the reviews on Amazon to make sure the printer meets their needs and to make a note of any unusual reported failure modes that reviewers raise and to make sure those conditions are not or cannot be reproduced in the local computing environment.
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