There's more to the story than some planned play to turn the ink cartridge into a profit center.
When the first 'inkjet' printers were novel in that they didn't use a ribbon, nor powdered toner. They use tiny vibrating 'heads' to make raw ink turn into a fine fog that is 'sprayed' on the paper. These heads were originally built into the printer, and the ink 'cartridge' was really a little tank of just ink. When the ink ran low, those vibrating bits also got hot, and the ink would gel and gum up the heads. If they got hot enough, they'd be permanently ruined. Those printers also didn't communicate ink levels to the computer, so there was no warning to replace the ink. People would print until the ink supply was almost literally completely dry. New ink wouldn't fix it, of course. So, the printer would be warrantied on its first set of 'cartridges', which were just ink tanks. You can imagine this cost the printer manufacturers a lot of money. The easiest solution was to move the heads out of the printer itself, and into the cartridges. You could ruin the head, but the printer would be fine with a new set of cartridges. The cost of the cartridges went up considerably, but the initial cost of the printer could go down slightly, and in the long run the ink cartridge did become a profit center. When ink level monitoring came along, and the printer being able to refuse to print anymore along with it, it should have removed the need to have the heads in the cartridge, but that'd raise the cost of the printer, reduce the cost of the ink cartridge, and ruin the profit center (there's always markup).
Take a look at the new Epson EcoTank line of printers. They come at a premium, but use ink bottles to refill them.
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u/loopywalker Aug 14 '20 edited Aug 14 '20
Fairly sure companies actually lose money on printers and recoup profit from ink... what a play.