I can’t blame the customer here. Ya, that’s the USB in the Ethernet port.
HP printers are the avantgarde of enshittification when it comes to gadgets, although the earliest way I can think of selling a product similarly to a subscription is Gillette shavers. They basically sold a handle, and the first set of razor blades were free. After that one had to buy their proprietary and overpriced blades. HP managed to take this principle into the realm of peripheral devices.
Nowadays other gadgets have been “inspired” by HP in therms of enshittification. For instance, there are headphones that require an app to be set up properly, as the manufactorer can save implementing a physical button and can get tracking data form the user.
The sticker on the USB port is just another (physical) dark pattern.
I read about this. They make the printer WITH a perfectly good USB port and then stick a “no USB” label over it and attempt to force you to use their wireless setup.
trying to force the app, force the networking… get the printer online and sending data back, trick an account signup too… because, hey. user data nom nom nom.
and of course, also trick you into enabling automatic firmware updates–the first of which will be waiting for you and ramps-up blocking of third-party consumables.
Don’t forget all the ads to buy their ink every month and other bullshit
When I put the old HP printer on the network, I put it into a “Restricted Internet Access” group on the router. Indended for limiting the kids’ internet access times, but you can set it to locked perpetually.
A lot of HP consumer printers will stop working if they can’t phone home for a week or so
This worked fine for a number of years until it started wasting ink like mad (had to deep-clean it after 3-4 pages with color images (not full-sized images, just some graphics on the page).
This is a fairly recent development. Maybe 3-4 years old.
Our last HP was definitively older. I have to admit it lasted long, and worked rather good until about a year ago.
And if they do have USB printing, the firmware might still get in the way. Don’t buy HP printers if you just want to print and be done.
Can confirm, sister in law had one of these and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure it out.
holy fuck.
PC Load Letter? What the f**k does THAT mean?
Why does the USB port say no USB?
The only other three comments explained it an hour ago.
Thanks, don’t know why I didn’t see those comments before.
Federation takes time
Yeah but can you give me the cliff notes?
Its for the legendary wireless cable
I honestly thought it was a port just for a wireless dongle or something.
It looks to me as if an ESP-01S WLAN WiFi module is installed under the plastic cover (under the stickers) and as if it is the back of a 3D printer. Then you could remove it and the host device would no longer have WiFi. If the host at least does not check whether it is present etc. when booting/starting and otherwise refuses the service
In my years of IT, I saw a few customers do this. I always put the printers on WiFi so they could move the printer to wherever they wanted it.
Maybe it’s the environments I work in, but WiFi printing always ends in tragedy.
Ya, you have to be careful with printing over WiFi. Robust DNS and static IP’s can help a lot.
