Printers are very expensive to design, especially if you care about reliably not jamming.
Printers are kind of expensive to manufacture.
Ink is extremely cheap to manufacture.
The printer industry charges a ton for ink and uses the enormous profits from charging for ink to cover the cost of design, and to heavily subsidize the price of printers.
Competing with printer companies as a startup looks like this: you burn a bunch of VC money to get a working design, then you burn even more VC money to make and sell printers at a steep loss, and once you have established a market presence your investors look on in horror as you use it to sell a very cheap commodity product a few milliliters at a time.
I always figured the key was to cut the treadmill.
There's very little difference in how I use a printer today versus 10, 20 years ago, so why can't they just sell me the same basic printer?
I'm sure there's someone on the "edge" of the printer space-- maybe a firm that formerly offered laser printers but moved out of the home market (does Okidata still sell those LED-based printers?) where you could probably buy the rights to a proven design and firmware, maybe even the tooling itself, for basically scrap cost. Polish it up a little- fix the known issues on a 20-year-old design-- and restart the line with an advertised guarantee of long-term availability.
I think you're right about that, but it feels like there's a different approach you could take if you were willing to not be a billion dollar company. If you wanted to run a small printer manufacturer, with a hundred people or so, you could design a printer once, sell it for enough to cover most of the cost of manufacturing (but not the loss leader pricing of an HP), then sell the ink for cost plus whatever percentage makes you profitable.
If the main cost is design, then limit the design. Don't come out with a new model every year. Don't have a dozen products. Sell a color laser printer with USB-C and wifi, that's it. Have a black and white SKU if needed. What other major innovations in printer technology do we need?
The real answer for disrupting the printer industry is making and selling “cartridge refiller devices”. You sell the ink super cheap (hell, you could give it away for free, it’s that cheap). Your margin is on the refiller devices: the fact that printer companies have made hundreds of different cartridges with a myriad of anti-tamper mechanisms means you offer dozens of different devices, and whenever the big bad printer companies make their cartridges more hostile, your scrappy little company diligently reverse-engineers them and offers a new refiller device, and the customer is happy to buy it because he’s sticking it to the printer man.
Printers are kind of expensive to manufacture.
Ink is extremely cheap to manufacture.
The printer industry charges a ton for ink and uses the enormous profits from charging for ink to cover the cost of design, and to heavily subsidize the price of printers.
Competing with printer companies as a startup looks like this: you burn a bunch of VC money to get a working design, then you burn even more VC money to make and sell printers at a steep loss, and once you have established a market presence your investors look on in horror as you use it to sell a very cheap commodity product a few milliliters at a time.