Re: Who prints at home anymore anyway?
I don't print very much as a home user, but it's still very useful.
I recently RMA'd some stuff that had failed to live up to the seller's claims. They sent me a .pdf address label with the postage prepaid. That has to be printed.
In fact, whenever I send a package, I pay online and print the label. It's cheaper, easier, and faster than waiting in line and handing them the form I filled out with a pen, then waiting for them to type all that stuff in to create a label much like the one I could have printed.
Then there's rebate forms that often need to be printed. I've also needed to print documents and mail them the old-fashioned way when dealing with government agencies.
When I go to a brick-and-mortar store locally that has a "we match internet prices" policy, I just hand them a screenshot of the competitor's listing on the web. And if I have done the "local pick up" option that they and many other retailers offer for online purchases, they ask you to bring a printed copy of the confirmation email.
These are just a few examples I've thought of off the top of my head.
Not everyone has a printer at work that they can use for personal stuff, and some that do don't wish to go through the hassle of bringing the documents in on a USB stick (or however you do it), possibly waiting a few days (weekends) before you can get your printing done, etc., when you can hit "print" and have the document in hand in a few seconds.
The home printer, like the PC, is not going anywhere. Smart phones and tablets are essentially toys that occasionally get to do serious stuff (largely as satellite devices for PCs), but toys are all that a lot of people ever needed in the first place. Those people have largely abandoned the PC market in favor of mobile devices. Selfies, pictures of food, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, streaming movies/ TV shows/ cat videos, games, etc., all fall into the "toy" category (and I don't mean that as pejoratively as it sounds-- I like toys too. I have an Android tablet that I use for some of those things.) It's easy to see how a printer would be superfluous for those kinds of things.
If that's all you need, that's fine. That doesn't mean that every home user only uses PCs, tablets, or phones for social media or entertainment purposes.
I too found inkjets to be more trouble than they are worth. I found I was only getting only a small number of pages per ink cartridge. After that, the ink would have dried out, and off I would go to buy another cartridge to print whatever it was I needed to print on that day. I would get one or two more documents printed in the coming months, after which it would have dried out again.
So now I use a black laser all-in-one. I'm not printing tons of stuff, but it is very useful when I do, certainly enough to justify the meager price I paid for it.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
