eRacks Systems Tech Blog
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Your Hardware, Your Choice: Lock-In from Ink Cartridges to Server Drives
Printers taught a lot of us what lock-in feels like, and the business model behind it is simple: sell the printer cheap, then make the money back on the ink, cartridge after cartridge, for as long as you own it. The printer is the loss leader; the supplies are the business. HP’s CEO, Enrique Lores, said as much on CNBC in January 2024: “Every time a customer buys a printer, it’s an investment for us. We are investing in that customer, and if that customer doesn’t print enough or doesn’t use our supplies, it’s a bad investment” (as quoted by TechSpot).
The way to protect that investment is to make sure the cheaper cartridges don’t work. A third-party cartridge runs for a while, then a firmware update stops it. HP’s own support document says a cartridge with a non-HP chip “may function for a period of time, but then cease to function” (HP, “Dynamic Security Enabled Printers”), and HP pushed another round of that firmware on January 29, 2026 (Ars Technica).
TVs run the same play with a different follow-on. As Bruce Perens asked on LinkedIn last month: “Why can you buy a 65 inch 4K TV for $250 and a smaller and less capable computer monitor can cost $1000? Because most of the income from the TV is fees for recording your TV viewing preferences” (LinkedIn). With the printer, the ink pays for the hardware. With the smart TV, your viewing habits do.
We’ll never buy or recommend another HP printer, and this is why.
What the follow-on is worth
Supplies were about 65 percent of HP’s printing revenue last year (HP’s fiscal 2025 annual report). HP’s CFO described the value of “locking that person” into a longer relationship as a 20 percent uplift on the customer (as quoted by TechSpot). HP+ printers, once activated, require original HP ink “for the lifetime of the printer” (HP). Branded inkjet ink runs $9 to $11 per milliliter (Forbes, November 1). When we priced toner for our own new printer this week, the maker’s high-yield set cost about 6.7 times a well-reviewed aftermarket set.
We don’t mind a brand premium. If a maker’s own supplies are better, people will pay for them. What we object to is firmware that removes the customer’s choice: subsidizing the hardware, then policing the supplies to win the money back. Compete; don’t restrict or mandate.
The security argument, checked
HP says cartridges can carry viruses. Ars Technica traced that to one lab-only bug, found through HP’s own bug bounty program, published and patched in 2022, with no known attacks in the wild. The lockout itself started in 2016, six years earlier (Ars Technica). If a cartridge chip can attack a printer, the fix is in the printer’s firmware, not in locking out the customer.
Regulators have mostly punished the secrecy, not the lock. Australia’s consumer regulator had HP compensate customers in 2018 for not disclosing it (ACCC), and Italy fined HP 10 million euros in 2020 (AGCM). Courts in the Netherlands and the US have so far let the practice stand. So the real check is what buyers choose.
The same playbook in servers, where it costs real money
- Branded drives. In April 2025 Synology said its new Plus NAS models would fully support only its own drives or certified ones. After pushback it restored third-party hard drives on those desktop models in October 2025, but its current policy still limits unlisted M.2 SSDs on every model, and unlisted hard drives on its rack and enterprise models, to migration only (Synology).
- CPUs fused to one vendor. AMD’s Platform Secure Boot (PSB) can permanently bind an EPYC or Threadripper PRO processor to one system maker’s firmware key. Dell’s support page says enabling it “will permanently fuse the CPU to only work on Dell platforms” (Dell), and Lenovo did the same with every Threadripper PRO 5000 in its P620 workstation (Tom’s Hardware). A used CPU pulled from one of those machines may never run in another board.
- Fans for “foreign” cards. Dell’s 13th-generation PowerEdge servers raise fan speed by default when they see a third-party PCIe card. Dell documents how to turn that off (Dell).
- Coded network optics. Cisco switches can shut a port down for a third-party SFP module (the small plug-in transceiver for fiber or copper) until you enable an “unsupported transceiver” command (Cisco).
- Paying to switch on what you own. Intel sold activation of features already built into 4th and 5th generation Xeon processors under “Intel On Demand.” It has since been wound down and is not on Xeon 6 (HotHardware).
- Licenses that limit where hardware runs. NVIDIA’s GeForce driver license says the software “is not licensed for datacenter deployment” (NVIDIA), and its virtual GPU features are licensed per user, per year.
Where buyers won
Synology backed off within six months for its desktop models. Intel’s On Demand is gone from Xeon 6. And Oregon, Colorado and Minnesota now limit “parts pairing,” where a maker refuses a working replacement part because it didn’t come from them. Pushback works.
How to spot lock-in before you buy
- Will it run third-party drives with full features: health reports, firmware updates, new storage pools?
- Do the fans ramp up, or warnings appear, when you add a card or drive of another brand? Can you turn that off?
- Are BIOS and firmware updates free, or tied to a support contract?
- Is the CPU fused to the system maker? Will it run in another board if the motherboard dies?
- Do the switch ports take standard optics?
- Are features already in the silicon sold as paid unlocks?
- Does a software license limit where the hardware can run?
- Can you roll firmware back if an update breaks something?
Not every answer has to be “no lock-in” for a purchase to make sense. But you should know the answers before you buy, not after the first update.
How we build
The printer and smart-TV model hides the real price of the hardware in what comes after it: the cartridges, the subscription, the data. We price the other way around. Our systems are priced for what they are, with no subsidy to win back later through locked supplies or subscriptions, so there is nothing to lock. Our home page has said it for years: no vendor lock-in, standard off-the-shelf components, your choice of operating system. We build on standard boards, drives, memory and cards you can buy anywhere, and on open-source operating systems. And adding or changing components doesn’t void our warranty. It’s your machine.
Questions about a build, or about lock-in in something you already own? Write to us.
joe November 7th, 2026
Posted In: News, Technology
Tags: AMD PSB, eRacks, NAS, open hardware, printers, right to repair, Servers, vendor lock-in