It’s not really surprising. The demand for printers has fallen off a cliff due to wide acceptance of digital alternatives. People barely need printers now and as such aren’t willing to pay much for them.

This is further exacerbated by the reality that a printer is actually a fairly high precision device and expensive to manufacture.

So you have an expensive to manufacture device that consumers aren’t willing to pay much for. So what happens? They adopt a consumable based business with the printers being locked down to force you to buy their overpriced, high margin consumables that have a low absolute price so consumers don’t think about it much.

Let’s say that we regulate away this lock in. What will happen? Well the price of printers would have to climb to match their actual cost to manufacture. That price would likely turn off consumers from buying them at all. The end result would be the end of the printer business altogether. Maybe not a bad thing as not printing at all is likely a better ecological outcome.