Personal Tech
Internal notes point to cloud connectivity woes for older OfficeJets, though company denies systemic issue
HP appears to have discovered a new subscription tier for printers: "Works until we decide it doesn't."A customer in Quebec claims the company remotely crippled his five-year-old OfficeJet 4650 printer after a firmware update, then spent weeks bouncing him through support queues before admitting internally that an entire generation of printers had effectively fallen off its support cliff.The customer, who says he has filed complaints with both Canada's Competition Bureau and Quebec's consumer protection office, provided internal HP documents obtained through a Canadian PIPEDA access request.
Those records, seen by The Register, include an internal alert titled "Gen1 printers losing connection to Web Services," along with notes attributing the failure to "a server update affecting connectivity to HP Instant Ink" combined with the printer being "likely at end of service life."
The customer says the OfficeJet 4650 stopped working halfway through printing a book manuscript following a firmware update, after which the printer began repeatedly throwing server connection errors and refused to properly reconnect.The customer does not appear to be alone. In a Reddit thread discussing the issue, another OfficeJet 4650 owner said a printer update left the device unable to connect over Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, or even a local network. Factory resets reportedly did nothing, and the user said they eventually gave up and went to a library to print their documents.What followed for the customer in Quebec will sound painfully familiar to anyone who has ever made the mistake of contacting printer support.The user describes weeks of repeated calls to HP support staff, cases mysteriously closed, promised callbacks from escalation teams that never arrived, and repeated attempts to blame local connectivity issues. Eventually, according to the customer, HP supervisors acknowledged the issue was linked to HP servers and was already known internally.One support email reviewed by The Register states that "compatibility with newer devices and connection protocols" had become an issue due to the printer's age, and also references problems with "cloud services linked to our web services."Another internal note states: "The agent acknowledged the printer is old and likely at end of service life. Customer was advised that upgrading the printer may be necessary if issue persists."Which appears to translate roughly as: the printer still turns on, but HP no longer considers that its problem.
