- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- nottheonion@lemmy.world
EDIT: This happened back in 2025. Will leave as I’m sure I’m not the only one that didn’t know, but I saw it on hacker news and didn’t realize it was a year old. My bad.
In an odd approach to trying to improve customer tech support, HP allegedly implemented mandatory, 15-minute wait times for people calling the vendor for help with their computers and printers in certain geographies.
Callers from the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, and Italy were met with the forced holding periods, The Register reported on Thursday. The publication cited internal communications it saw from February 18 that reportedly said the wait times aimed to “influence customers to increase their adoption of digital self-solve, as a faster way to address their support question. This involves inserting a message of high call volumes, to expect a delay in connecting to an agent and offering digital self-solve solutions as an alternative.”
HP is one of those companies whose products you can easily avoid. I don’t understand their dominance in the printer market, or why people continue to buy their products when many of them are objectively poor. I also don’t recall a time when HP had a particularly strong reputation to begin with.
At this point, most competitors offer better alternatives than HP.
It’s a known brand, that’s the reason why people choose it.
No, their laptops were pretty good about 10-12 years ago. Mac guy, but Macs weren’t great in the Intel era. I was advised to get an HP laptop. The one I was looking at was very highly rated. Can’t remember the name. Bought one from Asus with better specs. I would have been fine with the HP.
We used to have Elite Desks at work and they are dogshit. I kinda want one though. 8th Gen i5 with 8GB RAM. I wanna toss the hard drive and put an SSD in it. Then put Steam OS on it. I bet it would be decent for 2000s PC gaming. Like up to Skyrim.
Current gen omnibooks are really good if you can ignore or cover the AI branding. They’re also a really good value especially with how often they’re on sale. Source: I bought one a year ago and it’s been very good.
Yeah, I think most new PCs are also Copilot PCs with the branding and the button, if that’s what you mean. I don’t really mind that. I only use Windows at work, and we can’t use Copilot because it requires a personal Microslop account now, and we’re not allowed to sign in with one (only the corporate Intranet account). I think some people do anyway; to me, it’s as bad as using Facebook/whatever social at work, because IT can see everything you do. And I have enough history with Microslop (Xbox as well) I don’t want to associate with my job. I leave my job at the door when I leave and I leave my personal/social life at the door when I go there.
There are better printers than HP, but they have a solid niche where they’re the least expensive enterprise printers that aren’t entirely garbage.
Least expensive until you have to buy ink or toner.
Not necessarily. Epson has good support in the enterprise area, but their toner is just as bad as HP’s. And don’t even get me started on Lexmark.
Again, their home stuff is a different story. But once you cross over into “lol business” things change.