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What's the most futuristic piece of tech you can buy for under $100? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 3 weeks ago (5 children)

If you shop around you can find a Brother (B&W) laser printer for about $100.

Imagine this weird future: Printers that always just work no matter what type of computer you have or how long they've sat since you last used them. And the "ink" cartridges last forever. And you can buy 3rd party refills or even refill them yourself. Plus it's completely reliant on microplastics to do its job, what's more futuristic than that?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Imagine this weird future: Printers that always just work no matter what type of computer you have or how long they've sat since you last used them. And the "ink" cartridges last forever. And you can buy 3rd party refills or even refill them yourself. Plus it's completely reliant on microplastics to do its job, what's more futuristic than that?

I lived in the 90's, when office work was a tad more reliant on printers and late stage capitalism wasn't as bad. My dad had a laser printer for his business. Very reliable, fast, never needed anything.

I remember that as the past, is my point.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

I was thinking this too, but consider some improvements:

wireless printing seems to “just work” now. Besides having to painfully enter my wifi password with up and down arrows on my printer, it seems like my windows and Mac laptops are able to print to it wirelessly without any initial setup. (I use Linux on my desktop but haven’t tried printing from it yet). I think it even works from phones.
cables: I don’t remember what type of cable printers used, but I remember the big keyboard cable, then the smaller purple and green PS/2 ones (I think keyboard and mouse were different?)… I vaguely remember multiple different peripheral cables, like FireWire? Giant parallel ports for things like scanners?

I hate that most printers don’t come with the USB (B?) cable that seemingly only printers need now, but I’m glad that it’s standard and that everything supports <strikethrough>USB-A</strikethrough> I mean USB-C (except my PC) now. Such a utopia.

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