Look at it like you run the business, wouldn't you have to do something to keep making the most money you could to please your investors? Easiest way to do that is to decrease the amount of ink with the printer, keep price on printer the same, and make the actual cartridges slightly smaller. Todays XL cartridges are about the same size of cartridges I used to buy 15 years ago. In the end, not much can be done, profits have to keep increasing otherwise investors wont be happy and you will go under at some point. Sooner rather than later, I bet printers wont come with starter ink/toner. If you wanna look at fancy printers, you should look at "Solid Ink" printers, similar to a normal laser printer, but the toner is a SOLID block that the printer shaves to get toner. When I was in school we had one of the first Xerox printers to use Solid Ink, costly thing, and finicky. The Maintenance Cart (the piece that transfers the material from the block to paper) was about $250, and each "Ink Block" was another $300 or so. Took about 3 years before they finally replaced the ink in it, and that was with daily printing from dozens of students.
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