Replaceable wear parts cost extra money, and consume extra resources (which cost is a great proxy for). Many consumer products will never be used enough to make user-replace-ability cost effective or an effective use of resources. If you want to find evidence of this, look at all the computer and other consumer grade that is thrown away with no failed wear items (thrown out due to changes in preferences, obsolescence, or poor maintenance).
>look at all the computer and other consumer grade that is thrown away with no failed wear items
One of my hobbies is rescuing these devices from E-Waste, so I'm acutely aware of them. The huge difference is that these devices are usually pretty out-of-date.
Sure, that first generation iPad that went into an otterbox on day one is just fine, mechanically. But can a normal person use it to do much of anything useful? The youtube app doesn't work. Safari won't load any webpages. The app store loads, but most apps (even compatible ones!) won't install.
Not even just things being "too slow", they can't speak modern protocols.
Printers haven't changed that much. When's the last time there was a change to PostScript that made old printers not just obsolete, but unusable?
I agree that these devices are usually able to accomplish useful tasks, but they're still being thrown away in massive numbers. If you find a way to re-allocate or otherwise re-use these devices, more user-serviceability will be worthwhile, but that's a big 'if'.
There's enough E-Waste being generated without these sorts of anti-user moves.
Those old devices you're talking about were thrown out because they are old. Not because they were designed to fail. I pull PowerBooks from this era out of the trash literally every week. They're basically useless to anyone but collectors. They still work! But they're not very useful for modern tasks, for most people. Sure, giganerds like me can get use out of them. But good luck finding software to run on them...
Everything is designed to fail, the only questions are when and how. These printers are designed to stop working before the absorbent pad is full/used up. My guess is that most of these printers are thrown away long before the 'soft-failure' is triggered.
I reject your notion that everything is designed to fail. I regularly use machines that are older than you are. They certainly were not designed to fail.
The waste pad on every professional grade inkjet printer I've ever seen is a snap-fit part that costs under $25.
But no, defend this practice of throwing away a printer because a sponge is saturated.
I work in an electronics OEM, and I can tell you that all our products have a variety of age-related failure modes. We design them to last a long time, but not forever. LEDs age, as do capacitors, transistors, and batteries. Electro-mechanical systems are even worse!
So you're not designing them to fail, your designing them to last at least X years/uses (but it can last more in theory).
In this case, the printers are literally designed to fail. Once you get to an arbitrary number of uses, you can no longer use them, independently of the device state.
Assuming a replaceable waste pad is around $25. What fraction of a $50 printer is that?
Canon TS302 Wireless Inkjet Printer https://a.co/d/3SjlJbB (not Epson, but cheap inkjet; there were a handful of Epsons under $100).
I solved this problem for our house in the sensible way: with a color HP3600N laser and a B&W multi-function HP (I think a 252), but there’s clearly a cost to make a part user-serviceable that doesn’t strictly have to be and if you’re trying to sell a printer in the $50-90 range, $5 of parts matters.
In this case it amounts to a replaceable sponge. Inkjets already have elaborate mechanisms to support replacement of cartridges. There is no cost justification for omitting something so simple other than driving future demand with forced obsolescence.
