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.
