Comment by captaincrowbar

Doctorow mentions the cases where a printer company has made their software lie about how much ink was left in a cartridge to make consumers replace them more often. I always wondered why a manufacturer would want to do that. I mean, I understand the motive of making consumers buy ink more often, but from the manufacturer's point of view, why would they want to throw perfectly good ink away? Colour ink isn't as expensive to manufacture as they like to claim but it's still worth something. Why didn't they just put less ink in the cartridge to begin with (and maybe lie about how much was in it), instead of lying about how much was left toward the end of its life and throwing ink away?