October 1, 2011

On Better Printers

After another fairly annoying morning with my printer, I was reminded of this satirical post that the Onion ran on Tim Cook and Printers. The premise of this was basically that printers were as dull as a topic anyone could think of (basically emphasizing the difference between the creative Steve Jobs and the very operationally centric Tim Cook)

New Apple CEO Tim Cook: ‘I’m Thinking Printers’

SAN FRANCISCO-Following the resignation of Apple founder Steve Jobs, incoming CEO Tim Cook called a meeting of shareholders and members of the press Thursday morning to announce that he envisioned printers as the company’s future. “Laser, ink-jet, double-sided, color, black-and-white-the future of technology is in printers.

And yet I really do think printers need their “ipod” moment. We have for far too long been stuck with a purely utilitarian implementation that is a cause of frustration more often than not. Anyone remember this sketch by Eddie Izzard?

So I really like this printer concept that I saw last week. This may of course be overkill, but I can’t wait till I have a printer that actually is joyous to use.

Of course I feel the days of the printer may be numbered. I hardly ever use mine except to occasionally print boarding passes for the few airlines that dont yet generate emails with those as QR codes, but still if I do have to have one, I want one of those