

Frankly, antitrust laws should prevent loss leaders from being a thing in the first place. Whether it’s to get people in stores because of an amazing deal, people to buy into your ecosystem because hardware isn’t that cheap otherwise, or using venture capital to drive competition out of business by offering prices subsidized by investor money that others can’t compete with to drive them out of business and set whatever prices you want, it’s all anti-competition (especially the last one, that’s blatantly trying to set up a monopoly).






I think the fact that it’s hardware will prevent any cease and desist (or rather the legal teeth behind them). It’s not licensed IP but a physical product.
Like I think of it more like 3rd party car parts. Depending on the part, they often need to target specific makes, models, and even years of cars. It’s why so many parts have had encrypted handshakes with the main computer (John Deere is famous for this but I understand some cars are doing it for some parts these days, too) because they couldn’t just stop them in the courts.
I’m not sure that this is how it will work but hopefully. Also selling ink cartridges is how HP makes its money and it uses some of that money to subsidize the printers themselves, so they might like that this printer sells more of those rather than moving entirely away from their ecosystem.