HP to sack up to six thousand staff under AI adoption plan, fresh round of cost-cutting HP Inc will sack between 4,000 and 6,000 workers under a plan that calls for the PCs-and-printers prodigy to use AI to improve its operations. President and CEO Enrique Lores announced the plan on Tuesday alongside the company’s Q4 results, during which he said HP Inc’s “future-ready” cost savings plan, which commenced in 2022 …
Translation: We've been looking for an excuse to chop staff, boost shares short term, so the board can bank some money. AI provides the plausible reason to stop the market dumping our shares while we contract because we know there is going to be crash looking at the macro economics of huge sovereign debt, personal debt and reintroducing QE to keep liquidity in the market while the proverbial can is kicked again.
Replacing vast numbers of staff with AI will come back to haunt them sooner or later. I'm all for using AI when it serves a purpose (it's been saving my quite some time lately) but the way the C-suits embrace it as the be-all and end-all that can replace actual meatbags is ridiculous. This is going to bit them in the hindquarters SO badly.
Nah, sadly, not really.
At some point, HP-Ink will realize they need more humans on the loop. Say, ¿two years?. In those 2 years, AI will have improved. Perhaps not much, but improved, nonetheless*.
That means HP-Ink will "blame" the hiring spree on the "growth they achieved thanks to AI". Of course HP-Ink will NOT rehire the people they fired, the company can not stand such humiliation, and seem needy and vulnerable. Instead, They will hire "needy" people fired from Dell and Lenovo, they will be beging for a job, and demand lesser salaries.
The influx of people with different perspectives and ideas on how to do things will revitalize the company, and coupled with slightly better AI, will lead to a small growth sprout, self-fullfilling the profecy.
* Inprovements on AI can be had by improving the algorithms, or tapping private human-produced data sources inside companies large and small.
As much as I would like something following Bitcoin's intent; decentralised & limited, I can't see money being allowed to exist bereft of government control. Let's say it became as big as the dollar it would totally expose government incompetence, lies and machinations. So, at some point they'll work out how to control it or kill it.
Lasted over 15 years by which time aged rubber components were causing paper transport issues.
That got replaced with a secondhand 6MP which lasted a few more years.
Now switched to a Brother colour laser. I doubt I've printed 100 sheets since I bought it about 4 years ago.
Probably about the same time I last printed something at work.
Adhoc document printing at work is getting less as people get accustomed to not printing unless absolutely necessary. And so would the revenues of the suppliers
True to that, amen, and I hope that trend continues.
Nonetheless, HP-Ink will not be too fazed:
The market shrinking is a clear signal for prospective new entrants to stay away
HP-Ink has economies of scale that will allow them to out-live smaller competitors in the market
There is a core of customers who live or die by printing, and HP-Ink has a grip on them. By the time home, and SMB ink-jets are a distant memory, HP-Ink will be more than happy to sheed that "distraaction", to be able to concentrate on the Whales.
"Adhoc document printing at work is getting less as people get accustomed to not printing unless absolutely necessary."
Biggest driver of workplace printing is probably the mismatch caused by so many reports and published documents being prepared in A4 portrait format, which are then a PITA to read on a landscape screen. Force all written documents to be prepared in 4:3 or 16:9 landscape, and office printing would be dead in months.
HP is the world leader in finding ways to sell more inkjet cartridges. When you unpack a new one, you find "starter" ink cartridges with very little capacity. Cartridges are built with a time limit, so they expire even when there is still a lot of ink remaining. Woe unto you who use an HP inkjet for infrequent printing. And, of course, you can only use :genuine" HP cartridges, not refilled ones from 3rd parties.
I have long said that every HP inkjet printer comes with a special accessory that attaches directly to your credit card.
Our family own four HP laptops. The oldest is No.1 son's i5 which is 7 years old and still chugging along happily, daughter's i7 now 6 years old which replaced a Lenovo Yoga. My personal i7 Probook, almost 6 years old, and my business AMD A8 probook, now 4 years old. None have ever had any hardware issues.
I have an ancient HP 1220C A3 printer which runs happily from my Linux box as and when required (infrequently). I binned HP printers off about 10 years ago when they started fitting chips in their cartridges. Then used Canon Pixma all in one - but these expire when the ink pad gets full and are almost impossible to service. A professional service is almost £100 for a £60 printer...
Currently using an Epson ink tank model if I need to print from a Windows machine.
Then used Canon Pixma all in one - but these expire when the ink pad gets full and are almost impossible to service. A professional service is almost £100 for a £60 printer...
Can't say ours were similar models, but my Pixma megatank AIO ran into the full inkpad wall. Finding guidance on how to fix took little more than a quick search, that included both resetting the counter that assumes the ink pad is full, and removing the ink pad. In my case I went a step further and retrofitted a "printer potty" so that waste ink no longer gets shat into the printer's own basement. Nothing that required skills beyond a screwdriver and a pair of long nosed pliers. I've since replaced the colour print head, so as far as I'm concerned the Pixma's wearing bits are reasonably serviceable.
Having said that, the Canon web site wasn't as much help as enthusiastic amateurs on Youtube. YMMV.
Hmmm. My primary HP laptop is now over 7 years old and at the time cost me £499. The design might be older given that it wouldn't have been a new release when I bought it. It's currently running Windows 11 which it automatically upgraded to. I had to replace the keyboard a month ago because despite repeated attempts the 'I' key kept sticking on one edge. The replacement keyboard cost £40 and took ten minutes to fit.
Oh and a year ago I had to re-wire the power adaptor because the outer sheath began to break away near the plug.
Their corporate actions stink to high-heaven but their products seem damn' good.
Are there any alternatives with the same (or better if that's possible) build quality and better corporate behaviour? That's a serious question - good though it's proven to be I doubt this laptop will last forever.
"rich at the top will only further enrich themselves and fuck everyone else."
I think you'll find that's well underway. The rich's inability to play fairly and be nice is a cap on human development. Actually, it's not the rich, it's many humans in general. The rich are just the ones that were best at it.
So make worse quality products with less capable technology inside them, but charge them more for it? I don't need an AI to tell me those products will not be worth buying, but some people, even after all this time, honestly still believe HP is a great company that makes good, solid hardware...
Particularly in a world where soldered-in memory is becoming more common, it's essential now to buy something with a metric shedload of memory on the motherboard; you can't change your mind later. 4GB sadly no longer cuts it.
4GB became history when we moved from 32 bit to 64 bit architectures ie. When XP went EOL.
My current concerns is that the comfortable 16GB memory in my 2020 W10 laptop is starting to look limited as my typical usage has crept up to 13+GB from 9GB. Thankfully it’s DDR4 SODIMM…
Based on their business grade laptops, their hardware started to go to shit in around 2014 or so. Elitebook G2's had a nice big latched cover on the bottom allowing you access to all the components, and a nice rubberised coating on the lid to shrug off scratches. I've got an even older one which is genuinely robust enough to be used as a blunt instrument.
The newer models have nice metal cases still but inside seem akin to a budget priced Acer or something.
The newer models don't really use nice metal - it's low grade aluminum (worse performance than plastic for laptop usage), that is electropolished to look premium.
Around half of the laptop case isn't metal - it's plastic painted to look like metal (but that's a actually good thing, as that plastic can handle small drops just fine, while the metal will bend from a minor drop).
While metal looks premium, it's pretty bad practically for a laptop, as if you're anywhere that induces a static charge, you'll get a shock every time you touch the laptop.
>” The newer models don't really use nice metal - it's low grade aluminum”
Have this problem with a Dell 16” Latitude, with trend to ever thinner laptops the device doesn’t have the structural strength to support being picked up by one corner of the handrest without flexing. Overtime (ie within 2 years) this causes the CPU fan enclosure to distort resulting in a noisy fan and rapid bearing wear… fortunately, Dell on-site engineers are really good and polite.
Not had this problem with my thicker Thinkpad’s. Basically, it seems if it has a full height LAN port the case is probably sufficiently rigid to not suffer throm this problem.
Given most AI services run at a massive loss due to the amount of power they need, I can’t help but think all these “AI cost savings” are going to go up in smoke eventually (assuming they are even possible in the first place). One day the price of these services will surely have to rocket up as the money go round can’t keep spinning for ever.
This is an article about HP-Ink and (tangentialy) AI-PCs.
HP-Ink is large enough that they can buy their own servers (perhaps to HP-e) and run Open-weight models themselves internaly in their own datacenters.
Meanwhile, the whole premise of an AI-PC is that you run inference Device Side (i.e. on the Laptops/Desktop/Workstation), so no "AI services [from a third party] involved".
> HP is worried that rising memory prices will make its next financial year challenging. [..] “While an increase was expected, its rate has accelerated in the last few weeks.”
To put this in perspective, I ordered a Corsair 32GB DDR5 kit (2 x 16GB) on 12 October for £110.
Exactly a month later the price for the exact same SKU was £174.
That was shocking in itself, but just another five days later (17 Nov) it was £233.
The price a day or two ago was over £330.
It's just a bollocks way to rip people off - the manufacturing process hasn't increased in cost, the raw materials are similar to what they were. Putting the price up doesn't reduce the requirements for the components so it's just a bollocks way to rip off customers due to perceived scarcity.
Not really, they are using the same production lines to produce (redundancy inteded) DDR & LP-DDR (for desktops/Laptops/workstations/Servers), GDDR (for Graphics) and HMB memory (for AI). so, when AI commes knocking with bags of money saying they want more HMB and will pay a premium to get it ¡NOW!, well, some of the lines that were producing DDR, LP-DDR and GDDR will be converted to HMB (and that implies the production line will be turnded of for weeks), and according to the laws of supply and demand, the prices of GDDR, DDR and LP-DDR will rise.
So, is not "percieved scarcity", the scarcity is very real indeed.
¿Why not make more production lines? Well, for one, the memory industry has seen way too many boom and bust cycles, so, memory manufacturers nowadays are not prone to invest, and have to hold the bag if/when a bust comes.
Besides, part of the Zeitgeist in ElReg comment sections is that AI is a buuble that will pop inminently. So ¿which company in their right mind will build production capacity to sell to a bubble that will pop inminently?
Unless there's a cartel operating, I assume it's being driven by supply and demand and, like it or not, in the absence of price controls companies are always going to maximise what they can charge.
I'd also have assumed that it was being driven by the current AI boom, but that's been going on for years now, and even if it's been ramping up in the past few months, it doesn't explain the abrupt price increase of DDR5 in the past few weeks.
Is it an indirect consequence of recent moves to reduce or discontinue production of DDR4 which pushed prices of *that* up? I can't see why, since anyone trying to snap up the remaining supplies of DDR4 for older equipment isn't going to be able to use DDR5 instead- that's kind of the point, after all.
As for Corsair DDR5 I bought, I checked Scan's price- via the Wayback Machine- from the end of last year, which was £104, i.e. slightly lower than it was when I bought it. So that implied that it had gone *up* very slightly during a period you'd otherwise have expected it to have fallen as DDR5 lost its "new" technology premium and became the new mainstream. This suggests that AI-driven demand had already had an effect. At any rate, I didn't think £110 for 32GB seemed *that* cheap at the time, but it looks like an incredible bargain now.
RAM is one of those things which has always been notorious for price volatility. (*) I'm guessing because the technology is constantly changing, the level of investment required is high and because the need continuous production that forces can't always match with spikes and slumps in demand.
Presumably, even if the manufacturers wanted to take advantage of an increase in demand like this- and, ironically, flatten out the spike, which is how the "invisible hand" of the market is *supposed* to work- they wouldn't be able to do so overnight.
And, more importantly, another reason they'd be wary about rushing in to do so is that they're as paranoid as everyone else that the AI bubble is about to burst, demand from that sector would collapse and they'd be left with a huge excess of stock and/or production capacity which would no doubt exacerbate the resultant price crash.
(*) This article covers an earlier spike in 1988 and notes that:-
> "By July of 1988, the increasing RAM prices, which had slowly crept up in the early parts of the year, surged. A megabyte of RAM, according to John C. McCallum’s price analysis, had surged in price from $199 to $505 in a single month, and the cost of a 256k DRAM chip had surged from $2.95 at the beginning of 1988 to $12.45—a price level maintained for nearly a year."
Sam Altman just bought 40% of the world's DRAM or squirrelled it away in warehouses and then everyone else is panicking and buying up the rest. Then again memory manufacturers have colluded before so maybe they're also taking advantage of the situation again.
fire everyone ?
Whats not to lose? huge profits, huge margins, huge dividends and bonuses, then bail out to your next gig with "look how much money I saved HP" and they'll hire you like you're a god of manglement*
*and not bother looking at the festering heap of wreckage you made out of your previous employer..............
Yes, but they can't quite fire _everyone_, as that would cause a divide-by-0 error on some quarterly report somewhere.
However, they only need to keep 1 -- presumably someone to feed the first "g" into the GIGO "AI" that The Board will claim replaced all the biologics -- to avoid that pesky little problem.
HP warns that the memory price explosion means PCs may have less RAM, or use low-cost parts. Why is that any different than what HP has always done? Time and again, HP computers and laptops arrive here for service and they are almost always configured cheaply in the consumer sector of the business. In other words, HP already sells cheap underconfigured systems. So now they are saying they will do what they've always done.
10 years ago our company gutted its graduate recruitment program, suspending hiring and making the graduate co-hort redundant.
Now we have had to re-create the graduate program from scratch, because the company realised that a whole tranch of engineers will be retiring in a few years taking with them a vast trove of tacit knowledge with no one to replace them.
Here's the problem with gutting the lower level positions with AI. Yes, AI may be able to to some of the lower level tasks. However those junior engineers will eventually become senior engineers and without that stepping stone you are basically hollowing out the tree. For a while it will look fine and strong until it suddenly topples over
This is another classic example of short term thinking which a lot of western companies fall for. Yes in the short term it will boost the share price, and make all those executive stock options look great, but longer term it will cause massive issues. By then the present CEO will be sipping martina's and some executive resort no doubt
If you were on the HP board and you thought that all this AI investment was going to cause a stock market devaluation like the Dot Com bust in the 90s, wouldn't you try to increase stock prices and payouts to the board before it all happens? After all, no one is buying those "AI Powered PCs" now, who will be buying them after the crash?
There is no shortage of memory in the market. It's everywhere, just the price has gone up. As long as you pay the price it's there.
This is called gouging and as long as the price is payed it will continue to be.
It's artificial bullshit to hit end of year bonus amounts, nothing more!
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