Comment by WarOnPrivacy

I have good experience with HP laptops. Not their 200 euro consumer trash (but honestly, anything marketed towards consumers is trash these days, from any vendor), but HP's ProBook and Zenbook line. Probook is more plastic fantastic, but the repairability was great. Zenbook got hot, but always remained quiet (until the Nvidia GPU kicked in, but that's on Nvidia). Driver support and UEFI update support were both excellent, both in terms of support duration and general stability.

I've also got one of their thunderbolt docks. The only downside I've found so far is that MAC address forwarding doesn't seem to work outside of HP laptops. Everything else works great on normal devices.

As long as you avoid their cheap crap, HP are fine. Unfortunately, they do sell cheap crap, and consumers love cheap computers (even though a second hand computer with better specs would serve them much longer). Every brand that sells cheap hardware has gained a reputation for being terrible. It's why Apple's laptops start at the price of "used car" and Google's Chromebooks start at "two tanks full of gas".

> This utterly baffles me. ... Author is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and analytical skills.

The author is intelligent enough to not burn bridges with a company where he has a lot of useful connections. So this section is him basically waving a white flag at them.

HP got split since then - the HP you think of today is not the company it was in 2010. Too bad, HP used to be a great company that earned their great name.

Your questions though are valid.

> HP has some enterprise division that makes stuff I'll never see and

It's a separate company now: HPE "Hewlett Packard Enterprise". He mentions them in the blog post, but if you don't know that in 2015 HP split into two companies, you might not realize. He holds stocks in both companies, HP and HPE (in 2015, it was the same number, but since then there were some splits).

> This utterly baffles me. [checks] The post isn't 25y old. Author is obviously intelligent and posses self awareness and analytical skills.

One lens on this is that according to him he hasn't sold a single share since he left the company. That would mean he has a substantial monetary reason to see that people keep believing in HP.

These were my exact thoughts about HPs printer division. These should be studied in bussiness schools as the definition of enshitification for the next 25 years. PC side of HP is a different story. Their high end consumer laptops are crap compared to dells xps line. Comodity/Enterprise gear is equivalent to Dell (primary competitor) at the generic box and monitor level. Maybe a bit better on the power supply and managemet side. Worse if you bought into VMWARE ecosystem. So I thought HP…meh…dying company with legendary history of innovation in the 80s and 90s. Then I bought an HP z840 workstation for homelab. This thing is a beast. Engineered out the wazoo! Three pcix16 slots, 1+ TB RAM, 40+ cores. Documentation for days. Way better than similar era Dells. At least in the late 2010s they still had it, for the right price. For sure not unusable or any where near awful…even 10+ year old kit.

Ive got no idea about gear in the last 3 years or how they will do financially going forward. But if you are looking at the used market, the enterprise workstation gear in the late 2010s has tons of value.

I was going to chime in that I've been really happy with my HP Prime calculator, I purchased it in 2015 when I went back to school mostly because the TI calculators are absolute overpriced garbage and I wanted a calculator that did RPN. I still keep it in my desk drawer and use it several times a week, it has such a genuinely nice interface that I'd rather grab that than use the calculator on my PC. That said, from the wiki link[0] I see they sold that division off to a consulting company in 2022, so I expect that product line will deteriorate.

I'd argue the actual HP that people think fondly of got spun off with the test equipment division, first to agilent and now keysight. They're the folks doing the cutting edge engineering that is the lineage of what HP was.

The current company is probably the worst tech vendor available, I'd rather have whitelabel stuff direct off alibaba than most of their consumer stuff. I split time between sodfware development and IT (small company), so I have people ask me for recommendations on printers. This has happened three times where I recommended a specific model and warned the person that if that wouldn't work to get any other printer besides a HP. Several weeks later, they ask me why their brand new printer isn't working, and when they say they got a HP I tell them the only solution is the landfill. They have engineers specifically working to make the printers and drivers as crappy as possible, normally they're the cheapest option but that doesn't bode well. Meanwhile my brother printer from 2011 is going strong with absolutely no maintenence, and we have a small-office grade brother laser at work that has done 2.5 mil pages with only minimal maintenance (dusting with air, it lives in a warehouse). It's clearly possible to make a consumer grade printer that isn't garbage, but HP hasn't been doing that since at least the mid-2000s.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_Prime