When a product reaches a certain age, most manufacturers erase it from history. They remove all traces of it (Kim Jong Un style). As if the product never existed. Stripping you of dignity and insulting your intelligence just for the mere thought of searching for something no longer sold as new.

HP is also dirty rotten motherfuckers for sanitizing old products and all info about them from their website. But it is interesting that HP at least confesses to the practice. A link was supposed to lead to HP’s site about an old laptop and instead the attached popup is presented.

i've run across this on hp's site even for hardware still 'officially' supported by a 'current' windows.

meanwhile, over on dell's site you can find support articles and downloads for 30 year old systems.

We used to say "friends don't let friends use Norton."

And in the industry, we also used to say just buy an HP printer.

Those days are long gone. I'm telling people to never trust printer manufacturers and their crappy software, and "friends don't let friends use HP" now. Even "just buy a brother black-and-white laser printer" comes with strong caveats.

Well that's shit.
They used to keep loads of old documentation (even though they kept moving them and breaking links) for corporate stuff.
It was great to be able to look up specs of old servers etc and get drivers.

HP Enterprise (servers, storage, switches) still do maintain that. You want an original spec sheet and list of part numbers for a ProLiant Gen2 from 2000 (when that was still a Compaq product, long before HP bought them), or firmware and drivers for the same? That's all still there.

https://support.hpe.com/connect/s/product?language=en_US&kmpmoid=316587&tab=driversAndSoftware

Some of that might require an account to download (which is a whole other conversation), but the important enterprise stuff persists.

HP Inc (workstations, laptops, printers, monitors, etc) are the problem children here.

Capitalism loves monopoly, slavery and planned obsolescence. It's a feature not a bug.

...we also used to say just buy an HP printer.

You must be around my age. I remember when HP was the standard.

Around the Laserjet II, IIP and III, this was no question. My last HP was a 3390 I received from work 20 years ago. HP stopped providing drivers (especially scanning ones), last ones were for XP. Works fine under Linux still, but since then I bought Brother.

I worked at a large corp that used them for years and I had no issue. Many models after the II all worked well. We had people on the team trained to fix the printers with access to order parts.

Last big place I worked at used Brother. Brother would ship a replacement if one our under contract devices failed.