Here’s a short list of just a few of the examples of how Brother hates you:
1) This device comes with absolutely nothing except a tiny spool of “sample” label. No batteries, no adapter, no anything.
2) If you’re printing a label with a single word, expect to use about three times as much label as you’d use with a label maker that didn’t hate you. This thing has a FULL INCH of margin on both sides by default. The lowest margin setting, “narrow,” brings the right side margin down to about 1/5th of an inch, but the left side margin will never be less than an entire inch. At the lower margin settings the thing will print dots on the label to show you where to manually cut the label to match the opposite margin. Not only is Brother deliberately designing the product to make you waste probably more than half of your label roll on scrap, these unapologetic jerks make you put in effort and actively participate in getting screwed over.
3) This thing takes SIX AAA batteries. You might ask why it’d need so many, and the answer to that is that Brother wants you to get tired of constantly recharging more batteries than your charger will hold, or buying a ton of disposable AAAs. They really want you to buy the AC adapter that for some reason doesn’t come with the product, even though 9 VDC adapters cost less than a dollar each in bulk. You might think “oh, that won’t be a problem for me, I’m not going to use it all the time,” but Brother has you covered there as well. This thing will drain the batteries in less than a month from just sitting on the shelf. There’s no physical off button short of removing the batteries, and the label maker has seemingly been deliberately designed to have an enormous power draw in the “off” mode.
4) The AC adapter is the single most hostile thing I’ve seen from a consumer electronics product in as long as I can remember. The input is 9 VDC. Sort of unusual, small electronics tend to be either 5 VDC or 12 VDC, but 9 VDC makes sense if your objective is to plow through six 1.5 volt AAA batteries at a time. There are some of you like me who’ll think that’s no big deal, you’ll just reach into your drawer full of random adapters and rummage around until you find something with the number 9 on it, but THEY’RE STILL NOT DONE. The adapter is tip negative. They reversed the polarity.
THEY REVERSED THE POLARITY OF THE ADAPTER.
Unless you for whatever reason own other Brother products, chances are that you’ve never owned or even seen a tip negative adapter. In a normal universe with a normal vendor that isn’t evil and doesn’t despise you on a deep and personal level, the connector on your AC adapter is tip positive. Tip positive means that the positive voltage is on the inside of the barrel at the end of the connector. This is a good thing, because you don’t really want exposed positive conductors. Brother did the opposite of the good thing. They made it so that the outside of the barrel at the end of the connector is the positive. That round metal surface on the outside of the connector on the Brother adapter is positive voltage, so when you unplug the label maker to take it somewhere and leave the adapter behind, you have live voltage just flailing about coming into contact with whatever’s on your desk.
The ONLY reason to do this is so they KNOW you won’t have an adapter, because NOBODY ANYWHERE WOULD EVER SHIP SOMETHING THAT DUMB, except of course for Brother, and so you’ll have to go to them to buy it. The product name for the adapter is AD-24ES. Throw that in the Amazon search bar and go take a look, then come back here.
Yep. That’s the adapter that costs less than a dollar to make, selling for TWENTY-TWO DOLLARS. I don’t think you’d be able to find a more expensive 9 VDC adapter on Amazon. Or the rest of the Internet, for that matter.
Remember what I said about deliberately draining your batteries to force you into paying the 2,000% markup for their obscene junk? Look at these reviews:
“good product will work on brother model PT- D200 save me alot of AAA battery, 6 battery each time will drain the battery quick. This adapter must have. AAA battery $$ more than you spend on this.”
“I’ve had an older model labeler for years, requires 6 AAs. I had some rechargeable alkalines that worked great in it but they eventually went bad, NiMHs seem to not last very long. Finally saw this and ordered right away. No more battery problems”
“I am a labeling fanatic and thus go through A LOT of tape and A LOT of batteries. Even using rechargeable batteries in my two P-Touch printers was costing me a fortune, so I purchased this AC adapter.”
That all sounds so similar, almost as if someone had deliberately crippled the product to make people buy an AC adapter that should have been included with the product, but is instead selling as an accessory for the same price or more than most people paid for the label maker itself. Those were just the first three reviews. They had all given the product five stars. Don’t be these guys. Please.
This product is going right back to Amazon. Save yourselves the effort of having to do the same, and go buy a different label maker.
I hate you, Brother.
