I’ve been noticing an unsettling trend in the 3D printing world: more and more printer manufacturers are locking down their devices with proprietary firmware, cloud-based software, and other anti-consumer restrictions. Despite this, they still receive glowing reviews, even from tech-savvy communities.
Back in the day, 3D printing was all about open-source hardware, modding, and user control. Now, it feels like we’re heading towards the same path as smartphones and other consumer tech—walled gardens, forced online accounts, and limited third-party compatibility. Some companies even prevent users from using alternative slicers or modifying firmware without jumping through hoops.
My question is: Has 3D printing gone too mainstream? Are newer users simply unaware (or uninterested) in the dangers of locked-down ecosystems? Have we lost the awareness of FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) and user freedom that once defined this space?
I’d love to hear thoughts from the community. Do you think this is just a phase, or are we stuck on this trajectory? What can we do to push back against enshitification before it’s too late?
(Transparency Note: I wrote this text myself, but since English is not my first language, I used LLM to refine some formulations. The core content and ideas are entirely my own.)
Just wondering, is this “trend” you’re talking about just the Bambulab situation, or are other manufacturers doing the same? I’m not super up to date on 3d printing news, so not sure if i missed more such changes.
If it’s the bambulab situation, it’s not entirely unexpected. When they started people were already worried about exactly this seeing how closed their ecosystem is. Then again, they did make a printer that just works better than the competition, and that’s in the end what attracts users.
Personally i have diy 3d printers that i built myself, really happy with them, but for people who just want to print things, many other filament printers are just too annoying to work with. Not everyone is into diy, and many people just want to make cool stuff and not care about the printer, and bambulab really made the next step towards achieving that.
So if the open source community wants to compete with that, they must make printers that are as user friendly. My diy 3d printers are like running linux. Really great and customizable if you like to work on 3d printers, and really reliable now i as an expert built & tuned them. But most people just want to buy a machine that works, and that’s not these open source printers. And as long as we just focus on making 3d printers for expert diy’ers, we’ll end up in the same place as linux is for OS’es: used by experts and for specific advanced usecases, but beyond reach for the common user that’s then stuck on systems like apple/windows that are more locked down, but actually just work without having to understand how the entire thing works.
Besides the others that were mentioned, Prusa is moving away from open source.
https://hackaday.com/2024/11/20/with-core-one-prusas-open-source-hardware-dream-quietly-dies/
I think there’s some semantic confusion with that article. That’s not what I see. There are literally kits for sale on the Prusa Site to convert your old prusa into a new Core. imho, What the ‘RepRap Open Source folks’ mean is literally every part is sourced from already available parts or can be printed. And I think this is where the article is going. The other Open Source -is Open Ecosystem. Where there may be proprietary pieces (the steel cage), but nothing about it is purposefully closed. Prusa published the full electronic and hardware schematics before the machine was shipping. https://www.prusa3d.com/page/open-source-at-prusa-research_236812/ This is also ‘Open’. Both are good. Both have valid rationale. But neither is anything like closed source, closed box, only we can touch it companies models.
Hard disagree. Prusas used to be completely open source. Now they merely have open source components. It isn’t accurate to call them open source.
Would you call Windows or MacOS open source? Both Microsoft and Apple have made parts of their OS’s open source, but that doesn’t mean the entire product is open source.
Anycubic for example does similar things. The Kobra 3 & Kobra S1 support Network printing(via Cloud) only through there “Anycubic Slicer Next” which is a Orca Slicer Fork only available for MacOS and Windows(Windows seems to be the only up-to-date Version, Mac is broken as far as i know).
Firmware is, as far as i know the so called KobraOS, a Klipper-go fork without a Webfrontend or any way to connect to it through Orca, Cura, Prusa or else.
Haven’t heard much about that yet, indeed also sounds bad. But it’s anycubic so who cares :p.
But yeah, it’s indeed not the best trend. But it also up to open source to actually compete with this, and not just chase shiny features, but also usability…
Despite this, they still receive glowing reviews, even from tech-savvy communities.
I mean, most people don’t care. How often do you see mainstream smartphone reviewers making a single mention of the insane amount of bloatware and spyware on phones, or calling out Apple for their unrepairable devices? Shit just blows over eventually and consumers accept it for what it is. 3D printers are not exempt from this mentality.
Jeff Geerling made a video today about how he bought a dishwasher that was top-rated by
RTINGSConsumer Reports with no mention of the fact that in order to make it do a God damn thing, you have to connect it to the app, create an account, and connect it to them OEM’s cloud.Several years ago I bought a DJI action cam and it was the same thing. You can’t do jack shit with it without connecting it to an app and creating an account. I watched dozens of reviews and this was never mentioned. I returned it but I’m sure 99.9% either don’t give a fuck or accepted it.
When I’m shopping for cell phones and reading reviews a routinely see comments about the amount of bloatware embedded on various manufacturer’s devices. People actually do care about it, reviewers actually do write about it.
Never seen it before.
I think 3D-Printers have just this DIY image for me and that’s why i thought the general 3D-Printer user is more tech-savvy and aware.
If they would tell me that my ESP32 needs cloud connection to use them i would be furious to.
The industry is evolving. It happens in every industry eventually. When any one OEM corners a sufficient market size (like Bambu), they start taking freedom from the user to lock them into their ecosystem. Then all the other OEMs go “well if they’re doing it I guess we can do it too”. This is what you see trickle down from Apple all the time: headphone jacks, glued together devices, soldered RAM, and most recently unhinged RAM and storage prices, etc.
It’s what you see in the smart home industry as well. A dozen different brands with zero interoperability because none of them want to compete on a level playing field, they all just want to lock you into their ecosystem.
It didn’t seem to work for Bambu but they will back down and then try it again in another 12 months or make smaller changes. They just boiled the frog too quickly.
Apple’s RAM/storage prices have been unhinged for a long time. I try to avoid any upgrades when I buy their products, it’s usually better to get the higher model - I.e. with better processor/better product line (which usually has a better starting RAM/storage), than to upgrade a base model
yeah but it’s only relatively recently that other OEMs are adopting these pricing strategies.
Do you mean having a lot higher margins on upgrades? I don’t think that’s true either, but maybe they’ve been getting more aggressive on that front over time.
I mean they charge 800%+ the value for additional storage options. There’s no “thinking” it’s true, it just is.
I was talking about other OEMs that you’ve mentioned. It’s obvious what Apple does
I think you mean devolving
Just wanted to mention, it was top by consumer reports. I don’t think he mentioned RTHINGs but could have missed that.
Edited, thanks
Thats not really a good comparison. Fist thing someone does when they buy a smartphone is replace the OS. Same as laptops.
If you genuinely believe that, you are either living in some kind of serious tech nerd bubble, or you have no idea what replacing the OS means and you’re talking about doing software updates, tweaking settings, and installing apps.
The vast majority of smartphone users probably don’t even realize you can replace the OS, and if they do they probably don’t see the need.
For desktops and laptops, around 71% of them are running windows, somehow I doubt people are buying Linux or Mac laptops just to turn around and install windows on them. Then around 16% of them are running MacOS, and I doubt that any significant number of those are hackintoshes. A fair amount of the remaining 13% or so are probably people who have installed their own OS, but not all, some of them are using ChromeOS, I don’t hear much about people deciding to make their own Chromebook, and some people are buying an off-the-shelf Linux device.
I have a Bambu A1, and yes it really is a great printer. The firmware BS is crossing a line though, and that company will not get another dollar from me. My next printer will be a Prusa or a Voron.
Next time I need a new 3D printer I’m either buying a Prusa or building from a kit. Bambu has nothing I can’t get somewhere else, and I’ll pay extra to have a printer that doesn’t come pre-infected with corporate malware.
Voron. Make a Voron.
“Not sure which 3D printer to buy? Get a Voron you Moron!”
Many people don’t care about FOSS or don’t know the benefits, they just want a NOW working product. Many belief in the goodness that nothing bad will happen, and if something happens, they still can switch. I often have this discussion with other colleagues and friends, it’s an endless debate of price , features , comfort and support. As long as there is both on the market , why argue? People can buy what fits their needs.
My opinion on bad manufacturer behavior is: if we keep buying those products(with locked down firmware, Windows-Only Proprietary Cloud filled forked Slicers etc.) more and more manufacturers may go that route.
The problem is people’s stinginess. They want to save money and buy from China. The manufacturers help themselves to the OSS community but do not contribute anything - on the contrary, the manufacturers undercut the OSS alternatives enormously. They have no development costs or anything else to compensate. So that the OSS solutions do not finance the development for other companies and push themselves out of the market, the only option is to lock it in. It’s the people who want to get into an expensive hobby on the cheap.
Edit: example about developing stats.
PrusaSlicer
PrusaSlicer is our own open-source in-house developed slicer software. The PrusaSlicer team consists of 13 full time developers. As of January 2024, we spent a total of 145,720 work hours developing PrusaSlicer (that’s over 16 years of non-stop work by one developer). While only about 10% of the original code remains, we are still extremely proud that PrusaSlicer is originally based on the open-source project Slic3r by Alessandro Ranellucci. Each of the source files has a short header with the list of all contributors. We believe this is the right way to acknowledge whose shoulders we’re standing upon.
PrusaSlicer is a completely free, feature-rich, frequently updated tool that contains everything you need to export the perfect G-code for your 3D printer. Today, the PrusaSlicer code powers most slicers on the market.
Prusa is based in Prague, and according to some quick googling the average software developer in Prague makes 88k CZK (~3800 USD or ~3500 eur), so about 526 CZK/hr (~22/hr in both USD and EUR).
Which means they’ve potentially spent around 76.7 million CZK (~3.3 million USD, ~3 million EUR) into their slicer. Just for salaries.
I wonder if any of that includes what are essentially firmware tuning for their printers?
I recently ran a set of prebuilt Prusa M4S for a printing demo, and they were really nicely tuned, between the pressure sensing head and the way it only probes the area of the print bed it’s going to use, all 10 printers worked pretty much out of the box. One roll of filament wasn’t sealed properly and clogged a few times, but I basically did around 800-900 hours of printing over the course of a week and had a couple clogs from that one roll.
I wish I could have kept one, but my OG ended 3 is still hanging in there.
I can only advise every first-time buyer not to choose a prebuilt but to assemble it themselves in order to learn everything directly and gain experience.
I bought the mk4 prebuild as my first 3d printer with enclodure and it worked wonderfully. Except for problems at the beginning due to wet filament etc. but it’s not due to the printer itself. Then I installed the MMU3 later when it was available.
After that I had slight problems,
especially first layer problems, which I was able to fix. then the release of the mk4s so I ordered and installed the upgrade. Initially had massive problems which I would not have had if I had assembled the printer myself and had experience.
The troubleshooting was unnecessarily time-consuming as I had practically disassembled and reassembled the printer but was still successful. At some point (after several successful start-ups and printers) I started up the printer and wanted to print something. Since it had always run smoothly before and never had any really bad problems,
I sat at the PC with headphones on until I looked at the printer and saw that it wanted to become a CNC. Printing plate damaged but still usable, nozzle damaged but could be repaired, heater and thermistor destroyed.
The support was very cooperative but of course I got the heater and thermistor replaced as they are not wearing parts.
I am still extremely happy and can only warmly recommend prusaI’d actually recommend the opposite. Unless you’re a DIY hobbyist who loves taking everything apart and you don’t want to print immediately upon receiving it, it’s worth it to buy the prebuilt Prusa. There are so many many steps in assembling a MK4S that there are that many steps to get something wrong. Better pay a few hundred extra to get one that has been assembled by a more experienced person. And I say that as a makerspace coordinator who works with a lot of 3D printers.
Assembly teaches you how incredibly complicated the assembly is. I’ve adjusted pre-assembled printers with minor inconvenience. But the first one you put together can take more than the estimated 6-8 hours.
Troubleshooting after upgrading from mk4 mmu3 to mk4s mmu3 took well over a week despite help from the Prusa forum and support and in that time I had disassembled and reassembled it several times. In the end it was quite trivial and with the help of additional tools (screw clamp to firmly fix the stepper motor of the y-axis for mounting) quickly fixed. Knowing the localization and the interaction of everything with each other would have helped me a lot and certainly saved time. But I don’t even want to deny that you have to be prepared for several hours and several hours of frustration. Instead, you have to follow the planned and most important steps with the exact number of haribo gummy bears and place them correctly on your tongue and get to the process of enjoying them as quickly as possible. If you also opt for a prebuilt, you could also use the core one
Luckily for us, the original RepRap folks were smart enough to go for copyleft rather than permissive licensing. As such, the common firmwares and slicers are both using GPLv3 code, severely limiting the companies’ ability to do that.
It’s a race to the bottom line. The endless plight of the working class: funnel-fed the products of each other’s work for the price of obedience. Viva La Revolution, coming this fall everywhere you stream.
Maybe a little out of context but this reminds me of the Sony Helldiver 2 situation. If people get loud enough they can infect change things. No one got loud or boycotted games that had Kernel level AntiCheat , this could have been avoided. Same with Bamboo I guess, if people still buy them after the Firmware and Cloud thing , it probably will happen again.
The biggest thing stopping me from doing anything is that the steps to do something are multiplicative for me rather than additive how it seems for other people. If I’m dreading fixing and tuning my printer, then I just won’t print anything. For months. Until a magic day comes when I’m able to get on with it (Yeah, I know I’m a shitty low functioning person, you don’t have to mention it). Getting a Bambu let’s me actually print stuff and helps me not get locked into paralysis about it for months. I hate it’s a closed and easily fucked over ecosystem, but it’s a choice between letting me function or not. I dunno, I’m really rambling without a point, I just thought someone might find some value in this
Just different persons / mindsets. I bought a Prusa and in the first month replaced and modded everything I know of. Stabilizing it , replacing extruder gears and the nozzle , fine tuned some print settings. Why? I have fun doing so. And the time. Other people don’t, and that is completely fine.
We have become so normalized to anti consumer behavior it doesn’t even matter anymore
Like it used to be that a videogame manufacturer charged for a dlc that was already on the game disc, you had to pay to unlock data that you technically had purchased but not licensed, and people threw a fucking fit. Now it’s like “this new tech device will only work if you insert $20 bills every 30 minutes” and people are like “oh well that sucks but what are you gonna do? I need a toaster that can send me a notification when my toast is done”
Fuck the companies that do anti consumer bullshit, fuck the youtuber dummies that normalize it because they got $50 and a free shitty printer, fuck the government that has completely failed to regulate anything, and fuck the dummies who constantly enable this nonsense because they refuse to spend 10 minutes researching their purchases and instead spend the rest of their life in credit card debt because they have $1100 in monthly subscriptions to stupid bullshit that makes their stuff work for 18 months until the company goes bankrupt, their device is bricked, and they replace it with another piece of shit that has the same anticonsumer bullshit
All these companies lose. Everyone hates them. They are milking their brands of any reputation because they think the world is ending and wants all money. There are compassionate companies with humans that do not do this. They are not hated. You should choose them
It’s just like everything else with technology. As soon as the “normies” start buying into it everything goes to shit. They don’t know what to look for and just buy whatever’s easiest. Once it gets that far the manufacturers can do whatever they want
All the Youtubers Bambu sponsors are like, “I was terrified of 3D printing. Wasn’t that something only nerds do? Then Bambu sent me a free 3D printer and several hundred dollars and I’m telling you guys, you don’t even need a brain to use it!!!”
It’s a three way street though. Lazy consumers are to blame for enabling but bad companies are worse for having anti consumer practices to begin with. And the biggest failure of all is our government for allowing anti consumer behavior to run rampant and not allow any meaningful regulation to go through because they’re utterly corrupted and pro corporation.
In the “normies” defense in a functional society I shouldn’t have to research every purchase I make to ensure it is not hostile against me. However, we live in a dystopia where it is necessary to either manufacture your own foss solution or research for the purchasable option (that is often just the least hostile but still fairly hostile)
Agreed. It shouldn’t be this way but it is and they should act as such. The consumers are the only ones who don’t benefit from being corrupt pieces of shit so I think it’s fair to blame them for enabling it. If they took a stand we wouldn’t be in this mess.
Holy shit. There is so much gatekeeping here that Cerberus themselves would say “Yo dog, take it down a notch”
I think there are two big aspects to this.
The first is that, yes, we are seeing a big push toward locked down ecosystems. Bambu is a great example of this and people are still falling all over each other to talk about how amazing their products are. And, as someone who has been pointing out that AMSes don’t actually do what people think they do for years now, it has been frustrating to watch them take over the cultural zeitgeist even before the current bullshit.
Which leads into the second aspect. FDM printing is very much a “prosumer” hobby. It is about taking industrial/corporate processes and marketing them to hobbyists. Some of that is awesome because it provides a platform to rapidly prototype and iterate on new tech (which benefits the companies more than the users but…) and some of that is miserable because it means we have astroturfing campaigns out there to explain to people why they NEED 24 AMSes chained together for their single printer… because that model works a lot better for print farms.
And, as an aside before I get to the “real” point: We see the same with home cooking. There was a MASSIVE push that everyone should sous vide everything for a couple years. And… that was mostly because we had restaurant chefs talking to The Masses without a Food Network/PBS producer telling them to shut up. So OBVIOUSLY the best steak you will ever eat is the one that spent 11 hours in a hot water bath and was quickly seared to be plated in under 5 minutes. Rather than the understanding that this is a crutch used because a line cook can’t spend 10 minutes butter basting their steak.
And most of that still is incredibly obnoxious and outright wasteful. But it also led to people like J Kenji Lopez-Alt who used that to popularize “reverse sear” cooking.
So, now to the real point. People are gate keeping mother fuckers. They are angry that they had to read twelve different articles to figure out what “the paper trick” was rather than having a printer having an automatic tool that kind of gets you… probably closer than you would have gotten anyway. And countless other pain points that were resolved because… they were pain points.
And people decide THEY are heroes and legends rather than realizing that people like Naomi Wu et al came before them and got it to the point where it was learnable for the hobbyist sickos.
Which… not to shit on the OP TOO much (I would not be surprised if this came out of the LLM pass) but it is why I more than side eye anything that has “Make them great (again)”. Because, invariably, it is a case of people yearning for a time that never actually existed where they are on top and everyone bows before them.
I just want a printer that doesn’t require you to upload your gcode to their cloud server before getting permission from them to print.
I just want a printer that doesn’t require you to upload your gcode to their cloud server before getting permission from them to print.
Even on Bambu’s locked-down firmware you can just toss the gcode on the SD card and print that way if you don’t want to deal with their cloud service. Or throw it on a flash drive and plug into the USB port.
My previous printer could ONLY function via SD card, so I’m kinda used to that anyway.
Don’t get me wrong, I think Bambu locking down their firmware and forcing everyone through their cloud service is shitty. But you can print without it still.
For now
“Our cloud analytics tell us that everyone uses cloud to print, so we are removing SD card slots from our printers.”
I just want to make clear, im not against printers which are accessible, i think i myself didn’t had enough different devices to call myself an expert of any kind.
I would just wish that it would be news worthy if you need to use a specific slicer(specially if near all of those proprietary slicers are only made for windows) to make full use of your printer or some clarification that all your prints will be send to the cloud before they reach your printer.
Im much less a 3D-Printing-Purist then a privacy advocate. I wish that this type of behavior by manufacturers will be out-called - never-mind if it is a 3D-Printer, your Dishwasher or any other “Smart Device”.
It is “news worthy” in that basically every outlet doing printer reveiws/content will mention it. Even fricking Norm on Tested pointed out the problems with bambu and the issues if you want to use the laser cutter on anything other than Windows.
Some people want to 3d print for a hobby, while some want 3d printers as a hobby. You are the second type, while out of the box printers are for the first type.
Personally what kept me away from 3d printing my own terrain for miniature wargames is that I don’t have time for another hobby. I just can’t be bothered with endless fiddling with settings, temperatures, speed, and all that. But I understand your feelings
I’m also a builder for tabletop, and if you’re still interested in 3d printing some what take a look at tesin printers. They have different trade-offs than FDM (filament) printers, but mine has been very reliable without any tinkering. It’s really nice for printing stl’s from online (I don’t model anything myself).
Free systems were expensive, hard to use, and had worse finish
Bambu came, made a better [proprietary] product
People obviously bought it
Then other manufacturers saw that they could sell proprietary products just as well and jumped into the bandwagon
I love DIY.
At home, I run and build DIY printers but you can’t deploy them in a business/production. Why? As soon as there is a printer that isn’t it just works with easy (and documented) maintance procedures the business needs to hire not only a worker but a worker who knows 3D printers. That’s bad.
Printers like the Sovol SV08 and Biqu AMS (still not launched) aren’t just there yet.
Combined with the BambuLab pricing on the A1 mini and P1S it is pretty difficult to buy FOSS.
Prusa is close with the Core 1 but they don’t have an good AMS package for their printers (their MMU lacks a enclosure/easy to deploy setup). They propably know it but don’t have the answer avaible.
Equally on the econmics side it is difficult: The BambuLab P1S killed the (FOSS) market.
If I compare a 1150€ BambuLab X1C against the 1350€ Prusa Core One I would likley prefer the Prusa product/ecosystem. With the P1S it suddently is 700€ compared to 1350€ for a machine that will produce the exact same parts with a near identical cycletime, uptime and opperating/maintance cost. The decission in favor of BambuLab is easy.
This. The proprietary 3d printers arent the “enshitification” of 3d printers, they’re what’s finally going to make them go “mainstream”.
Tech people need to remember how deep into these hobbies we really are, especially compared to “normies”.
Its like with computers, people go “oh well you can get a better bang for your buck on your memory by not going with apple!”. Which sounds great and everything until you remember that people don’t know what memory is or what it does, let alone how to buy new memory, or how to disassemble a computer, or where the memory goes, or even why more memory can be good for you.
I compare it to fabric crafts because I don’t know shit about them. I know (well, think) fabric is sold in bolts and that’s about it. Hell I don’t even know how much a bolt is, and we haven’t even gotten to the different types of fabrics or ways to utilize them.
The vast majority of people don’t want a 3d printer hobby, they just want to 3d print stuff. And the Bambu printers are as close to that as I’ve seen so far.
Incoming fabric nerd. Bolts are like the spool when you buy filament, they come in different styles, but its typically just a bit of cardboard the fabric is wrapped around for storage. Fabric is typically sold by the linear yard, and if you buy a full bolt, they tell you how many yards of fabric it has on it. Common sizes are 12yd bolts, 24yd bolts, and 30yd bolts.
The vast majority of people don’t want a 3d printer hobby, they just want to 3d print stuff
Exactly, I like to design things and be able to manufacture them at home. I have absolutely no interest in thinkering with hardware (especially dangerous one like a 3D printer)
False dichotomy. There are plenty of printers that are pro-sumer and also have great documentation and are easy to use and maintain.
Name one that is competitive to the BambuLab P1S combo.
Keep in mind that the operator is an average Joe, who knows nothing about 3D-printers, with minimal training on the job to do the maintenance.
Competitive (explicitly) includes cost: If I need to pay $2k for a printer that works just as well as an $800 option it is not feasible (for a business) to spend this much more.
I could but I’m going to assume that you already know and will simply disagree.
Tell me.
Looked last week into it and concluded that BamubLab is still the best option.
Runner up was Creality. They are equally proprietary these days.
How is Creality equally proprietary? I can put mainsail or fluidd on the machine and use any slicer I so choose.
So your suggestion would have been the Creality K2 or K1C?
Open source is a major boon for process automation in a print farm. I also wouldn’t trust ANY cloud platform with anything remotely sensitive, like product development prototypes.
- this is what going mainstream looks like. Greedy people see profit and they get in.
- greedy people are often sneaky, and they work to take all the can from open and close it in : Apple, Later Redhat
- there are tons of Open Open printers out there
- Open has a problem - it’s hard to maintain ignorance and get the benefit. It requires work - you can’t just easily trade dollars for someone else’s labor. You have to learn and put things together to really enjoy.
- What can you do?
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This is hard, almost impossible: Don’t do business with people you suspect or know are cruddy. Even if they say they have what you want.
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Learn how to build the printer you want. Hire a good person to learn and do it for you.
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Buy a printer from a company that pledges to do right. Even if it costs more.
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I build an original voron 1.0, reused the parts to build a 2.0, and built that into a 2.4 with mostly newer parts because the frame was just fucked from all that nonsense. I have a very low serial from back when they did that on the subreddit, not sure if that’s still a thing
Even with the raggedy frame it was a great printer. But building it properly it’s bulletproof. Costly but if you want a forever printer that you can mod it’s the way to go imo
My 0.2 Parts are on the way.
Thought about buying the upcoming Sovol Zero but i guess its the time to build my first Voron :)
Which kit? I’m finishing up mine soon.
Its mostly Fysetc but some other parts as well. I spend the first half of my day building but i make a break now to get some fresh air
Nice. I went Sibor with the CNC kit for an… odd reason? It needs to survive repetitive van transport.
Im happy so far with my purchase, finished half of the printer today - may i will finish it tomorrow :)
It is simply an entry level thing. You will find this in every market.
In a bike shop retail market I can sell you a serviceable bike for $500 that will last, or an $800 road bike you’ll actually ride. Still the majority of bikes sold come from places like Walmart where they are made of unserviceable junk and are mostly nonfunctional. These are rarely ever ridden and often thrown away. In the shop I’ll sell 20:1 on the cheapest model to the next options up the ladder.
It is strange to adapt to this kind of understanding at first, like just how skewed the real market is. I can target selling to clubs and teams but I can’t touch the the garbage bike market where most people reside.
I think we are at a point where the influx of people into 3d printing are not real Makers or have any aspirations to be.
The reality is that people are often simply stupid. They seem to think that saving a few bucks here or there is smart but are not bright enough to see that everyone doing the same thing are buying the junk product over and over. There is nothing more expensive than being a cheap miser.
Ultimately, the only person that can fix stupid is ourselves. One can only inspire others to learn but can never force them. You cannot fix stupid in others. In the USA, stupidity is political currency and we have a long tradition of poor education and standardized exploitation. It is the American dream.
I think LDO and Voron are the only super relevant open source torchbearers.
well put
Is it a price thing?
In my opinion Bambu Lab is a high-end consumer 3D-Printer and still modding, servicing etc. is bad. On the other side of the price-spectrum Anycubic copy-pasted all the bad stuff from Bambu.
It’s not. It’s the “premium” products that have this proprietary bs and branded parts trying to justify the inflated prices. The cheapest printers are all just generic clones with no lock in and mostly generic parts. Practically DIY kits only without the DIY unless something fails.
The “problem” is people just want to do stuff, they don’t want to spend hours and hours trouble shooting. And Bambu brought that to the market.
It is more complicated than just price. It is ultimately an intuitive self awareness and scope thing. People lack depth to understand the details or ask others that do understand before they make a purchase. The majority of people are more oriented towards interpersonal interactions and experiential aspects of life in their fundamental functional thought. They struggle to see detail and nuances or question fixation and biases.
We still live in the early era of human tribal primitivism when it is quite easy to exploit tribal stupidity on multiple fronts. For some it is fixation from initial exposure or emotional brand perception, others it is impulsive availability, for others they are masochistic misers. Abstractive thinking and understanding is rare in humans, and the majority do not understand it or value it in others.
Walmart bikes are targeting misers first, but spontaneous availability and access, along with controlling the perception of what the low bar of the market is are major factors as well. Each of these three factors exploits a specific niche. Walmart is a rogue wholesale distributor selling directly to consumers using massive capital. They are privateers (legal pirates) in the retail market as are most big box stores. Piracy has always been a nice short term business model for gains. It just happens to be true that people of today like being raided raped and pillaged so long as it is done slowly enough without violence, the ship looks pretty and the pirates wear a suit. Even worse is when pirates become entrenched as monarchs and feudal lords. This is the next step in the evolution when piracy is normalized. Welcome to neo feudalism.
Btw most would rather read your own writing rather an ai. When my students edit with ai it’s typically pretty obvious and I think it wastes everyone’s time. Also, foreign students frequently write much better than the native English ones at my school, idk why. I bet your writing is better than you think :)
I know, i just had issues to put all my thoughts together in a way that it is still readable/understandable so i gave the AI a try. In the end, it didn’t really change that much but gave it some structure and nicer wording.
Do whatever is most comfortable for you :) My opinion!
I own a BambuLab A1M as I want a printer that just works. And while yes it is all proprietary they do sell replacement parts for most parts.
While I will not forgive them for their latest moves I am quite happy, I turn it on, load an stl into BambuStudio and let it run without any issues at all.
My next printer will however probably be a prusa as they are Europeans and I love that they keep everything up to the user so far. But I can not deal with anything that is more DIY than a Prusa, it is a tool for my hobby…not the hobby itself.
they do sell replacement parts for most parts.
If you can’t replace all of the parts with some other off the shelf part, regardless of quality, then you’re locked to a brand and are at their mercy.
What happens when they inevitably discontinue the A1M and no longer sell parts for it?
That will be a shitty day. But the alternative is that they don’t sell replacement parts at all. To be fair we don’t even know how they treat discontinued products as all their printers are still in production.
Still my point stands, Bambu printers simply just work, I took my 15-20 minutes to set up and it did run flawlessly since then with only the maintenance the printer asks me to do. I can understand why people like that. This would be possible by opensourcing everything but somehow except for Prusa there is noone else who strikes that balance between ease of use and openness.
the alternative is that they don’t sell replacement parts at all
maybe I’m misunderstanding, but isn’t the corresponding alternative in this case “you can use parts from any manufacturer you want”?
That’s the third option, I was just saying that at least they do sell replacement parts which today is not always the case for many companies.
