alt Hacker NewsPrusa sat on its haunches for a decade, happy to leave progress on the table as long as their salaries got paid. Bambu actually got non-technical people into the hobby and has always had more bang per buck.
Buy a bambu; use Orcaslicer
Edit: didn't mean to say "held the industry back"; I would categorize my opinion more along the lines of "were happy to get fat on past offerings" or the like.
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My thing with bambu was always that they polished whatever the industry (and hobbyists) had invented and closed it all off, then also innovating on top of that but never giving back unless they _had_ to. Polish and mechanical design are great but corexy kinematics, input-shaping are imo what made the X1 stand out as the fast+good-qual printer when it launched. A lot of what they added on top was then to build a moat.
This may be a controversial take, but imo it would be Bambu to set the industry back by a decade if they "win" and lock up the market. That's clearly their strategy afaict.
Does anyone remember Bambu patenting existing open inventions as their own? I can't seem to find good links anymore (?!) but there's some details here https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5134/8/6/141
I did quick search and bambu p2s seems to be 30% faster than prusa mk4s and few hundred cheaper. Prusa is more accurate, more open and has better spare parts supply. Bambu doesn't have wifi connection unless I use their cloud?
I'm gonna keep using mk4s.
How did Prusa hold the industry back? Were they suing other printer manufacturers who innovated?
"Not innovating myself" isn't the same as "holding other's innovations back".
Prusa is generally like Apple in that regard, in that they wait for the new technology to be tried and true before committing their design(s) to it. CoreXY is the most prominent example.
Prusa was actually the "non-technical" printer company for quite a while though. They would sell to schools and libraries, and still do, and offer(ed) assembled kits.
I don't own a Prusa, I've assembled Vorons and have a highly-modified Ender 3 S1, but if I was in the market to get a user-friendly printer, or recommend one, I'd get a Prusa.