alt Hacker NewsI think the Bambu social contract is pretty clear:
- they benefit from open source software work
- we benefit from their dirt cheap top performing machines
As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me. They provide insane social value through accessibility. Before them, it was Creality with the Ender 3.
My problem with Pruša as an European is that it turns us into the equivalent of being a Chinese citizen who can't afford the Temu product they make at work. Their machines are priced more or less only for US export, and not really something most people here can reasonably buy. They even refuse to use injection moulding out of some self righteous principle, which drives the price per unit up further all the while selling less durable machines cause they're half RepRap. I take it sort of as a personal insult and I will never buy one even though I can afford it, I see it as bad value. Like buying a gold plated watch or something.
Replies
> As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me
Are they actually still the best on price/performance? There are now dozens of Bambu clones at lower prices, I'm wondering how much worse those are (for example, a printer like the Elegoo Centauri Carbon 2)?
I just finished building a Core One+. It has a number of printed parts, but it also does have a bunch of injection molded ones, and they've just replaced another printed one with injection molding. Most of it is metal though, with the printed parts mostly used as relatively simple brackets to hold stuff in place that doesn't need great precision, and replacing those probably wouldn't save much on cost. I think these days they do the printed parts thing mostly to dogfood their print farm solution and I wouldn't be surprised if the next generation had only one or two printed parts for bragging rights. I wasn't a big fan of that either, the Mini I got in 2000 had a few critical parts printed and that did impact performance somewhat, but the Core One+ is fine in that regard.
From a hobbyist perspective, I find it's a much better designed machine than a friend's Bambu that recently broke down and turned out pretty much unfixable. Performance is at least on par, but the entire Prusa can be taken apart with basic hex and torx keys, it's highly serviceable and repairable, lots of fairly standard parts, not very highly integrated. I consider that a feature, but that will cause higher sourcing and assembly costs. It's built like a tank, lots of attention to detail, I expect it to last for a long time with minimal servicing.
That also means it's not targeting the same niche as Bambu's printers. That's not a personal insult, that's just a consequence of how things are right now. No European company is going to undercut a ultra high scale Chinese market dominiation vehicle, that's just not happening. Prusa is doing lots of R&D on much lower sales, they don't have the kind of access to Chinese industry that Bambu has, obviously the Bambu will be cheaper even if Prusa tried to compete in the same segment. But once the market domination thing is far enough along I expect Bambu will disallow non-chipped filament, lock everything into their cloud and jack up their prices. That's how these schemes usually end if they work out, but if they did that now, companies like Prusa would see record sales, so they don't do that just yet.
I'm pretty happy we still have some trace amounts of viable B2C tech industry in Europe. Companies like Prusa provide insane social value too by keeping skills and production in the EU. That's something we sorely need more of (not that companies are to blame, but we still do). Not sure how things will play out, and I'm not too optimistic, but perhaps with everyone else going all-in on dark patterns and pumping out disposable low cost crap, there is an emerging niche for reasonably open high-quality products that serve the owner first and don't data mine them for every last private detail.
>As long as they remain the lowest priced and the best, they can do whatever they want if you ask me. They provide insane social value through accessibility.
This is how you end up with overpriced "3D print cartridges", unfixable printers that fail at warranty + 1 day and control software that goes "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't print that."