[alsodumb]

Ahh, classic hackernews upvoting the 'I hate cloud' comment to the top.

I have a few Bambu lab printers (perks of being a grad student) and their offline mode is pretty good - there are printers in my lab that are pretty much never connected to internet and print 24/7.

Sure, offline mode doesn't have all the features they mention on their website, but even without it, Bambu lab printers are better than their competition by a HUGE margin. I've had all kinds of printers before, including Prusa. Nothing comes close to Bambu lab ones in terms of no non sense printing and cost.

Sure, their components aren't open source, but official spares are cheap enough. And they promised to keep them cheap enough. Sure, they can change their word, and guess what? The printer would have made it's money's worth (for personal or commerical use) by the time that happens. You can throw away the printer by that point and you'd have net positive gain.

Bambu lab is going to do what DJI did to drones. Period. Every kid is gonna have a 3D printer, every influencer is going to make a 3D printer is cool post, and lots of Christmas gifts are going to be Bambu 3D printers. Bambu lab is former DJI folks - no wonder their product strategy and in some way design language is so close to DJI.

[function_seven]

I totally believe that these printers are technically amazing. That’s why I made the Apple vs. beige box analogy. Those M-series chips and their hardware quality are way better. But there is stronger lock-in.

I’ve been burned so many times by other products that I think my wariness is more than justified.

And I’m not alone, which is why this is “classic”.

(But the pricing is really good. I think I’ll wait and see a bit more)

[blitz_skull]

I think this is a valid analogy. Albeit, one that makes me all the more excited to buy a Bamboo. I’ve been a software engineer for a while now and personally I adore Apple’s approach to products. It just works. I don’t have to spend time fucking around with things I don’t want to. And most importantly, IT JUST WORKS.

I hate what a pain it is to just get straight lines to print on my 3D printer! It shouldn’t be this hard.

Granted, hopefully a swing towards Bamboo will put pressure on the other players in the market and they’ll up their game so that all the non-enthusiasts who just want to print can select from a variety of products.

[rcarmo]

That is all fine and good as long as I can use it (all the features, including firmware upgrades but except a marketplace) without a cloud login. I've been printing to my Prusa and KP3S via the LAN using Octoprint and Klipper for years now, and I welcome feature-based competition as long as I am not the product.

[joshvm]

For what it's worth the best printer I've ever used (at least the most reliable) was a Markforged and that was very heavy lock in. Own brand filaments, cloud-only slicer, super expensive consumables. But that thing really did work every time and the slicer was functional enough that we never had issue with it.

[amelius]

> cloud-only slicer

I'd feel dirty having to upload my designs to the cloud first.

[2muchcoffeeman]

It’s not the value that Bambuu brings that’s the problem. We bitch and moan about repairability, owning the device etc.

But here we have a piece of hardware that was essentially open source where you owned the hardware and could repair it easily, and turns out, no one ever really gave a shit. Not really. You never wanted that. You wanted the Chinese clone that took the ideas, lowered the price and added cloud shit.

I hope to god influencers don’t take up 3D printing. Fuck sakes. 3D printing is a cool way to bring your ideas to life. Not for influencers to waste plastic on shitty trinkets.

[alsodumb]

'You wanted the Chinese clone that took the ideas, lowered the price and added cloud shit' - two things:

1. Bambu has a lot of innovative hardware pieces that aren't in say Prusa - I wouldn't call it Chinese clone that took the ideas. Bambu is not one of those Prusa clones, let's get that straight.

2. Yup, I appreciate lower price and features that make it easy to use. Yup I appreciate minimal setup time and faster/consistent prints. I am not a 3D printing enthusiast - I am a user, like millions of other 'normal' people in the world. Somehow folks on hackernews always discount this.

No one ever really gave a shit precisely because it was expensive and hard to use - Bambu is fixing both of those things. I've seen people who did 3D printing full time, who had Prusa farms and extensive knowledge of repairing them completely give up Prusas and switch to Bambu. Bambu seems to be a better product for a lot of audience.

I don't see anything wrong with influencers taking up 3D printing - they have the reach and I'd love to see 3D printers in the hands of more people. What makes you think influencers/people wouldn't use 3D printers to bring their ideas to life? That's precisely why I want 3D printers to be more accessible (both in terms of usability and cost).

[2muchcoffeeman]

What can’t be found in an open source project? AI first layer inspection and lidar?

I’m not an enthusiast either, I wanted to produce my own CAD designs. And I understand not wanting to tinker with the printer. I also don’t care about that shit. But I also appreciated that I could just order parts from where ever or even print my own upgrades. I also agree that any decent printer before the Bambuu was expensive. Bambuu really punches above it’s price point.

But a lot of a printer isn’t something complicated and super fiddly that can’t be user repaired. And this style of printer started off as an open source project with maximum right to repair. But at this point, I’m convinced, that if an open source printer with absolute feature parity was released, it would fail. They would never compete on price. Ownership of your device never mattered.

[regularfry]

All that's happened is that the audience has changed. Ownership of your device does and did matter - just not to the wider market that's now being served by the Bambu devices. The market couldn't have grown to this point without the open source printers, I'm convinced of that. And I strongly suspect that there will always be open source printers out there, and they probably will have feature parity, and they probably will be a bit more expensive, and people will say they have "failed" because they only hold a small percentage of the market, but you know what? The market will be ten times the size. Not everyone has to like the thing for the thing to be viable.

In a sense Prusa are already proving this: they're not really competing on price, and they can't build printers fast enough to satisfy demand.

[Philpax]

> What can’t be found in an open source project? AI first layer inspection and lidar?

Not having to fuck around to assemble and use your printer.

I had the spare time and patience to maintain my printer during my university years - but now I really just want something that works out of the box, all the time, every time.

I love open-source hardware, but only in places where having to maintain it myself isn’t burdensome - and unfortunately, I’ve always treated my printer as more of a tool than as a hobby.

[2muchcoffeeman]

You can buy a preassembled Prusa, Lulzbot, Vorons.

Prusas and Lulzbot work great out of the box. They are expensive though.

[darknavi]

Can you connect Octoprint to them? I have an Ender now but I'd love to upgrade to a multi-spool printer.

[nullc]

X1C works fine completely offline now[1], however it still has a stupid restriction where their slicer can't find the printer if its on a different subnet unless you generate the announcement packet yourself.

[1] it was much worse a few months ago, but an incident where a cloud outage resulted in a lot of damaged printers (when jobs were erroneously resent after they completed without a re-leveling) seems to have motivated fixing many of the remaining gaps with local operation.