[Robotbeat]

I’m a huge Prusa fanboy as well, but Bambu does deserve credit. There’s clearly a before-Bambu and after-Bambu era for 3D printing. Prusa had to adapt (and did, IMO, pretty quickly), and now so have a lot of the other Chinese printer manufacturers.

I totally don’t trust China from a manufacturing perspective. I think it’s literally an intentional policy of the Chinese government to try to de-industrialize the rest of the world (in particular the West and the US, geopolitical rivals), and this is most clearly seen with how China has dominated drone manufacturing and rare earths mining and (just as important) processing. Rare earths is relevant not because it’s irreplaceable or incredibly rare (they’re not, in spite of the name)but because it’s super easy to see the Chinese govt use access to what would otherwise be a kind of niche mineral group as a geopolitical trade weapon. DJI leveraged corporate espionage and stolen IP of rivals (like Parrot) as a launching platform for absolute dominance of what has become a national security relevant sector. And Bambu Labs was started by former DJI folks, so they’re playing some of the same game. But geopolitical motivations aside, they legitimately HAVE upped the game dramatically, bringing to bear just an insane level of electrical engineering, software, and mechanical design and manufacturing expertise on what was not long ago a hobbyist driven sector, producing machines superior to the industrial Statasys machines at a hobbyist price with an Apple-like polish.

But I do think Prusa has, against all odds, actually kept pace. The Mk4S and XL, and then especially the Core One really are comparable machines that keep most of the core of the open source Prusa ethos (although diminished as Prusa got burned by cheap Chinese clones in the past & now doesn’t open source as much) and far less of the corporate control and surveillance embedded in the IoT-ified Bambu machines. The ONLY non-Chinese company to still make competitive machines.

[fennecfoxy]

Yeah and people always mention that Bambu forked all Prusa's stuff, which was only open to fork in the first place because Prusa forked it from Slic3r.

I'm nominally against the Chinese company ingesting and reselling everything possible thing but in this case it's more business as usual as the entire market does it - I mean it all originated in reprap with everyone sharing stuff anyway. Only thing is when they try to create a moat (and both Bambu & Prusa are guilty of this).

[Robotbeat]

They are not equally guilty. Prusa is fighting for their lives against subsidized Chinese printers, against a global scale industrial policy that they are only a tiny player in (Czechia is not exactly a heavy hitter globally). That they have still succeeded at all is remarkable.