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It's giving me serious pause when looking at things like the new Bambu printer
I really like my x1c, but I haven't upgraded it's firmware yet, and probably never will, because the local features are just too good. I know I can replace a lot of the bambu cloud features with octoanywhere, but I shouldn't have to
I suspect an important angle, at least for Bambu Lab, is AI. That's why they are selling printers with expensive Lidar units at a competitive price (the X1C). The Lidar data adds a key part to AI training sets: print outcome. They could use this to train more AI models to improve their own products. I believe this is why they are first pushing the firmware update to X1C models.
If you want to, you can still have a completely open-source printer. You can even build one yourself with some expertise needed. I guess the enshitification is part of the wider audience those manufacturers seek. It wouldn't be necessary, but it seems this is the way they go.
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
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.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
They try to keep it as simple as possible so that really everyone can start printing if they like to. For our luck, we got companies like Prusa and Creality that still allow modifications and have a big community.
I would name Sovol as a good and cheap producer. The plain Klipper(or on older Devices Marlin)-Firmware is really nice :)
Isnt the Creality-K* Lineup also locked down?
The K1 has root access and you can use whatever slicer you want. They are probably not the best machines if you want to install plain clipper though.