MakerBot Is Outsourcing Its Brooklyn Manufacturing Jobs to China
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And I know we pay extra for the warm and fuzzies knowing that something is made in the states, but I'm sure the home tinkerer in Indianapolis doesn't get super warm and fuzzy thinking of paying an extra $2000 just to support some exorbitant Brooklyn rent.
Point being you could find much better locations than Brooklyn without going straight to China (while keeping your own self in Coolsville).
That's a pretty big if. But truth be told, most things don't need to be ultra-high-quality with ultra-tight tolerances.
Where's your iPhone made?
China gets a bad rap for the lowest, barely passable spec crap that gets made and sold by vendors seeking the lowest possible COGS. It's not that China can't make iPhones; it's that they get asked to make cheap shit in a lot of cases. And they can happily do that, too...
An established EMS company like Jabil has huge economies of scale and tremendous in-house resources. They have long relationships with suppliers and consultants. A startup can't possibly compete with that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11568699
Perhaps it's worth the effort to have some manufacturing and expertise in the US?
So what you're proposing, yeah pretty much doing that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_in_the_United_St...
Rent (for employees) is also very accessible in the nearby area, nothing close to Manhattan or some swanky neighborhood in BK. (I live nearby)
In my opinion, especially in technology, its just hard to operate at scale and not produce products in China. Not only is their labor force less expensive but the parts that you require are manufactured there as well.
[0] : https://commercialobserver.com/2015/09/brooklyns-sunset-park...
Coastals might feign confusion, but that spoke to lots of folks.
The fact is that average productivity of an average American is so high today that it does not make sense anymore for most Americans to do a lot of those jobs.
This makes life difficult for some people at the bottom who have no skill and I think as a society we need to solve that problem. But I see government regulation and unreasonably high taxation as primary barriers to do anything.
"The Postal Service is losing millions a year to help you buy cheap stuff from China" https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/12/...
The reality is you can't open a manufacturing shop in a hip and gentrified urban neighborhood for "cool points" and expect to keep costs down. You want factories in poorer rural areas, not a place where the media home sale price is close to $700,000.
The China or bust mentality serves big business, but the reality is that you can do domestic manufacturing at a decent cost if you desired it.
Housing was cheap in '09 but the average apartment rent was $1700 in November '15. That's over a year since the oil price crashed.
If oil prices continue to stay low for another year or two Houston might get more affordable as people leave looking for work elsewhere. But that's a big "if" and it's barely started.
I know it's harder to find talent in small-towns, but in today's economy, you can do a lot with just a small group of people and a workshop in the middle of the country.
At least it feels that way. It's not the same feeling as if production of cheap sunglasses gets off-shored.
My Replicator Gen 5 was not functional on launch, I never got a good print out of it. The self calibration function was non-functional out of the box after one print, and the inability to manually level was designed out from the Rep2, a design so good, international manufacturers copied it in the form of the Flashforge. The Rep 5 was completely redesigned for no reason, the integral filament reel was intended to bully you into buying Makerbot brand filament on their custom reels, the "new" software made it so you could CHANGE LESS SETTINGS, like you know, temperature, or feed rate. Basically Gen 5 was a corporate ball of dark patterns and poor regressive design, completely overpriced, and shipped before it was ready to boot. One could argue that making the Makerbot brand a more closed design was a choice of positioning, but I feel that is only justified if you can deliver the ease of use value, which Gen 5 didn't.
Sadly, those Brooklynite's jobs might have been doomed when the Stratasys logo first went up on the Makerbot sign.
The Makerbot rose up from a spirit of sharing and community goodwill, made money and employed local Brooklyites - so it was a flagship for the sharing economy and open hardware.
Now there is an impression that they closed it off. Make4rbot was bought by the holder of a patent for the sintering 3D printing technology, seen as an impediment to this useful methods community adoption.
The price paid for Makerbot was handsome, but as everyone was doing OK already - this was perceived as 'selling out' and the goodwill began evaporating. The question then for Makerbot is: Does the momentum of being first to market trump the anger among the maker community & alpha adopters ?
When I bought Minecraft at alpha, Mojang suggested it would become open - then after making more cash than anyone needs they sold it to Microsoft. I felt a bit betrayed, not because of $20 but because I promoted it and gave it to friends children and now they are tied into Microsoft which was the opposite of my intention.
This problem echoes down the ages: traditionally bands sell out the truefans when they sign with the majors; the closing of the UNIX community when Bell was privatised; the emerging idea that cool hacks, hardware & software shouldn't be shared among friends, exemplified by Gates letter to the Homebrew Computer Club about BASIC.
This makes new communities wonder if there is a way to prevent this - Stallman invented the GPL to stop the 'tradgedy of the commons' happening to his work & community.
Is there a community GPL that could have been used for MakerBot to ensure it stayed community orientated ?
Does this reflect the difference between Free and Open ? GPL & MIT, is this the tragedy of the commons that only the GPL ensures against ?
A company must choose where to place itself. Go after the high-end boutique market and risk pricing yourself out (if one can't communicate the price/value argument to customers), or become another "me too" supplier in a race to the bottom, following all the same steps as the competition, facing extinction due to lack of margin.
Jobs had seen Kay's Dynabook at Parc and had some vision of what portable computers could offer. Apple phones made $250 per phone, even with less than 0.5% of the market Jobs had already won as Nokia et al. made ~pence per phone.
Cartels and Monopolies naturally aggregate to protect incumbents from the needs & desires of the customer and society from the painful costs of over rapid progress, yet like great empires companies decline when their owners lose touch with their daily customers needs, demands or desires.
Intellectual property rights are not natural rights but a social contract, providing temporary monopoly in exchange for social benefit.
Rinse and repeat.
The MakerBot derives from this GPLed work - the first MakerBot parts were printed by a RepRap.
This is a RepRap tradition that a RepRap print the parts for new RepRaps, a ceremonial self replication.
So the MakerBot's intellectual property is not wholly their own and in fact is derives from a GPL licensed work.
Is this a GPL violation or did MakerBot relicense the RepRap from Bath ?
Perhaps the MakerBot is a 'clean room' redesign of the RepRap, but Pettis, MakerBot's founder was involved from the beginning and built RepRaps and the the MakerBot designs evolution (and initial part printing) from the RepRap is well documented by Make magazine.
MakerBots not being GPL licensed seems like a GPL violation but IANAL.
So redesigning from scratch, following strict clean room protocols (fresh designer who hasn't ever worked on the GPLed design, given a description only), defeats the GPL because it is based on copyright ?
Presumably no GPLed RepRap derived community innovations were copied, if they were ( hypothetically an amazing way of doing the nozzle or special hot-plate method to avoid warping ) would this demonstrate a derived work and trigger GPL ?
If this type of thing isn't a GPL trigger then why can't anyone clean room a different design of sintering tech and allow general sinter 3D printing and sales ?
Is this difference because the GPL relies on copyright but 3D sintering is patent protected ? If so does Open Hardware need a GPL patent license, can that even be possible ?
Has a hardware GPL case ever been brought ?
3d sintering is different because as you said, sintering is patented. Physical products have a bunch of rules that are significantly different from software products, and the area is really murky. I don't know of any GPL hardware cases, but would doubt they'd get very far unless you were able to show direct infringement, which is a lot harder.
Or I am off base and Bowyer's RepRap GPL only applies to media like blueprints ?
Or the Makerbot is sufficiently different ? Or there was prior art to Bowyer ?
P.S: Not Chinese, I've just enjoyed enough Chinese mfg'd (even Chinese designed) products now to know that trope is old.
The stigma is for the uneducated. Cheap knockoffs will be cheap. But if you know how to spend and where to spend it in China — regardless of industry — you will get amazing quality for the price.
It might be worth going to a local tailor and getting measured. They'll gladly do it for free, but I'll usually give the person $20 as a thank you.
Regarding scores: I won't buy if the "Item as Described" metric is below 4.6. I can usually get stuff to Minnesota within 10 days via ePacket.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MakerBot_Industries#Closed_sou...
Product Chart has a section for 3d printers with open source design:
If they had stayed open source they would have gone under years ago, probably years before Systrays bought them.
Open hardware doesn't really seem to be a sustainable business, at least not when what you're making costs as much as a 3D printer. A brand name isn't worth a ton when an identical rip-off product is 40% cheaper and performs the same.
Neither does open source software tbh.
Open hardware works similarly in that you offer your design and then sell a reference build of it. There will always be some percentage of users who are attracted by the fact that it's 'free' but just want the finished product and don't care about building it themselves.
It's a viable business model, it just doesn't scale the way closed-source scales. It only works when you're selling something new that hasn't been mega-mass-produced and commoditised yet. If you want to design something once then churn out millions of units, don't open-source your design.
I'd recommend Lulzbot and Ultimaker.
We have three MakerBots at my company and at least the two Replicator 2X have been fraught with problems. Service from MakerBot was terrible so in the end we had to repair it ourselves as best we could. Based just on that experience, I'd recommend against them.
I wound up having to make my decision on 1) price, 2) what I felt I could look at for a while, considering the cost, and 3) whether or not it seemed like a company that would survive a while.
Prices for the same level of capability between brands vary wildly - there are printers out there that perform on paper just as well as a Makerbot and cost easily half as much. It's almost like they just tote up the cost of mfg and then make up a number to add to it.
Wound up buying a Cel-Robox for $1200 ($1600 after supplies and tax, etc.). We'll see how this turns out.
I might be swimming in filament for a while.
The way I see it, they simply want to lower production costs, cut jobs, save money. Stratasys overpaid heavily.
The Lulzbot mentioned below was based on the Mendelmax 1.5. This line of printers moved RepRap from a threaded rod construction to extruded aluminum. Also the first to have linear rails instead of steel rod+linear bearings. The new Mendelmax3 is a mix of laser cut parts and extrusions - and has required less service than any of my printers to date.
Thomas Sanladerer on youtube is a good source of information, and reprap.org, if you're shopping.
Microcenter is carrying Makerbot but also much lower priced generic 3D printers I think which are house branded. Dremel has a very nice 3D printer for a lot less than Makerbot and apparently has pretty good tech support too.
In regards to competing with China though, it's important to know that the products from China are artificially low and that seems to benefit us but it also means that so many of us are out of work or under employed. But if you straighten out trade balance and currency manipulation Chinese products become more expensive as they naturally should be, local U.S. goods become more accessible and less expensive to a degree and and we have more people with more buying power (because employment) to make the economy work.
It is more than (in Europe) half the price of a Makerbot and that for a printer that is certainly on par with it or maybe be even better. It scores very high in the enthousiasts category on 3D hubs (https://www.3dhubs.com/3d-printers#enthusiast)
Regarding Chinese quality, I don't have the feeling that "Made in USA" is so much better if I see how many problems there are with the Makerbot Replicator 5th generation imo. That version is notorious for having a lot of quality problems.
These days most parts come from Chinese manufacturers anyway... .
Can you explain China's currency manipulation? I don't get how this is different from the Fed printing money. Every country does it to an extent.