If cloud connectivity concerns you, the only pre-built option I’d recommend is Prusa. The mk4 isn’t as fast as Bambu’s printers, but that is a trade you will have decided on. I’d still put the mk4 in the “fast” category. The mk4 is completely open source. Prusa is the most reputable company in terms of trustworthiness.

> When the Bambu came out, there was nothing like it on the market that combined price, speed, and ease-of-use. Yes, there were cheaper printers, and faster printers, and easier-to-use printers, but not in a single package, and especially not in a pre-built package.

are they hoping to monetise you in a future update?

continued use? $19.99/month

Bambu X1 started shipping in July 2022 when their Kickstarter wrapped up. AnkerMake M5 started shipping in August. Bambu was first.

Voron is a kit or diy. Creality printers that were available at the time were not fast like the Bambu. Their K1 came later.

I wrote that at the time Bambu was the first to have a pre-built fast 3d printer. That is the first to market (the pre-built fast printer market) that I was talking about.

I don’t know how you say I was wrong, because everything you “corrected” me was in my previous post.

And then you also set up a VPN connection to your phone, mess with certificates and whatnot? Though you’ll also need to use some form of cloud system to get past CGNAT, since you probably have that on both ends. My ISP hasn’t provided IP addresses in years.

Most people just want a printer, not two new hobbies.

The point is that you don't want this to just be on LAN, you would want to be able to this from anywhere. That way if you're at work or going out you can still do that. If you wanted it to just be on LAN, you can just disable the cloud features, but for many people that's a big selling point.

You can make it work over the internet without a cloud connection, but it's fiddly and requires set-up (port forwarding or hole punching). People don't want that, and Bambu's value proposition is zero-tweaking at high performance - otherwise you'd go for another model.

It is completely doable, and there's a lot of good software and tutorials to get it done. But there's all sorts of things that could complicate that process.

For instance, with my last 3d printer, I had to open it up and jump some pins on the mainboard, and then had to get a specific piece of (cheap and readily available) USB hardware to write to it from a laptop - and even then, it only worked from a specific USB port on some of my machines, because of weird USB host incompatibilities. And my 3d printer was one of the most common buy-this-one-first products of its time!

Oh, and there was also some weirdness with the PSU as well that somehow caused flakiness when powering up the webcam when I tried to share power for the pi with the printer itself. I'm comfortable with troubleshooting that, but I wouldn't expect nor even want the average person to have to bother with that kind of stuff.

So the appeal/marketing of the Bambu products is that it's not something for tinkerers - it's something that the average person can just setup and immediately get reliable prints, with all the bells and whistles on top of it.

In other words, the idea is that it (quite literally) "just works". Even with the drawbacks that we all know about proprietary devices and cloud services, it does its job for the average person.

The positive side of all this is that Bambu's relative success means a bit of pressure on the other leaders in the 3D printing space, and we can see that they're all iterating quickly and well to compete in aspects where they may have been resting on their laurels before.