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Comment by dthakur | Hacker News Reader

The interview[1] between Bambu Lab's CEO and Stefan from the CNC Kitchen YouTube channel has some details about the company's background and strategy.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pFtbybLlk0

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Their strategy seems to be make a profit by taking everything they can from the community while milking their users. Do everything they can to lock people into their cloud and ecosystem.

How are they "taking everything from the community"? You mean researching user feedback on other printers and building a better product?

I have owned a dozen or so printers over the last decade going back to PrintrBot. As with a lot of users, the BambuLabs X1 was hands down the best out the box experience of any printer I own. It continues to be my go to printer while my other Prusa's + Creality's sit idle. As long as the cloud service never becomes a paid subscription I could care less that I am locked into their ecosystem. The additionally functionality that provides is a plus for me not a minus.

The fact they have crammed a bunch of the same features of the X1/P1 into a smaller printer that is sub $500 is pretty amazing.

I heard the same arguments for the Ender printers when they were popular. Best prints ever, incredible detail, etc, etc. At least Ender wasn't actively trying to trap people into their ecosystem.

It won't work though. The clones are coming. Many companies have tried to get the cloud lock-in but it just doesn't make sense to buy in as a user.

As an example, Creality giving in and open sourcing the K1 (their clone of Bambu's tech) after initially going as far as violating the license on Klipper to push their own cloud system.

I don’t get how they can trap people into their ecosystem. Does it print STL files, or does it have some way of owning the asset life cycle? Whether I sneakernet an sdcard,m, load via octoprint, or something else, I’m not super locked in. Or does locking in mean “making it so user friendly and easy that you wouldn’t want to use a Marlin firmware printer?” Otherwise it’s just another UI for managing my STLs and slicing. That’s a lot different than an iCloud scenario where all of everything is end to end across the closed device ecosystem. Just the last mile of my STL files is nothing.

Their strategy is to make a good printer and allow you to easily use it. Also, the "cloud" thing is not paid or anything its just a way to send files to the printer over the internet and watch the built-in camera from your telephone. You can also just put files on an SD card or whatever and print them.

There are one zillion other companies making super hackable 3D printers or whatever if you want that.

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