Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

I find this really fascinating as my company has several products and we've been considering for years whether open source is a better direction than what we are doing now, which is to sell closed source software to enterprises. Needless to say, this is a very different market than the one Prusa is attacking, but I've still got opinions.

I find it interesting that this comes the day after Xmas. My house was already completely swamped with cheap Chinese (or similarly cheap manufacturing country) crap. Plastic toys, fire-retardant ugly Disney-esque pajamas made in Myanmar. My kids threw tantrums because they "only" got 14 presents instead of the 16 their siblings got, but almost all those toys are forgotten now a day later. I bought my daughter reproductions of prints from Anna Atkins (the first person to create a book of photography in 1843), a kit to make cyanotypes (the technique she used), and had them solve riddles to get their presents (my daughter's clue was "blue"). I bet she won't remember that. My kids are buried in junk, and it is partially my fault, but let's at least assign a little blame to relatives trying to make up for their parenting failures years ago.

I say all that because I disagree with DD's assertion that the low-cost strategy at Best Buy is something that will always win and is what Prusa should have done. Sure, they probably would have earned much more by somehow offshoring to China. But, I still try to buy things consciously, and would making a bunch of cheap plastic shit from a cheap 3D printer from China be better for my life? I am skeptical.

If all you took away is “cheap plastic from China” and that they should have gone for low cost, you haven’t paid enough attention while reading this article. It talks about building a better product and investing in the experience and ecosystem, which the chinese alternatives have done. We are about to witness the same thing happening to cars very soon.

It's been interesting seeing this happen in multiple industries. Hifi is one of them, companies like Topping, Fiio, etc.. make great products for a fraction of the cost of previously well-known Japanese or western companies and have the measurements to prove it.

Robot vaccuum cleaners are the same, we went from irobot being the best to being eclipsed by companies like Roborock or Dreame (although given privacy issues, I'd get something can be rooted)

> Fiio etc.. make great products for a fraction of the cost of previously well-known Japanese or western companies and have the measurements to prove it.

Ironically, most of the ADCs on the market are equalled or beat out by a $10 Apple USB-C-to-3.5mm dongle smaller than my pinkie finger, and the measurements prove it.

The trouble is, the author doesn't at any point discuss what makes the products better. They just claim they are as if initial cost is the only factor.

Author here. For the price tag of a Prusa Mk4 you can get a Bambu X1 Carbon 3D which is, metric for metric, a better printer -- larger volume, 16 color prints, faster printing, better resolution, pretty much all stats. Go for Creality and you can get the K1 Max at $300 less than the Mk4 (currently on sale, so more like $400 less) which is even better, again, in every spec and comes with an ecosystem that Creality has invested in to a much greater extent than Prusa.

You should know you can't just compare specs and stats and say the K1 Max is better. Print quality and reliability isn't something that shows up on a spec sheet, and Creality struggles here. Bambu is certainly a credible competitor though.

Honestly, as someone who's been in the 3d printing space for over a decade... Bambu Labs isn't a competitor to Prusa. There is no Prusa printer that is as fast, as reliable, produces the quality prints, as any printer from Bambu. I've used both extensively, the X1C since Kickstarter days, the Prusas for... just about ever. The only edge, the only objective property that Prusa holds over Bambu Labs is customization; Prusa gives away all the details you need to majorly modify their printers. Beyond that there just is no reason to buy a Prusa. Print quality on any of my Bambu printers was equal or better out of the box (minus one that had a warped bed, that was replaced for free) than any of my Prusa printers, even ones with extensive tuning. It's just a better product. Better design, better manufactur, better price, better quality output, better software (though I've migrated to Orcaslicer). Prusa has spent the last decade being the top of the pack, holding market share and stagnating. Now they've been dislodged, and I can't see any compelling reason for them to come back.

My experience did not match your. My X1C combo hadn't really work out of the box. I was able to get maybe 2 prints so far.

That said, I am just an sample of one and the only reason why I bought it because my business need seems more pressing than waiting for Prusa to deliver the MMU3 kits.

I have maybe a few hundred prints on Bambu Labs printers, and I've had fewer than 20 failures, pretty much all from bad design choices on my part. They have been quick, reliable workhorses that just spit out the parts I need.

I did have an issue with one of them having a warped bed, which caused bad adhesion on several prints, but I contacted support, they walked me through some debugging, then just sent me a new one. It seems that early on they had a manufacturer that was putting out warped beds that weren't caught in QC, but they've dropped the manufacturer. Maybe you got one of these warped beds as well? You can diagnose that with a straightedge, a ruler, and a flashlight.

Nope. All my issue with X1C is the AMS stuff.

I will be replacing it eventually once there's a viable open source product or make enough money to fund open hardware projects.

Oh interesting, my AMS has worked flawlessly. This is interesting because I've tried many multimaterial solutions, and other than a Voron with multiple hot ends, none of them worked well at all until the Bambu AMS. It was really wasteful at first, but that was the only negative thing I could say about it. Maybe Bambu Labs has more QC problems than I thought. My experiences were all so simply and directly positive (across 4 of their printers now), I kind of expected that to just be the norm.

Remember that I am just a sample of one. Experience will differ.

It's hard to say what's the norm without more data.

Fine, I'll admit I am not always a careful reader.

But, I did read it as: they should have diversified. I know from first hand experience that this is really expensive to do for a company. And, only possible when you can reduce costs in other ways, which China obviously has an advantage in the manufacturing realm.

I think what I'm trying to say is that instead of diversifying, maybe their best bet is to make a really high quality product that appeals to a different category of people than Best Buy consumers. I have no evidence to prove this feeling though. It is just what I aspire to buy when I do buy things.

Prusa's big problem is that they stopped innovating. They plateaud on their current tech, and just made tiny incremental improvements, years apart. There was plenty of things they could have been working on, new technologies, massive speed increases, etc. Bambu Labs created a better product in all ways (but one; very hard to modify), and now there's just no reason to buy a Prusa. You'll be spending more for an objectively inferior product.

If you read the article the contents are pretty much 1) Prusa screwed themselves. 2) The chinese products are materially better and cheaper in every way.

If you want to print crap out of your 3d printer you're totally allowed, but most people I know print useful and interesting tools and additions to their home that make things easier.

I totally agree. I'm only saying that if you are buying the cheapest 3d printer you can find at BestBuy then you are probably not making interesting and useful tools. I wish I could prove that, it is purely speculation. I just see my own world littered with a bunch of cheap crap that satisfies a "I WANT NOW" reflex and generally does not lead to a flurry of creativity.

For the record, I still believe that a "bicycle for the mind" is the best toy. That's why I've got my kids (7,9,11) using Linux and making music with Sonic PI, running Steam on Linux (which works pretty well!) and hopefully much more. It is a constant battle to fight iOS apps with ads and the junk advertised on YouTube, and I'm not sure I'm winning.

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