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Comment by iwwr | Hacker News Reader

This may be a storm in a teacup. 3D printing doesn't make sense for mass manufacturing, nor in the possible future lest for at least one order of magnitude increase in speed and cost of raw materials. We're still talking of hours to build a small figurine and $50/kg in material prices. If we move out of plastic and into metal, the process is again 100 times slower (or very energy intensive) and the machines are priced in multiples of $100K.

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This is dangerous thinking, IMO. Look at where we are with other media (music and movies).

Years ago, the same thinking was applied to music and movies. "Well, this isn't a big problem, because duplicating the content is expensive and time consuming." The technology advanced, and now copying digital goods is very nearly free from a time and money standpoint. Should we wait for things to get as sideways as they are with music and movies before we put some weight behind reform?

The difference is that music and movies can be translated into digital format, which makes copying effectively free. 3D printing is physical, not digital. Every copy you make will require raw materials and will cause wear and tear on the printer. That creates costs.

Those costs will probably come down over time, of course, but nowhere near as fast as the cost of digital duplication has. The price of plastic doesn't obey Moore's Law.

Music and movies used to only be available on physical media until internet connections became quick enough to be able to download files from geographically anywhere.

One could say the same for CD/DVD/Blu-Ray burners...one needs energy to run the burner and a laser to inscribe the data onto the physical media.

I think the same logic applies to 3-D printers.

I think the same logic applies to 3-D printers.

How? In the one case, you have a situation where it is no longer necessary to have (or produce) the "thing" in order to use it. That is to say that you no longer need the CD/DVD or other physical medium in order to use the bits they carried.

Printed (or otherwise rapidly prototyped) physical artifacts are quite a different thing. Having the 3D model or CNC cutting paths of a physical thing is in no way equal, or even equivalent, to having the thing itself. If the time and cost involved in making a replica is greater than the time and cost of popping down to the shop to pick up the genuine article or of ordering it online and waiting for delivery, then printing's not at all cost-effective.

That's not to say that 3D printing (or subtractive RP) has no utility at all. One of its advantages is that it can be used as a relatively cheap substitute for maintaining parts inventories over extended periods of time—but only for some types of parts. And it is a good way of distributing low-volume decorative works, since the print price is not much higher than the per-unit price of low-volume tooling. (Or at least it will be when the resolution is sufficiently high, since most users are not likely to want to spend a lot of time chasing and filleting their print results.)

I don't disagree with your statements, but I don't think they're the most important factor. 3D printing will never be free, but it doesn't need to be. It only needs to be cost competitive with purchasing the physical good from the traditional provider.

There are still a lot of parallels with digital media, because the cost for a media provider to duplicate digital media is the same as it is for a consumer: free. The costs to the media provider are in production, marketing, and promotion. Additionally, media rights holders sell their content at a healthy profit (far exceeding the total costs of all the production cost components) because they're able to artificially limit supply. Scarcity is enforced only by legal frameworks, not by limits of production. The consumer avoids these costs by duplicating the content on their own, which just happens to be free. That is the disruption.

The same factors apply to many physical goods. The significant costs are in design, marketing, and logistics (moving things around). Manufacturing the physical product is frequently an equal or smaller cost component in the greater scheme of things. This is especially true of simple physical goods that are sold at a high price because of trademark exclusivity or brand value (action figures are a great example). The consumer can avoid the design, marketing, and trademark/brand costs by 3D printing their own physical product. Logistical costs are offset somewhat by the fact that bulk material is easier and cheaper to transport than a finished product.

This mechanism of disruption -- avoidance of major cost components through self-production -- is very similar to the one we see in digital media. 3D printing costs don't need to drop to free, they only need to beat the retail price, which includes many non-manufacturing related costs.

Except physical goods have a real cost associated to it. This is how Microsoft got to be one of the richest companies on the planet and IBM and Apple did not. The per unit profit of one license of Windows is infinitely higher than selling beige box PCs.

Yes, compared to content, duplicating physical goods is expensive.

As of last August, Apple was the most valuable company in the world, and Microsoft and IBM were sixth and seventh, respectively. By that same measure, the four most valuable US companies were Apple, ExxonMobile, Microsoft and IBM, in that order.

http://blogs-images.forbes.com/scottdecarlo/files/2011/08/Cu...

I think your information is out of date.

  This is how Microsoft got to be one of the richest
  companies on the planet and IBM and Apple did not.

Isn't Apple now worth more than Microsoft based on selling hardware devices?

Long term, it's going to be cheaper to ship raw materials and print toys on demand in the stores.

The amount of resources we waste and pollute on packaging today is an atrocity, and 3D printing will go a long way to destroying that.

Cost wise, between buying a plastic figurine off the Internet and printing it, printing is already competitive (possibly more expensive to manufacture but you save shipping and handling).

Printing a figurine is also faster than getting it delivered, or even than going to a brick and mortar shop unless it's really close.

So for decorative stuff 3D printing is already there (if the design is printable and if you can live with limited choices in material), but the real revolution will be when you can print replacement parts to fight planned obsolescence, entire industries may crumble.

You miss probably the major disruption that 3D printing brings to manufacturing, it turns it into a software problem. We've seen what happens when something is reduced to bits that can be manipulated by software, and now we are going to watch it happen to the physical world.

What happens when you don't just torrent a model to print, but you distribute your job to hundreds of printers? We have all seen what happens when you network a bunch of cheaper and lower quality things relative to a monolithic system, and I can see this happening with digital fabrication as well.

I agree. "Photocopying" an object is still way more expensive than buying it.

The price of machines, especially for plastic printing, can and will probably go down (1000$ seems high, I think the small ones are more in the 400/500 range right now). The price of material ? I don't see that happening.

That depends what kind of object it is. Take the example of warhammer figurines - these things are incredibly expensive and cheap to manufacture.

I get what you're saying, but if the tech is left untouched, any advancement gained in a few decades time will likely be less impressive than a few decades of commercial and niche amateur interest. No one is saying let's shut down factories yet. (I don't think.)

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