>Goalposts moved! I'm not the one who set that goalpost and I disagree with it because it's nonsensical. The market is not a binary between a $1000 Mk4 and a $

>Goalposts moved! I'm not the one who set that goalpost and I disagree with it because it's nonsensical. The market is not a binary between a $1000 Mk4 and a $200 Ender 3, period. >You must mean high-end China, yeah? $2k doesn't sound like much when it comes to FDM high end. No, I'm talking about hobbyist builds. Yes, you can drop a couple of orders of magnitude more on industrial printers but I was under the impression we were discussing the consumer space, unless you'd like to move those goalposts? >Are you thinking that Prusa printers are a "hobbyist journey"? Because they're definitely an appliance. Not only that, they're an appliance that can be repaired with off-the-shelf parts for the most part. That's not what I was saying at all. I was saying that if you're after the hobbyist journey, dumping $1k into a Mk4 doesn't make sense. That's money better invested in something that will ultimately be a better printer. If you're after the appliance experience, the Mk4 is a worse option than a Bambu would be. >While it does hinder them competing on price, it also grants them some flexibility to improve designs over time. Since the printer has printed parts, users can print the new/better designs if they want. This isn't mutually exclusive. Bambu has made revisions to the parts they send out of the factory. End users have made extensive modifications like the excellent Hydra AMS. Being flexible doesn't mean locking yourself into low volume, expensive production. >don't require any manual tuning by the user (just like Prusa.) Not just like Prusa. Better than Prusa does. The machine calibrates itself for EM and PA for any arbitrary filament. This is a large part of the "produces better prints" equation. >What about contributions to the 3d printing community? Their slic3r fork is the basis for Orca Slicer, which has become my preferred slicer on non-Bambu printers. >What about repair? Bambu provides detailed repair guides for the entire machine in both text and video format: https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/x1/maintenance https://wiki.bambulab.com/en/x1/maintenance >What about support (and I'm not talking about Prusa's chat/email)? Nearly every part on the printer is directly available on Bambu's webstore and reasonably priced. >Or will they instead want you to buy a whole new printer to get the latest whatever that they've lifted from the community? Long term support remains a question mark but they've made promising first moves on that front. The P1 series have seen a number of upgrades since launch and the firmware for the X1 continues to receive significant firmware growth -- a completely new motor calibration routine got pushed out this month, for example. It's an unknowable at this point.