8 ms·

Formlabs Form 4 Teardown

163 points by zdw 2y ago

brcmthrowaway 2y ago
Wow.. all this technology costing 10x the price of a FDM printer, yet the models don't even look near 10x better than what a 0.1mm layer height FDM printer could do.. kinda disappointing. I'm bearish about this company.
- hooverd 2y ago
  10x less than an FDM printer in the same market segment, if you want to look at it another way. For the longest time you had to pay the Stratasys tax.
- ZiiS 2y ago
  Formlabs is very much the ultra premium end. There are less moving parts, so printers like https://store.anycubic.com/products/photon-mono-m5 https://store.anycubic.com/products/photon-mono-m5 are a reliable workhorse very much price competitive with FDM printers. For tiny models like table-top miniatures, then, I guess quality is subjective, but I certainly think it is more than 10x better. The numbers do not nearly represent the difference in surface finish and detail.
  - ZiiS 2y ago
    Note, I am not saying they are better in general. I much prefer printing on my FDM and taking a clean part strait of the bed. Poring very smelly toxic chemicals, making everything you look at sticky, having to clean, filter etc, along with more sanding off the supports etc. I also find it much harder to prep designs; is that going to warp as it is pulled off the bed for each layer; is that going to trap uncured resin etc.
    - ipsod 2y ago
      Fully agree on toxic chemicals. When you get a workflow down and need quantity, though, resin is cool. Since it exposes the whole bed at once, I can, for example, pull 24 small prints off of a small printer every 1 hour. 2 days of production, and I have hundreds, using just one printer. With FDM, this particular part, FDM couldn't even make, but if it could, it'd be more like 15 minutes per part - would need a small print farm to keep up with literally one $150 printer. I don't even have a space for the resin printer right now, though. It really needs a dedicated and well-thought-out station to keep the toxic stuff from ruining your day.
- teruakohatu 2y ago
  I have never used a resin printer but from what I understand its not just layer height but 2D resolution. SLA printers can print 0.025mm layer heights, so a huge improvement over 0.1mm. Not sure cost has to or should be be linear compared to performance.
- sciolistse 2y ago
  You can get a good quality SLA printer for $200-300, and you can buy FDM printers for tens of thousands of dollars. Just depends on what audience they're targeting.
- martin_a 2y ago
  I'm looking into buying a resin printer for our company for very special applications where we need a higher resolution than a FDM printer. Buying a "premium" model with proper support, a service contract etc. is totally fine for a business investment. I would get lots of raised eyebrows if I were to buy a "hobby machine" for 1/5 of the price. So... There's a place for machines like these.
- samatman 2y ago
  The difference between FDM and resin is quite substantial. Each style has applications which are easier, and come out better, compared to the other approach. Having one of each, I would never bother printing a replacement support bracket on resin, or printing a miniature model on FDM. With one of either, probably worth it. The differences between hobby-grade and professional-grade printers are less obvious at this point, more about reliability and throughput than they are about fidelity at this point.
teruakohatu 2y ago
> First up, the Raspberry Pi 4 compute module. From a scrappy little “$35 computer” put out by a charity originally for the educational market, Raspberry Pi has taken over the world of single board computers, socket by socket. Thanks to the financial backing it had from government grants and donations as well as tax-free status as a charity, it was able to kickstart an unusually low-margin hardware business model into a profitable and sustainable (and soon to be publicly traded!) organization with economies of scale filling its sails. It also benefits from awesome software support due to the synergy of its charitable activities fostering a cozy relationship with the open source community. Being able to purchase modules like the Raspberry Pi CM with all the hard bits like high-speed DDR memory routing, emissions certification, and a Linux distro frees staff resources in other hardware companies (like Formlabs and my own) to focus on other aspects of products. A very succinct description of the Raspberry Pi past trajectory.
- bloggie 2y ago
  I find it confounding how 'cozy' RPi's relationship is with the open-source community given how little of their project is open-source. But I infer that open-source hardware and low-level software is much less important, interesting, and malleable than the OS-and-above software.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - dgroshev 2y ago
    One often under-appreciated aspect is that they have a tiny set of SKUs, which means opensource contributions/docs/articles/hype are all concentrated on those few SKUs. It's especially true for RP2040, their competitors have massive lineups that help to right-size the MCU, but this also means that any given SKU has less opensource support.
    - johnwalkr 2y ago
      This is definitely true, especially when rpi is probably more popular than all other SBCs combined. I always feel burned about 2 years after buying anything but beaglebone, rpi or Jetson nano and can't find support. With rpi you can always find an up to date OS image (for the boards that need an OS). If you use complex devices like cameras, you can probably find recent drivers and readme files for rpi. For other SBCs you will probably end up trying to adapt documentation for rpi and getting stuck because your OS is using a weird version of libc, or something like that.
archi42 2y ago
Since Formlabs position themselves at the higher end, I was surprised they didn't skip LCDs and went straight to DLP. PDF from TI from 2019, though I think they have updated their line up since: https://www.ti.com/lit/sl/dlpt019e/dlpt019e.pdf https://www.ti.com/lit/sl/dlpt019e/dlpt019e.pdf
- varjag 2y ago
  All resin printers have converged to the same tech years ago for good reasons. The differences are mostly aesthetic.
  - archi42 2y ago
    I disagree. DLP resin printers use what can be described essentially as a UV beamer. The DLP IC is called DMD - digital micromirror device. It is what it says, and contains lots of micromirror that can direct the light. The resulting image projected onto the FEP film on the resin vat is quite sharp. They also require little power without affecting the exposure time. Normal resin printers use a UV LED array with lenses to produce a more or less uniform light field. A display is then stuck underneath the vat to block light at certain spots. Since there is some distance between the display and the resin inside the vat, the resulting image has a slight blur on the edges; I think isn't an issue and is countered by using high resolution displays. However, they consume a lot more power and require active cooling. The display on a LCD resin printer has a limited lifetime, while the DLP is rated for 20000h. Being able to focus the image on the resin also allows for using arbitrarily thick (and thus stable) glas plates, while on a LCD the distance between LCD and resin needs to be minimzed. Mind we're talking about a device that costs 4500US$ (before taxes). Or am I missing some good reason to use a LCD display over a DMD in that device class?
edg5000 2y ago
I have been doing a lot of FDM for the past 10 years, but a few years ago, for FOMO reasons, I got really hyped up about resin printing. I got an Elegoo Mars and a very large expensive Chinese resin printer that I never got to work. I ran into three problems that I was not able to overcome, even after tons of trial and error: - Warping. With ABS, a heated chamber, ABS slurry, heated glass bed, completely solved all warping. With resin, I was unable to predict or fix warping issues. - Model not sticking to the bed. Behaviour was inconsistent. With a good printer like the Form, that is probably not a problem. With FDM, having an all metal printer, with a glass bed and a good Z probe solved this for good. - Mechanical performance was garbage. Very brittle. - Always needing supports. With FDM, if you fully control the design process, you can completely eliminate supports (at least in my case, of course this imposes design constraints). With resin, you always need supports. The supports are more complex and harder to remove. I still think resin may be the future, because the level of detail with resin is just amazing.
- torginus 2y ago
  The warping one is strange, warping is caused by thermal expansion/contraction and resin doesn't really change temperature during the printing process. That's one of the reasons you Sounds to me you either aren't printing at room temperature, don't have the resin dialed in or you got a bad batch of resin/ The other criticisms are fair, but not necessarily dealbreakers and can be mitigated. PLA is brittle as well, about the same as standard resin. Just like with FDM, there are other formulations, but the materials are different, and perhaps there are no good analogs for FDM materials. Imo resin printing is mostly useful for tabletop minis, not engineering prints. As opposed to you, I don't think resin's the future, certainly not in the hobbyist space. The fact that it involves highly toxic chemicals and fumes means you need a separate space and be really cognizant about materials safety at all times. It does have its niches, particularly in mini printing, where the high detail is useful, and you can load up the whole area with minis at no penalty to print time and have an entire army's worth of minis printed in a span of hours.
  - michaelt 2y ago
    > The warping one is strange, warping is caused by thermal expansion/contraction and resin doesn't really change temperature during the printing process. In my experience with resin, you can get misshapen parts for a bunch of reasons: 1. Resin will change size a bit during and after curing. Not by a large amount, and of course it depends on the type of resin you use etc - but enough. And of course if your design has some thick bits and some thin bits, one might shrink more than the other. 2. Every time the machine exposes the resin, it sticks to the previous layer and to the projector screen/LCD. The machine then lifts the model, to unstick it from the projector screen. This applies force to the model, and can cause it to bend by a tiny amount - which can gradually build up over several layers. 3. Resin has to be somewhat UV transparent, for each layer to cure all the way through in a short exposure time. Because of that, UV curing later layers can pass through the part and cure resin that shouldn't be cured, on earlier layers. This is particularly the case if the shape has areas resin can pool up and won't run off. > PLA is brittle as well, about the same as standard resin. Just like with FDM, there are other formulations, but the materials are different, and perhaps there are no good analogs for FDM materials. For many printers, resin has to be brittle because of the way the printing process works. You cure a layer, it sticks to the previous layer and the projector screen/LCD, then you raise it to unstick it from the screen. If the resin is flexible, the unsticking process would cause the layer to bend, giving poor dimensional accuracy. So resin is formulated to be stiff and unyielding. FDM can print flexible materials like TPU - common 'print upside-down' designs of resin printers simply can't. Although you undoubtedly could engineer a printer that could, such as a resin equivalent of an SLS printer, which doesn't face the unsticking issue.
torginus 2y ago
Honestly, this just looks like a fancypants version of the cheap Chinese LCD resin printers you can buy for the fraction of the price. Which by the way, if you are willing to drop at least $500 on them, come with many of the convenience features that this printer does. Quality-wise, model detail is impeccable even on my years-old Elegoo Saturn.
mdorazio 2y ago
Notable that I can't find any reviews that directly compare the performance of this $4500 printer to one of the higher-end consumer resin printers available today for $500. What are you getting to justify the massively higher price? With the laser + galvo setup it was clear, but now that it's also LCD is the print quality better? Speed better? Reliability? Build quality? All of these have improved massively from the Chinese brands in the last couple years so I really hope Formlabs isn't planning to coast on their brand name.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- martin_a 2y ago
  > What are you getting to justify the massively higher price? As I've written below this is a machine for businesses not hobbyists. You pay for service contracts, the overall "professional behaviour", a reseller network that helps you and whatnot.
  - mdorazio 2y ago
    This isn't supported by people I've talked to who have owned prior Formlabs printers, though. In fact, I've walked into several R&D labs and seen Formlabs printers collecting dust because they couldn't get support or replacement parts. And when I can replace an entire printer 8 times with next-day shipping and it's still cheaper for significantly higher resolution and faster prints... again, what am I getting here? And I'm not asking as a hobbyist, I ran a 50 printer farm for a couple years.
    - brookst 2y ago
      Formlabs may not deliver on the promise, but that absolutely is the promise. To consumers, a $4500 printer needs to “justify” its price compares to a $500 printer. To a larger company, a $500 printer from an offshore company that doesn’t even pretend to have field support is just a non-starter.
  - washadjeffmad 2y ago
rkagerer 2y ago
I would love to see a quantitative comparison of the Form 4 against competing SLA printers, that measures and compares accuracy and repeatability of the printed parts (i.e. engineering applications, not artistic). Formlabs makes some bold claims, eg. 99% of surface area within 100um of spec when using Precision Resin [1]. [1] https://formlabs.com/store/materials/precision-model-resin/ https://formlabs.com/store/materials/precision-model-resin/
drekipus 2y ago
I don't understand how this is any different to what we've had more than 6 years ago. Ie: this [0] is a $300aud (maybe $200usd) LCD SLA printer. [0] https://au.elegoo.com/products/elegoo-mars-4-msla-resin-3d-printer-with-9k-mono-lcd?variant=48229005099321&currency=AUD https://au.elegoo.com/products/elegoo-mars-4-msla-resin-3d-p...
fuzzfactor 2y ago
Here we have the most important findings about this particular printer: >The past few years has seen a step-function in the competitiveness of products out of China, and SLA 3D printers have been no exception. The Form 4 sits at a pivotal moment for Formlabs, and has parallels to the larger geopolitical race for technological superiority. In general, Chinese products tend to start from a low price point with fewer features and less reliability, focusing on the value segment and iterating their way towards up-market opportunities; US products tend to start at a high price point, with an eye on building (or defending) a differentiated brand through quality, support, and features, and iterate their way down into value-oriented models. We now sit at a point where both the iterate-up and iterate-down approaches are directly competing for the same markets, setting the stage for the current trade war. From somebody who obviously knows more about things like this than the general consensus (or lack of it) in places like Washington, DC. No surprise, that's a place with very little ability to understand complex things, especially technology and its impact.

163 points by zdw 2y ago

Wow.. all this technology costing 10x the price of a FDM printer, yet the models don't even look near 10x better than what a 0.1mm layer height FDM printer could do.. kinda disappointing. I'm bearish about this company.

hooverd 2y ago
10x less than an FDM printer in the same market segment, if you want to look at it another way. For the longest time you had to pay the Stratasys tax.
ZiiS 2y ago
Formlabs is very much the ultra premium end. There are less moving parts, so printers like https://store.anycubic.com/products/photon-mono-m5 https://store.anycubic.com/products/photon-mono-m5 are a reliable workhorse very much price competitive with FDM printers. For tiny models like table-top miniatures, then, I guess quality is subjective, but I certainly think it is more than 10x better. The numbers do not nearly represent the difference in surface finish and detail.
- ZiiS 2y ago
  Note, I am not saying they are better in general. I much prefer printing on my FDM and taking a clean part strait of the bed. Poring very smelly toxic chemicals, making everything you look at sticky, having to clean, filter etc, along with more sanding off the supports etc. I also find it much harder to prep designs; is that going to warp as it is pulled off the bed for each layer; is that going to trap uncured resin etc.
  - ipsod 2y ago
    Fully agree on toxic chemicals. When you get a workflow down and need quantity, though, resin is cool. Since it exposes the whole bed at once, I can, for example, pull 24 small prints off of a small printer every 1 hour. 2 days of production, and I have hundreds, using just one printer. With FDM, this particular part, FDM couldn't even make, but if it could, it'd be more like 15 minutes per part - would need a small print farm to keep up with literally one $150 printer. I don't even have a space for the resin printer right now, though. It really needs a dedicated and well-thought-out station to keep the toxic stuff from ruining your day.
teruakohatu 2y ago
I have never used a resin printer but from what I understand its not just layer height but 2D resolution. SLA printers can print 0.025mm layer heights, so a huge improvement over 0.1mm. Not sure cost has to or should be be linear compared to performance.
sciolistse 2y ago
You can get a good quality SLA printer for $200-300, and you can buy FDM printers for tens of thousands of dollars. Just depends on what audience they're targeting.
martin_a 2y ago
I'm looking into buying a resin printer for our company for very special applications where we need a higher resolution than a FDM printer. Buying a "premium" model with proper support, a service contract etc. is totally fine for a business investment. I would get lots of raised eyebrows if I were to buy a "hobby machine" for 1/5 of the price. So... There's a place for machines like these.
samatman 2y ago
The difference between FDM and resin is quite substantial. Each style has applications which are easier, and come out better, compared to the other approach. Having one of each, I would never bother printing a replacement support bracket on resin, or printing a miniature model on FDM. With one of either, probably worth it. The differences between hobby-grade and professional-grade printers are less obvious at this point, more about reliability and throughput than they are about fidelity at this point.

teruakohatu 2y ago

> First up, the Raspberry Pi 4 compute module. From a scrappy little “$35 computer” put out by a charity originally for the educational market, Raspberry Pi has taken over the world of single board computers, socket by socket. Thanks to the financial backing it had from government grants and donations as well as tax-free status as a charity, it was able to kickstart an unusually low-margin hardware business model into a profitable and sustainable (and soon to be publicly traded!) organization with economies of scale filling its sails. It also benefits from awesome software support due to the synergy of its charitable activities fostering a cozy relationship with the open source community. Being able to purchase modules like the Raspberry Pi CM with all the hard bits like high-speed DDR memory routing, emissions certification, and a Linux distro frees staff resources in other hardware companies (like Formlabs and my own) to focus on other aspects of products. A very succinct description of the Raspberry Pi past trajectory.

bloggie 2y ago
I find it confounding how 'cozy' RPi's relationship is with the open-source community given how little of their project is open-source. But I infer that open-source hardware and low-level software is much less important, interesting, and malleable than the OS-and-above software.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dgroshev 2y ago
  One often under-appreciated aspect is that they have a tiny set of SKUs, which means opensource contributions/docs/articles/hype are all concentrated on those few SKUs. It's especially true for RP2040, their competitors have massive lineups that help to right-size the MCU, but this also means that any given SKU has less opensource support.
  - johnwalkr 2y ago
    This is definitely true, especially when rpi is probably more popular than all other SBCs combined. I always feel burned about 2 years after buying anything but beaglebone, rpi or Jetson nano and can't find support. With rpi you can always find an up to date OS image (for the boards that need an OS). If you use complex devices like cameras, you can probably find recent drivers and readme files for rpi. For other SBCs you will probably end up trying to adapt documentation for rpi and getting stuck because your OS is using a weird version of libc, or something like that.

archi42 2y ago

Since Formlabs position themselves at the higher end, I was surprised they didn't skip LCDs and went straight to DLP. PDF from TI from 2019, though I think they have updated their line up since: https://www.ti.com/lit/sl/dlpt019e/dlpt019e.pdf https://www.ti.com/lit/sl/dlpt019e/dlpt019e.pdf

varjag 2y ago
All resin printers have converged to the same tech years ago for good reasons. The differences are mostly aesthetic.
- archi42 2y ago
  I disagree. DLP resin printers use what can be described essentially as a UV beamer. The DLP IC is called DMD - digital micromirror device. It is what it says, and contains lots of micromirror that can direct the light. The resulting image projected onto the FEP film on the resin vat is quite sharp. They also require little power without affecting the exposure time. Normal resin printers use a UV LED array with lenses to produce a more or less uniform light field. A display is then stuck underneath the vat to block light at certain spots. Since there is some distance between the display and the resin inside the vat, the resulting image has a slight blur on the edges; I think isn't an issue and is countered by using high resolution displays. However, they consume a lot more power and require active cooling. The display on a LCD resin printer has a limited lifetime, while the DLP is rated for 20000h. Being able to focus the image on the resin also allows for using arbitrarily thick (and thus stable) glas plates, while on a LCD the distance between LCD and resin needs to be minimzed. Mind we're talking about a device that costs 4500US$ (before taxes). Or am I missing some good reason to use a LCD display over a DMD in that device class?

edg5000 2y ago

I have been doing a lot of FDM for the past 10 years, but a few years ago, for FOMO reasons, I got really hyped up about resin printing. I got an Elegoo Mars and a very large expensive Chinese resin printer that I never got to work. I ran into three problems that I was not able to overcome, even after tons of trial and error: - Warping. With ABS, a heated chamber, ABS slurry, heated glass bed, completely solved all warping. With resin, I was unable to predict or fix warping issues. - Model not sticking to the bed. Behaviour was inconsistent. With a good printer like the Form, that is probably not a problem. With FDM, having an all metal printer, with a glass bed and a good Z probe solved this for good. - Mechanical performance was garbage. Very brittle. - Always needing supports. With FDM, if you fully control the design process, you can completely eliminate supports (at least in my case, of course this imposes design constraints). With resin, you always need supports. The supports are more complex and harder to remove. I still think resin may be the future, because the level of detail with resin is just amazing.

torginus 2y ago
The warping one is strange, warping is caused by thermal expansion/contraction and resin doesn't really change temperature during the printing process. That's one of the reasons you Sounds to me you either aren't printing at room temperature, don't have the resin dialed in or you got a bad batch of resin/ The other criticisms are fair, but not necessarily dealbreakers and can be mitigated. PLA is brittle as well, about the same as standard resin. Just like with FDM, there are other formulations, but the materials are different, and perhaps there are no good analogs for FDM materials. Imo resin printing is mostly useful for tabletop minis, not engineering prints. As opposed to you, I don't think resin's the future, certainly not in the hobbyist space. The fact that it involves highly toxic chemicals and fumes means you need a separate space and be really cognizant about materials safety at all times. It does have its niches, particularly in mini printing, where the high detail is useful, and you can load up the whole area with minis at no penalty to print time and have an entire army's worth of minis printed in a span of hours.
- michaelt 2y ago
  > The warping one is strange, warping is caused by thermal expansion/contraction and resin doesn't really change temperature during the printing process. In my experience with resin, you can get misshapen parts for a bunch of reasons: 1. Resin will change size a bit during and after curing. Not by a large amount, and of course it depends on the type of resin you use etc - but enough. And of course if your design has some thick bits and some thin bits, one might shrink more than the other. 2. Every time the machine exposes the resin, it sticks to the previous layer and to the projector screen/LCD. The machine then lifts the model, to unstick it from the projector screen. This applies force to the model, and can cause it to bend by a tiny amount - which can gradually build up over several layers. 3. Resin has to be somewhat UV transparent, for each layer to cure all the way through in a short exposure time. Because of that, UV curing later layers can pass through the part and cure resin that shouldn't be cured, on earlier layers. This is particularly the case if the shape has areas resin can pool up and won't run off. > PLA is brittle as well, about the same as standard resin. Just like with FDM, there are other formulations, but the materials are different, and perhaps there are no good analogs for FDM materials. For many printers, resin has to be brittle because of the way the printing process works. You cure a layer, it sticks to the previous layer and the projector screen/LCD, then you raise it to unstick it from the screen. If the resin is flexible, the unsticking process would cause the layer to bend, giving poor dimensional accuracy. So resin is formulated to be stiff and unyielding. FDM can print flexible materials like TPU - common 'print upside-down' designs of resin printers simply can't. Although you undoubtedly could engineer a printer that could, such as a resin equivalent of an SLS printer, which doesn't face the unsticking issue.

torginus 2y ago

Honestly, this just looks like a fancypants version of the cheap Chinese LCD resin printers you can buy for the fraction of the price. Which by the way, if you are willing to drop at least $500 on them, come with many of the convenience features that this printer does. Quality-wise, model detail is impeccable even on my years-old Elegoo Saturn.

mdorazio 2y ago

Notable that I can't find any reviews that directly compare the performance of this $4500 printer to one of the higher-end consumer resin printers available today for $500. What are you getting to justify the massively higher price? With the laser + galvo setup it was clear, but now that it's also LCD is the print quality better? Speed better? Reliability? Build quality? All of these have improved massively from the Chinese brands in the last couple years so I really hope Formlabs isn't planning to coast on their brand name.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
martin_a 2y ago
> What are you getting to justify the massively higher price? As I've written below this is a machine for businesses not hobbyists. You pay for service contracts, the overall "professional behaviour", a reseller network that helps you and whatnot.
- mdorazio 2y ago
  This isn't supported by people I've talked to who have owned prior Formlabs printers, though. In fact, I've walked into several R&D labs and seen Formlabs printers collecting dust because they couldn't get support or replacement parts. And when I can replace an entire printer 8 times with next-day shipping and it's still cheaper for significantly higher resolution and faster prints... again, what am I getting here? And I'm not asking as a hobbyist, I ran a 50 printer farm for a couple years.
  - brookst 2y ago
    Formlabs may not deliver on the promise, but that absolutely is the promise. To consumers, a $4500 printer needs to “justify” its price compares to a $500 printer. To a larger company, a $500 printer from an offshore company that doesn’t even pretend to have field support is just a non-starter.
- washadjeffmad 2y ago

rkagerer 2y ago

I would love to see a quantitative comparison of the Form 4 against competing SLA printers, that measures and compares accuracy and repeatability of the printed parts (i.e. engineering applications, not artistic). Formlabs makes some bold claims, eg. 99% of surface area within 100um of spec when using Precision Resin [1]. [1] https://formlabs.com/store/materials/precision-model-resin/ https://formlabs.com/store/materials/precision-model-resin/

drekipus 2y ago

I don't understand how this is any different to what we've had more than 6 years ago. Ie: this [0] is a $300aud (maybe $200usd) LCD SLA printer. [0] https://au.elegoo.com/products/elegoo-mars-4-msla-resin-3d-printer-with-9k-mono-lcd?variant=48229005099321&currency=AUD https://au.elegoo.com/products/elegoo-mars-4-msla-resin-3d-p...

fuzzfactor 2y ago

Here we have the most important findings about this particular printer: >The past few years has seen a step-function in the competitiveness of products out of China, and SLA 3D printers have been no exception. The Form 4 sits at a pivotal moment for Formlabs, and has parallels to the larger geopolitical race for technological superiority. In general, Chinese products tend to start from a low price point with fewer features and less reliability, focusing on the value segment and iterating their way towards up-market opportunities; US products tend to start at a high price point, with an eye on building (or defending) a differentiated brand through quality, support, and features, and iterate their way down into value-oriented models. We now sit at a point where both the iterate-up and iterate-down approaches are directly competing for the same markets, setting the stage for the current trade war. From somebody who obviously knows more about things like this than the general consensus (or lack of it) in places like Washington, DC. No surprise, that's a place with very little ability to understand complex things, especially technology and its impact.