17 ms·

bait-and-switch? We, those who advocate for open source 3D printers, saw it coming from miles away. This has very very clearly been their plan all along, they t

by nialv7 2y ago

bait-and-switch? We, those who advocate for open source 3D printers, saw it coming from miles away. This has very very clearly been their plan all along, they themselves said as much (e.g. they are doing the "apple model"). They have been very transparent about this, yet people still fell for it.

hooverd 2y ago
Open source didn't compete on quality for price. I could pay 2k plus 40 hours of my time for a Voron or buy something that just works. I think Prusa only put out their CoreXY offering after they realized Bambu was eating their lunch. The Apple model works because people want to print rather than tinker.
- nialv7 2y ago
  I paid ~$750 for my 350mm Voron 2.4 kit (and, sure, 40 hours of my time. But look, you want to do 3D printing, 40 hours are just a small initial investment).
  - hooverd 2y ago
    Damn that's cheap! What vendor did you use?
  - MindSpunk 2y ago
    > But look, you want to do 3D printing, 40 hours are just a small initial investment No. None of this crap. I want to 3D print. I don't want to service industrial machinery in my spare time. Why should 3D printing require spending weekends troubleshooting machines just to keep the thing working? I want to print models not play repair technician. Vorons are fantastic printers and a fantastic kit if 3D printing itself is your hobby. 3D printing is a fantastic hobby. There's tons of fun to be had building up and dialing in a printer kit. A well tuned voron can be up with the best of the best 3D printers. If that's what you want to do go for it! But for heaven's sake I want to print models, parts and other practical things. I have other things to do and problems to solve. My 3D printer is a tool. If I have to spend just as much time working on the machine as I do using to actually print things then I'm not interested. Bambu is still the best game in town for a turn-key, just works printer. Prusa can deliver the same experience at double to triple the ticket price. A voron is not a replacement for a Bambu printer no matter how good the printers actually are.
    - nicman23 2y ago
      because 3d printing is not there yet. the whole process is basically cnc but with z hops and extruding instead of removing material. we do not even have conical slicing yet.
      - abtinf 2y ago
        > because 3d printing is not there yet Ya, it is, and it’s been there for quite a while now thanks to Bambu. The X1 just works. Coming up on a year of frequent use, I can count the number of failed prints on one hand. It’s incredible.
        nicman23 2y ago
        i do not believe you. it is mostly a material issue not a printer issue
        abtinf 2y ago
        > it is mostly a material issue not a printer issue Tell me you don’t anything about 3d printing without telling me you don’t know anything about 3d printing.
        nicman23 2y ago
        if you think that there are not limitations with current fdm thermoplastics and software, i do not know what to tell you.
        Mashimo 2y ago
        Both modern (pre assembled) Prusa and Bambu are very good at this. They guide you through the full setup process, automate first layer reliable, have decent stock profiles. It's all just much less tinkering then 5 years ago.
      - BoorishBears 2y ago
        You're saying this yet anyone can buy a random Bambu and just print. I've owned or used probably every major (and some minor) printer released in the last 8 years and for most people Bambu really will just be "plug and play" (and even if something goes wrong they'll hold hands as much as needed)
  - rleigh 2y ago
    It really depends upon the target market. That's fine for hobbyists. But I use the Bambu X1 for small-scale prototyping in a company, and it has to be usable out of the box. We can't justify an entire week of labour for each printer we buy. The Bambu has been ideal for that reason. Every material pretty much just works, and the quality is excellent. The cloud integration and janky LAN mode is the downside, and this current topic even moreso.
    - tonyarkles 2y ago
      Yeah, I've got an A1 that I bought on sale. It's sitting next to a Prusa MK3S. I was doing prints for my nephews for Halloween and the A1 would do a print in 2h and PrusaSlicer estimated 9h for the MK3S. And I have, so far, not had a single failed print on the A1. They're rare on the MK3S too. But... the MK3S is "start the print and it'll be ready in the morning" and the A1 is "start the print and it'll be ready by lunch, and if you need to iterate you can have another one done by 3pm"
- seabird 2y ago
  There's a middle ground between the Apple model and assembling everything yourself.
- harrall 2y ago
  Well Prusa was open and did compete. But for 3D printers that worked out of the box under $1000, Prusa had no real competition itself. The Mk3 came out in 2017 and I swear Prusa just sat on their laurels. I was a Mk3s+ owner (well, still am) and was pretty disappointed how little improved with the Mk4. Bambu’s competition was Prusa and they clearly strived to improve over what Prusa had accomplished.
  - bushbaba 2y ago
    I wondered if the bamboo was sold for a loss
    - GuB-42 2y ago
      Bambu Labs printers are not cheap. Even their entry level A1 printer is twice the price of an Ender3. Sure, it is a better printer, but it is clear that they are going for scale, and most of what makes them better is in the software rather than in using premium hardware.
    - esskay 2y ago
      initially maybe but the way the printers are built makes for cheap mass production. Theres no special sauce in the hardware, it's all low cost off the shelf stuff, it's just optimised very well.
  - nirvdrum 2y ago
    I wasn’t really sold on the 4/4S, but I recently upgraded a 3S+ to a 4S and am amazed how much improved. The new touchscreen LCD is a huge improvement over the old two line monochrome LCD. Remote access and wife printing is a nice plus — I don’t even run OctoPi anymore. Automatic bed leveling and no more Live Z tweaking for each sheet has been a major quality of life upgrade and eliminates one of the major pain points in swapping out nozzles. The nozzle is much easier to swap out and is now high flow. Add in Input Shaping and it prints significantly faster. I hadn’t had any experience with the new platform prior to this upgrade and I skipped over the MK4, but the 4S upgrade is a significant step up over the 3S/3S+. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the upgrade kit — that took much longer than expected to complete (about two days) and I regret not buying a new printer instead. But, I have a 3S I plan to upgrade to 3.5 just to get the new electronics; that upgrade is far less intensive. If you haven’t tried out a 4S you might be pleasantly surprised by how much nicer it is than the 3S+.
- beeflet 2y ago
  it just works until it doesn't
- moooo99 2y ago
  > Open source didn't compete on quality for price. Well, Open Source did compete on one quality very well: being open, hackable and staying that way. With this being removed from Bambu lab printers it seems as if this is a very much valued aspect for many 3D printing enthusiasts, yet few people were willing to compromise for this aspect. Apparently it is true, you don’t know how much you value something until you don’t have it anymore
- kamranjon 2y ago
  Curious if anyone has tried the Core XY printers from Creality? I think they use open source software and are generally in the same ballpark as the Bambu printers price-wise. Also saw they have a similar AMS style system as well.
- pandemic_region 2y ago
  > The Apple model works because people want to print rather than tinker. Entirely this. I bought my A1 mini over the Christmas holidays and couldn't be happier with it, it's my first 3D printer. Searching for models on Makerworld, adjusting tiny bits here and there if needed and print. It just works and I don't really care about anything else, much like my Brother printer.
DrBenCarson 2y ago
AFAIK, Apple has never retroactively removed functionality from devices people already purchased Selling a walled garden is one thing, building walls around a garden you already bought is another thing entirely
- ulrikrasmussen 2y ago
  This is the Google model then. Base everything on open source, even allow unofficial builds of your operating system (LineageOS, Graphene), but slowly introduce more and more device attestation and DRM so it becomes de facto impossible to actually use anything but the closed builds because everything from banking apps and electronic identification apps to streaming apps will refuse to run on your "unsafe" operating system.
  - Arch-TK 2y ago
    Currently the only thing which won't run on a non-google blessed android build is google wallet, although a lot of applications rely on google's proprietary services exposed through google play. I've not ran into any banking applications which won't run on a non-google build of android (as then they would only run on a pixel). That being said, I refuse to seriously bank with any bank which doesn't offer a functioning website. My main bank offers an app but you have to wholesale switch to it.
    - jumski 2y ago
      Revolut stopped working for me on GrapheneOS with an official message "Sorry, Revolut is not supported on devices with custom firmware".
      - piaste 2y ago
        Do you have the sandboxed Play Services installed? It works fine for me on Graphene (just checked). That said, the recommendation I always give, and personally follow: keep a spare phone in a drawer somewhere, with official Android installed, a Google account, and use it exclusively for business purposes - banking, government services, and the email account you use for those (separate from the one you use for everything else). Nothing else, no messaging, socials, browsing, or games. Then you're free to keep your personal phone FOSS and as private as you like, without fear of getting locked out of important stuff due to a crappy Google® SafetyNet® upgrade.
maverwa 2y ago
As someone who recently bought a bambu printer, I have to agree: I am not surprised. Still disappointed, but in no way surprised. The "apple experience" is why I went for a bambu device (along with the price, and some excellent recommendations from friends). I was even surpised that the "LAN Mode" actually works somewhat good. Should have got a prusa...
BoredPositron 2y ago
Come on even makerbot wasn’t that blatant. I believe a lot of us haven’t seen it coming.
LeoPanthera 2y ago
"Fell for it" implies that everyone buying a Bambu printer expected some degree of openness. Maybe some customers actually want an "Apple model", where the device mostly looks after itself and "just works" as much as possible.
stavros 2y ago
I bought a printer. It had some stuff. I didn't want that stuff to be gone after I bought it. That's a bait-and-switch, because they didn't explicitly say "be aware, that stuff is going away on Jan 2025".
- op00to 2y ago
  They never officially supported compatibility with Orca, or Home Assistant. Vendors break compatibility with unsupported stuff all the time. Don’t make purchase decisions on unsupported features if you’re gonna get all bent out of shape about it.
  - stavros 2y ago
    They officially supported me printing without an Internet connection, which is stopping now.
    - rickdeckard 2y ago
      Sorry to potentially pour oil into fire here, but I'm curious: did they really? "Officially support" printing without internet connection? Was this explicitly documented as a feature or did this just "happen to work" as you expected? A lawsuit may have some leverage to find that something could have been "reasonably expected" to work in a certain way, but that's quite uncertain territory. i.e. I would expect an Apple Watch to also work with Android Devices, but this was never officially supported by Apple and it's arguable whether it was reasonable for me to even expect this.
      - nullc 2y ago
        Yes, "lan mode" is an officially supported advertised feature, where you can happily print on an isolated network. (though as of this morning it now sounds like they're backing off after public backlash)
        rickdeckard 2y ago
junon 2y ago
Good for you. Kind of a non sequitur, though, and gaslight-ey at that.
nullstyle 2y ago
no, it hasn't been their clear plan all along, and blaming the victims is not advocating for open source 3d printers. Fully open source, DIY 3d printers that are available today suck compared to Bambu. The commercial offerings built on top of Orca (I have a magneto X) suck compared to bambu. The 3d printing community just slapped down heygears for similar BS to what bambu is pulling right now. Once Bambu hire some better software devs and sort out their issues, open access will return, I bet.
- cap11235 2y ago
  Apologists are crazy. It's clearly shit
  - nullstyle 2y ago
    Its clearly shit, but you're delusional if you think I'm an apologist.
  - nullstyle 2y ago
    oh, and look, the backlash is already starting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91kfolYkRNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91kfolYkRNM I'm not saying I wouldn't love for an fully open source printer company to have the quality and velocity of development that the bambu has (AMS-compatible TPU, delicious), I'm saying people who are making "It's clearly X... You should have known Y" aren't providing useful perspective nor are they accurate. Looking at your post history shows this.
asveikau 2y ago
I got into 3d printing a few years ago and noticed the same, bambu made me nervous for exactly this. But the fanboyism and shilling in the 3d printing community is intense. If you mentioned these misgivings you'd get flamed. If you bought or enjoyed another printer people would advise you to sell it and buy Bambu. Lots of people in various threads seemed to defer to that kind of expert advice. I think there is/was a similar fanaticism for Prusa going on, but it seems a little less at the forefront since Bambu.

by nialv7 2y ago

hooverd 2y ago

Open source didn't compete on quality for price. I could pay 2k plus 40 hours of my time for a Voron or buy something that just works. I think Prusa only put out their CoreXY offering after they realized Bambu was eating their lunch. The Apple model works because people want to print rather than tinker.

nialv7 2y ago
I paid ~$750 for my 350mm Voron 2.4 kit (and, sure, 40 hours of my time. But look, you want to do 3D printing, 40 hours are just a small initial investment).
- hooverd 2y ago
  Damn that's cheap! What vendor did you use?
- MindSpunk 2y ago
  > But look, you want to do 3D printing, 40 hours are just a small initial investment No. None of this crap. I want to 3D print. I don't want to service industrial machinery in my spare time. Why should 3D printing require spending weekends troubleshooting machines just to keep the thing working? I want to print models not play repair technician. Vorons are fantastic printers and a fantastic kit if 3D printing itself is your hobby. 3D printing is a fantastic hobby. There's tons of fun to be had building up and dialing in a printer kit. A well tuned voron can be up with the best of the best 3D printers. If that's what you want to do go for it! But for heaven's sake I want to print models, parts and other practical things. I have other things to do and problems to solve. My 3D printer is a tool. If I have to spend just as much time working on the machine as I do using to actually print things then I'm not interested. Bambu is still the best game in town for a turn-key, just works printer. Prusa can deliver the same experience at double to triple the ticket price. A voron is not a replacement for a Bambu printer no matter how good the printers actually are.
  - nicman23 2y ago
    because 3d printing is not there yet. the whole process is basically cnc but with z hops and extruding instead of removing material. we do not even have conical slicing yet.
    - abtinf 2y ago
      > because 3d printing is not there yet Ya, it is, and it’s been there for quite a while now thanks to Bambu. The X1 just works. Coming up on a year of frequent use, I can count the number of failed prints on one hand. It’s incredible.
      - nicman23 2y ago
        i do not believe you. it is mostly a material issue not a printer issue
        abtinf 2y ago
        > it is mostly a material issue not a printer issue Tell me you don’t anything about 3d printing without telling me you don’t know anything about 3d printing.
        nicman23 2y ago
        if you think that there are not limitations with current fdm thermoplastics and software, i do not know what to tell you.
        Mashimo 2y ago
        Both modern (pre assembled) Prusa and Bambu are very good at this. They guide you through the full setup process, automate first layer reliable, have decent stock profiles. It's all just much less tinkering then 5 years ago.
    - BoorishBears 2y ago
      You're saying this yet anyone can buy a random Bambu and just print. I've owned or used probably every major (and some minor) printer released in the last 8 years and for most people Bambu really will just be "plug and play" (and even if something goes wrong they'll hold hands as much as needed)
- rleigh 2y ago
  It really depends upon the target market. That's fine for hobbyists. But I use the Bambu X1 for small-scale prototyping in a company, and it has to be usable out of the box. We can't justify an entire week of labour for each printer we buy. The Bambu has been ideal for that reason. Every material pretty much just works, and the quality is excellent. The cloud integration and janky LAN mode is the downside, and this current topic even moreso.
  - tonyarkles 2y ago
    Yeah, I've got an A1 that I bought on sale. It's sitting next to a Prusa MK3S. I was doing prints for my nephews for Halloween and the A1 would do a print in 2h and PrusaSlicer estimated 9h for the MK3S. And I have, so far, not had a single failed print on the A1. They're rare on the MK3S too. But... the MK3S is "start the print and it'll be ready in the morning" and the A1 is "start the print and it'll be ready by lunch, and if you need to iterate you can have another one done by 3pm"
seabird 2y ago
There's a middle ground between the Apple model and assembling everything yourself.
harrall 2y ago
Well Prusa was open and did compete. But for 3D printers that worked out of the box under $1000, Prusa had no real competition itself. The Mk3 came out in 2017 and I swear Prusa just sat on their laurels. I was a Mk3s+ owner (well, still am) and was pretty disappointed how little improved with the Mk4. Bambu’s competition was Prusa and they clearly strived to improve over what Prusa had accomplished.
- bushbaba 2y ago
  I wondered if the bamboo was sold for a loss
  - GuB-42 2y ago
    Bambu Labs printers are not cheap. Even their entry level A1 printer is twice the price of an Ender3. Sure, it is a better printer, but it is clear that they are going for scale, and most of what makes them better is in the software rather than in using premium hardware.
  - esskay 2y ago
    initially maybe but the way the printers are built makes for cheap mass production. Theres no special sauce in the hardware, it's all low cost off the shelf stuff, it's just optimised very well.
- nirvdrum 2y ago
  I wasn’t really sold on the 4/4S, but I recently upgraded a 3S+ to a 4S and am amazed how much improved. The new touchscreen LCD is a huge improvement over the old two line monochrome LCD. Remote access and wife printing is a nice plus — I don’t even run OctoPi anymore. Automatic bed leveling and no more Live Z tweaking for each sheet has been a major quality of life upgrade and eliminates one of the major pain points in swapping out nozzles. The nozzle is much easier to swap out and is now high flow. Add in Input Shaping and it prints significantly faster. I hadn’t had any experience with the new platform prior to this upgrade and I skipped over the MK4, but the 4S upgrade is a significant step up over the 3S/3S+. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the upgrade kit — that took much longer than expected to complete (about two days) and I regret not buying a new printer instead. But, I have a 3S I plan to upgrade to 3.5 just to get the new electronics; that upgrade is far less intensive. If you haven’t tried out a 4S you might be pleasantly surprised by how much nicer it is than the 3S+.
beeflet 2y ago
it just works until it doesn't
moooo99 2y ago
> Open source didn't compete on quality for price. Well, Open Source did compete on one quality very well: being open, hackable and staying that way. With this being removed from Bambu lab printers it seems as if this is a very much valued aspect for many 3D printing enthusiasts, yet few people were willing to compromise for this aspect. Apparently it is true, you don’t know how much you value something until you don’t have it anymore
kamranjon 2y ago
Curious if anyone has tried the Core XY printers from Creality? I think they use open source software and are generally in the same ballpark as the Bambu printers price-wise. Also saw they have a similar AMS style system as well.
pandemic_region 2y ago
> The Apple model works because people want to print rather than tinker. Entirely this. I bought my A1 mini over the Christmas holidays and couldn't be happier with it, it's my first 3D printer. Searching for models on Makerworld, adjusting tiny bits here and there if needed and print. It just works and I don't really care about anything else, much like my Brother printer.

DrBenCarson 2y ago

AFAIK, Apple has never retroactively removed functionality from devices people already purchased Selling a walled garden is one thing, building walls around a garden you already bought is another thing entirely

ulrikrasmussen 2y ago
This is the Google model then. Base everything on open source, even allow unofficial builds of your operating system (LineageOS, Graphene), but slowly introduce more and more device attestation and DRM so it becomes de facto impossible to actually use anything but the closed builds because everything from banking apps and electronic identification apps to streaming apps will refuse to run on your "unsafe" operating system.
- Arch-TK 2y ago
  Currently the only thing which won't run on a non-google blessed android build is google wallet, although a lot of applications rely on google's proprietary services exposed through google play. I've not ran into any banking applications which won't run on a non-google build of android (as then they would only run on a pixel). That being said, I refuse to seriously bank with any bank which doesn't offer a functioning website. My main bank offers an app but you have to wholesale switch to it.
  - jumski 2y ago
    Revolut stopped working for me on GrapheneOS with an official message "Sorry, Revolut is not supported on devices with custom firmware".
    - piaste 2y ago
      Do you have the sandboxed Play Services installed? It works fine for me on Graphene (just checked). That said, the recommendation I always give, and personally follow: keep a spare phone in a drawer somewhere, with official Android installed, a Google account, and use it exclusively for business purposes - banking, government services, and the email account you use for those (separate from the one you use for everything else). Nothing else, no messaging, socials, browsing, or games. Then you're free to keep your personal phone FOSS and as private as you like, without fear of getting locked out of important stuff due to a crappy Google® SafetyNet® upgrade.

maverwa 2y ago

As someone who recently bought a bambu printer, I have to agree: I am not surprised. Still disappointed, but in no way surprised. The "apple experience" is why I went for a bambu device (along with the price, and some excellent recommendations from friends). I was even surpised that the "LAN Mode" actually works somewhat good. Should have got a prusa...

BoredPositron 2y ago

Come on even makerbot wasn’t that blatant. I believe a lot of us haven’t seen it coming.

LeoPanthera 2y ago

"Fell for it" implies that everyone buying a Bambu printer expected some degree of openness. Maybe some customers actually want an "Apple model", where the device mostly looks after itself and "just works" as much as possible.

stavros 2y ago

I bought a printer. It had some stuff. I didn't want that stuff to be gone after I bought it. That's a bait-and-switch, because they didn't explicitly say "be aware, that stuff is going away on Jan 2025".

op00to 2y ago
They never officially supported compatibility with Orca, or Home Assistant. Vendors break compatibility with unsupported stuff all the time. Don’t make purchase decisions on unsupported features if you’re gonna get all bent out of shape about it.
- stavros 2y ago
  They officially supported me printing without an Internet connection, which is stopping now.
  - rickdeckard 2y ago
    Sorry to potentially pour oil into fire here, but I'm curious: did they really? "Officially support" printing without internet connection? Was this explicitly documented as a feature or did this just "happen to work" as you expected? A lawsuit may have some leverage to find that something could have been "reasonably expected" to work in a certain way, but that's quite uncertain territory. i.e. I would expect an Apple Watch to also work with Android Devices, but this was never officially supported by Apple and it's arguable whether it was reasonable for me to even expect this.
    - nullc 2y ago
      Yes, "lan mode" is an officially supported advertised feature, where you can happily print on an isolated network. (though as of this morning it now sounds like they're backing off after public backlash)
      - rickdeckard 2y ago

junon 2y ago

Good for you. Kind of a non sequitur, though, and gaslight-ey at that.

nullstyle 2y ago

no, it hasn't been their clear plan all along, and blaming the victims is not advocating for open source 3d printers. Fully open source, DIY 3d printers that are available today suck compared to Bambu. The commercial offerings built on top of Orca (I have a magneto X) suck compared to bambu. The 3d printing community just slapped down heygears for similar BS to what bambu is pulling right now. Once Bambu hire some better software devs and sort out their issues, open access will return, I bet.

cap11235 2y ago
Apologists are crazy. It's clearly shit
- nullstyle 2y ago
  Its clearly shit, but you're delusional if you think I'm an apologist.
- nullstyle 2y ago
  oh, and look, the backlash is already starting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91kfolYkRNM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91kfolYkRNM I'm not saying I wouldn't love for an fully open source printer company to have the quality and velocity of development that the bambu has (AMS-compatible TPU, delicious), I'm saying people who are making "It's clearly X... You should have known Y" aren't providing useful perspective nor are they accurate. Looking at your post history shows this.

asveikau 2y ago

I got into 3d printing a few years ago and noticed the same, bambu made me nervous for exactly this. But the fanboyism and shilling in the 3d printing community is intense. If you mentioned these misgivings you'd get flamed. If you bought or enjoyed another printer people would advise you to sell it and buy Bambu. Lots of people in various threads seemed to defer to that kind of expert advice. I think there is/was a similar fanaticism for Prusa going on, but it seems a little less at the forefront since Bambu.