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If you are a hobbyist or small business in desktop manufacturing you are basically forced to buy Chinese products. I have never owned a Prusa, but I have owned

If you are a hobbyist or small business in desktop manufacturing you are basically forced to buy Chinese products. I have never owned a Prusa, but I have owned several Creality and Bambu Labs printers, because I could get the same utility at half the cost. The same goes for soldering irons, linear actuators, oscillscopes, etc. I still buy European hand tools (Knipex, Wera, etc) because I know they won't break in a year, so they are good value in the long run. Often the choice is whether to buy a used, last generation tool of eBay, or a brand new next-gen tool from China. The choice depends on how flawed the Chinese implementation is and the gap in utility between the generations. The main problem with Chinese products is the lack of accountability. The same product will be sold under multiple brands, or by dropshippers, and you have no idea who actually made it, there are some strong Chinese brands that buck this trend, i.e. Bambu Labs. When you buy western tools you are buying peace of mind, something I can't currently afford.

jononor 1y ago
Forced I don't know... But of course the financial incentives are very strong, as in many categories the Chinese brands have remarkable and sometimes astonishing value-for-money. But for a small business, the cost of these tools might be quite low relative to manpower anyway, so paying 2x might not be a big deal. We got 8 Prusa machines at our local hackerspace, and 10 at previous startup lab I was at.
alnwlsn 1y ago
Chinese stuff these days has pulled far ahead of the Harbor Freight reputation of my youth. I can't remember the last time I've seen a proper "Engrish" instruction manual, most of the things are well designed and well built. Meanwhile, the "good old American brands" seem to just be selling out for cheaper and better profit margin products, so you'll be ending up with Chinese stuff anyways, which is sometimes worse than the actual Chinese brands.
- Workaccount2 1y ago
  The Chinese stuff is now more often than not better. You cannot be the world's manufacturer for 30 years and not get good at making stuff.
  - tempest_ 1y ago
    I always think it is amusing that some people make the mistake of thinking that the Chinese can only make cheap crap(forgetting all their cell phones and apple laptops come from there). The American market only wants to buy cheap crap so that is what is made and sent. Usually though the skills involved in making something cut-rate are just as applicable to making something top notch. American manufacturing skills have atrophied as it has moved to a service economy while as you say the Chinese have been boosting manufacturing for 30 years.
    - cluckindan 1y ago
      Maybe America needs a planned economy and minority ”re-education” camps to boost production.
      - cactacea 1y ago
        Good news everyone!
      - dpkirchner 1y ago
        Or maybe just better accounting for the total lifecycle and disposal of products. If a company had to pay a bond to cover the long term impact of their shit products I bet we'd see higher quality goods.
    - unethical_ban 1y ago
      I was thinking a snarky thought reading another comment in the chain: "DJI and Anker aren't Chinese brands, because they're good and they have brand reputation". "Chinese" in my ape brain is Harbor Freight junk, or cheap houseware from Amazon with names like "KRLFOCGY".
- uticus 1y ago
  > a proper "Engrish" instruction manual At what point do the instruction manuals stop catering to Engrish and start focusing on 汉字?
  - beng-nl 1y ago
    I quite honestly fear this day. (But for other reasons, eg we might have to go to china for top conferences, universities, jobs, etc.).
    - Melonai 1y ago
      I myself have been preparing for that day, learning simplified Mandarin and trying to expose myself to Chinese online presence. :) I'm not sure that China will ever "overtake" the US in global technology mindshare, but they are getting closer, and if that ever properly happens, I'm quite ready, and if not, at least I get a whole new language out of it and a better understanding of a huge culture that felt a lot more out of reach before. For context, I'm from Russia, so maybe it's easier for me to trade one foreign hegemony for another than for many others..
      - tstrimple 1y ago
        > I'm not sure that China will ever "overtake" the US in global technology mindshare Is that adequately measured from the English side of the internet? I honestly don't know. I don't participate in Chinese technology communities online and have zero basis to measure any amount of tech mindshare that it has. I do know that a number of English based tech forums are entirely dependent on a select few microcontrollers for their builds. Surely on the Chinese side of things there are discussions going on about who is building the next cheapest microcontrollers and how they achieve it? I do know that absolutely nothing that we have in the "West" can compare to what hardware hackers can accomplish in Shenzhen thanks to the overwhelming amount of electronics knowledge and availability in the area. I have to wonder how much of that mindshare "we" actually have.
    - immibis 1y ago
      It's already here. All the best cheap microcontrollers have datasheets written purely in Chinese. Most Westerners don't use them because the datasheets are written purely in Chinese, and therefore, Western products with cheap microcontrollers use inferior ones.
- tstrimple 1y ago
  I came across this[1] recently. It compares a Harbor Freight Icon ratchet ($70) to a Snap-On ratchet ($195). They are essentially using the same design and same parts. The Snap-On replacement part kit fits inside an Icon ratchet. Oh and the Icon is performs better than the Snap-On for a fraction of the price. The Gearwrench ratchet ($45) was even more impressive as it's only slightly worse than either of the others and not necessarily in ways most people will ever experience. Some brands of cheap tools are getting really fucking good. There's still a lot of garbage out there though. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBItmykqu0I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBItmykqu0I
zevon 1y ago
Prusa makes their products locally, the spare part situation is good, the company runs an open Makerspace in their basement, helps host conferences and has done a lot for Open Hardware in general. They also have offered consistent upgrade paths for old machines for a long time and the repairability in general is good. You can also talk to them. These things matter for purchase decisions. Same logic as per your Knipex and Wera example. I actually have a Bambu Labs at home for occasional use but I would not consider anything but Prusas for a general-use desktop FDM printer in basically any more serious setting. This has been the situation for many years now (over the last 12 years or so, I've had to make a few purchase decisions for batches of 5-15 FDM printers as well as different single specialty ones).
- hyperbovine 1y ago
  I want so much to like Prusa ... but the Bambu printer at my local makerspace costs half as much and is better in every way than the MK3S+ sitting in my basement. I'm fully aware that this is the result of shrewdness on the part of the Chinese, plus incompetence in the West, and it's so frustrating.
  - sarchertech 1y ago
    It’s not better in every way. For long term reliability and ability to repair and upgrade, Prusa is far superior.
    - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
      But you get better results from the Bambu. I care about the product of the manufacturing more than I care about the tools.
      - sarchertech 1y ago
        That depends on what you’re doing. For many things Prusa printers produce higher quality prints.
schrijver 1y ago
Hobbyists aren’t forced to buy anything.. I blame youtube for turning hobbies into an exercise at buying stuff. Affiliate links are one of the few ways to make money online and the reason why the majority of videos in the hobby space seem to be gear reviews. Yet as a hobbyist chances are you won’t practice enough to outgrow your tools anyway, and neither do you have the economic incentives of business owners.
- jonbiggums22 1y ago
  Youtube may have exasperated the situation, but gear obsession in hobbies certainly predates even the internet, much less youtube. It seems kind of natural, mastering your tools takes time and maybe talent. Buying them just takes money. I remember the original Dawn of the Dead poking fun at it when they raid the gun store in the mall: Peter: Ain't it a crime. Stephen: What? Peter: The only person who could miss with this gun is the sucker with the bread to buy it.
therouwboat 1y ago
I have Creality Ender3 v3 and Prusa mk4s and they are not the same, you can get them to produce same quality, but ender requires more tinkering and I have had more failed prints. Creality software is awful, you get no firmware updates for a year and then you get 4 on same day, like do they even test before release? Slicer is also buggy and default settings seem to be max everything, so its loud and fast and has print quality issues. When I was building the prusa kit, I kept thinking that this is how you should make a product, the machine feels well thought out and documentation is great. Of course prusa is 3x the cost of ender.
- simplyluke 1y ago
  Bambu is who's winning this space and largely took 3d printing from a hobby for its own sake to "it's another tool in your shop". My bambu was FAR cheaper than a comparable prusa, and I took it out of the box, put filament in it, and it started producing effectively perfect prints immediately.
- platevoltage 1y ago
  I just got a Creality K1 Max and I'm over the moon with it. Granted, my only frame of reference was a Prusa i3 knockoff kit I bought almost 10 years ago, upgraded with 3d printed parts, replaced the power supply with one from an old server, and added dual extruders. Basically If I wanted to use it, I'd have to tinker for hours to get a print started, and printing anything too large would almost definitely fail, or warp off the bed. I've done multiple prints on the K1 Max where I started it, went to bed, and it was there, finished for me in the morning. Since I'm familiar with the process, I just jumped straight to using OrcaSlicer and never touched creality's software. It definitely feels like Chinese hardware is progressing much quicker than their software. I need an enclosed design and wanted to go coreXY, and Prusa's offering in that category was out of my budget, but they seem like a fabulous company.

jononor 1y ago

Forced I don't know... But of course the financial incentives are very strong, as in many categories the Chinese brands have remarkable and sometimes astonishing value-for-money. But for a small business, the cost of these tools might be quite low relative to manpower anyway, so paying 2x might not be a big deal. We got 8 Prusa machines at our local hackerspace, and 10 at previous startup lab I was at.

alnwlsn 1y ago

Chinese stuff these days has pulled far ahead of the Harbor Freight reputation of my youth. I can't remember the last time I've seen a proper "Engrish" instruction manual, most of the things are well designed and well built. Meanwhile, the "good old American brands" seem to just be selling out for cheaper and better profit margin products, so you'll be ending up with Chinese stuff anyways, which is sometimes worse than the actual Chinese brands.

Workaccount2 1y ago
The Chinese stuff is now more often than not better. You cannot be the world's manufacturer for 30 years and not get good at making stuff.
- tempest_ 1y ago
  I always think it is amusing that some people make the mistake of thinking that the Chinese can only make cheap crap(forgetting all their cell phones and apple laptops come from there). The American market only wants to buy cheap crap so that is what is made and sent. Usually though the skills involved in making something cut-rate are just as applicable to making something top notch. American manufacturing skills have atrophied as it has moved to a service economy while as you say the Chinese have been boosting manufacturing for 30 years.
  - cluckindan 1y ago
    Maybe America needs a planned economy and minority ”re-education” camps to boost production.
    - cactacea 1y ago
      Good news everyone!
    - dpkirchner 1y ago
      Or maybe just better accounting for the total lifecycle and disposal of products. If a company had to pay a bond to cover the long term impact of their shit products I bet we'd see higher quality goods.
  - unethical_ban 1y ago
    I was thinking a snarky thought reading another comment in the chain: "DJI and Anker aren't Chinese brands, because they're good and they have brand reputation". "Chinese" in my ape brain is Harbor Freight junk, or cheap houseware from Amazon with names like "KRLFOCGY".
uticus 1y ago
> a proper "Engrish" instruction manual At what point do the instruction manuals stop catering to Engrish and start focusing on 汉字?
- beng-nl 1y ago
  I quite honestly fear this day. (But for other reasons, eg we might have to go to china for top conferences, universities, jobs, etc.).
  - Melonai 1y ago
    I myself have been preparing for that day, learning simplified Mandarin and trying to expose myself to Chinese online presence. :) I'm not sure that China will ever "overtake" the US in global technology mindshare, but they are getting closer, and if that ever properly happens, I'm quite ready, and if not, at least I get a whole new language out of it and a better understanding of a huge culture that felt a lot more out of reach before. For context, I'm from Russia, so maybe it's easier for me to trade one foreign hegemony for another than for many others..
    - tstrimple 1y ago
      > I'm not sure that China will ever "overtake" the US in global technology mindshare Is that adequately measured from the English side of the internet? I honestly don't know. I don't participate in Chinese technology communities online and have zero basis to measure any amount of tech mindshare that it has. I do know that a number of English based tech forums are entirely dependent on a select few microcontrollers for their builds. Surely on the Chinese side of things there are discussions going on about who is building the next cheapest microcontrollers and how they achieve it? I do know that absolutely nothing that we have in the "West" can compare to what hardware hackers can accomplish in Shenzhen thanks to the overwhelming amount of electronics knowledge and availability in the area. I have to wonder how much of that mindshare "we" actually have.
  - immibis 1y ago
    It's already here. All the best cheap microcontrollers have datasheets written purely in Chinese. Most Westerners don't use them because the datasheets are written purely in Chinese, and therefore, Western products with cheap microcontrollers use inferior ones.
tstrimple 1y ago
I came across this[1] recently. It compares a Harbor Freight Icon ratchet ($70) to a Snap-On ratchet ($195). They are essentially using the same design and same parts. The Snap-On replacement part kit fits inside an Icon ratchet. Oh and the Icon is performs better than the Snap-On for a fraction of the price. The Gearwrench ratchet ($45) was even more impressive as it's only slightly worse than either of the others and not necessarily in ways most people will ever experience. Some brands of cheap tools are getting really fucking good. There's still a lot of garbage out there though. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBItmykqu0I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBItmykqu0I

zevon 1y ago

Prusa makes their products locally, the spare part situation is good, the company runs an open Makerspace in their basement, helps host conferences and has done a lot for Open Hardware in general. They also have offered consistent upgrade paths for old machines for a long time and the repairability in general is good. You can also talk to them. These things matter for purchase decisions. Same logic as per your Knipex and Wera example. I actually have a Bambu Labs at home for occasional use but I would not consider anything but Prusas for a general-use desktop FDM printer in basically any more serious setting. This has been the situation for many years now (over the last 12 years or so, I've had to make a few purchase decisions for batches of 5-15 FDM printers as well as different single specialty ones).

hyperbovine 1y ago
I want so much to like Prusa ... but the Bambu printer at my local makerspace costs half as much and is better in every way than the MK3S+ sitting in my basement. I'm fully aware that this is the result of shrewdness on the part of the Chinese, plus incompetence in the West, and it's so frustrating.
- sarchertech 1y ago
  It’s not better in every way. For long term reliability and ability to repair and upgrade, Prusa is far superior.
  - trenchpilgrim 1y ago
    But you get better results from the Bambu. I care about the product of the manufacturing more than I care about the tools.
    - sarchertech 1y ago
      That depends on what you’re doing. For many things Prusa printers produce higher quality prints.

schrijver 1y ago

Hobbyists aren’t forced to buy anything.. I blame youtube for turning hobbies into an exercise at buying stuff. Affiliate links are one of the few ways to make money online and the reason why the majority of videos in the hobby space seem to be gear reviews. Yet as a hobbyist chances are you won’t practice enough to outgrow your tools anyway, and neither do you have the economic incentives of business owners.

jonbiggums22 1y ago
Youtube may have exasperated the situation, but gear obsession in hobbies certainly predates even the internet, much less youtube. It seems kind of natural, mastering your tools takes time and maybe talent. Buying them just takes money. I remember the original Dawn of the Dead poking fun at it when they raid the gun store in the mall: Peter: Ain't it a crime. Stephen: What? Peter: The only person who could miss with this gun is the sucker with the bread to buy it.

therouwboat 1y ago

I have Creality Ender3 v3 and Prusa mk4s and they are not the same, you can get them to produce same quality, but ender requires more tinkering and I have had more failed prints. Creality software is awful, you get no firmware updates for a year and then you get 4 on same day, like do they even test before release? Slicer is also buggy and default settings seem to be max everything, so its loud and fast and has print quality issues. When I was building the prusa kit, I kept thinking that this is how you should make a product, the machine feels well thought out and documentation is great. Of course prusa is 3x the cost of ender.

simplyluke 1y ago
Bambu is who's winning this space and largely took 3d printing from a hobby for its own sake to "it's another tool in your shop". My bambu was FAR cheaper than a comparable prusa, and I took it out of the box, put filament in it, and it started producing effectively perfect prints immediately.
platevoltage 1y ago
I just got a Creality K1 Max and I'm over the moon with it. Granted, my only frame of reference was a Prusa i3 knockoff kit I bought almost 10 years ago, upgraded with 3d printed parts, replaced the power supply with one from an old server, and added dual extruders. Basically If I wanted to use it, I'd have to tinker for hours to get a print started, and printing anything too large would almost definitely fail, or warp off the bed. I've done multiple prints on the K1 Max where I started it, went to bed, and it was there, finished for me in the morning. Since I'm familiar with the process, I just jumped straight to using OrcaSlicer and never touched creality's software. It definitely feels like Chinese hardware is progressing much quicker than their software. I need an enclosed design and wanted to go coreXY, and Prusa's offering in that category was out of my budget, but they seem like a fabulous company.