You're rewriting history here because of something that you dislike that happened long after Bambu Labs became popular.
In the beginning Bambu Labs came up with the X1C which is essentially a really good Core XY printer with an enclosure for $1500 that included a revolutionary AMS that no other manufacturer had. If you wanted a printer of similar quality, you would have had to build your own Voron for $1000 with the obvious caveat that you have to order the parts yourself and then assemble it.
Then Bambu Lab releases the P1S, which is comparable to a Voron but cheaper and you don't have to assemble it.
At that point Bambu Labs was no longer just a high end printer company with Apple aesthetics. Regular consumers could afford their printers.
Then they came up with the A1 mini and the AMS Lite. They've started building a printer that is cheaper than an Ender 3, but has the same print quality as the higher end Bambu Lab printers and despite being a gantry design, much faster print speeds with low setup and maintenance. I personally got an A1 mini for $200.
Compared to other Chinese competitors, their printers were both good and affordable. Prusa had good printers that were relatively expensive.
Meanwhile if you bought an Ender 3, which was the community recommendation before Bambu Labs, you basically brought an unreliable low quality piece of garbage into your house that you constantly have to maintain when it breaks or upgrade features that should have been there out of the box. The abysmally bad Ender 3 gave outsiders the impression that most 3D printer enthusiasts treated the printer as the project rather than the things they make with the printer.
Basically, the entire 3D printing community centered itself around a terrible overpriced 3D printer from a company that still produces garbage to this day. Meanwhile if you bought a rather expensive Bambu Labs printer you never had any issues to begin with. If the 3d printer community had centered around e.g. Sovol printers, this disconnect from reality probably have never happened.
Then Bambu Labs came out with the A1 bed slinger and at that point they had a printer that was cheaper and better in every single aspect. The masks from the existing Chinese 3D printer companies peddling you garbage fell off. Suddenly they have X1C, P1S and A1 clones that are 90% as good as Bambu Labs printers. Like, every single manufacturer realized simultaneously that their printers were bad and that they could have sold you printers that weren't terrible.
>And you know, the product might do that, the problem is the message that they're the only game in town, which has never been true and which they largely achieved on the back of work already done by others for them in software, designs and ecosystem development.
You're assuming some marketing fantasy which isn't the case. Most Chinese printer manufacturers simply made terrible products before Bambu Labs. If you restrict yourself to Chinese manufacturers, then Prusa is out. Back in those days when you were buying a Chinese printer, they really were the only game in town.
The thing about doing it on the back of others sounds stupid. There were hundreds of niche 3D printer companies that sold you unsupported products that barely worked. Obviously they didn't write their own software from scratch. They used existing software from the open source printer ecosystem.
>To contrast this: You often hear this about Apple, that they didn't necessarily invent the stuff, but they did the last-mile integration really well. It's incomparable. Apple did far more work on their products than Bambu ever did
Now you're getting things backwards. Bambi Lab's is a lot like Apple here, with the difference that they don't charge Apple level premiums.
I'm wondering how you can take it for granted that they are doing the equivalent of selling a MacBook Pro at the price of a regular MacBook. Bambi Lab also came up with two AMS types before everyone else adopted multi filament printing in a mass consumer basis. Not to mention quality of life features like quick change nozzles.
You shouldn't rewrite history just because you don't like a company. Without Bamboo Labs we would be stuck with Creality.