Why Prusa is floundering, and how you can avoid their fate

I wasn't aware that Prusa is floundering and wouldn't have minded a little more development there. However it wouldn't surprise me as when I was shopping for my latest 3d printer replacement it was too easy to choose something else. For the price of the Mk4 most of the market is within the same budget (many options arguably better and more capable).

This post is the Armin Ronacher take that the author here is talking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38768997

I find this really fascinating as my company has several products and we've been considering for years whether open source is a better direction than what we are doing now, which is to sell closed source software to enterprises. Needless to say, this is a very different market than the one Prusa is attacking, but I've still got opinions.

I find it interesting that this comes the day after Xmas. My house was already completely swamped with cheap Chinese (or similarly cheap manufacturing country) crap. Plastic toys, fire-retardant ugly Disney-esque pajamas made in Myanmar. My kids threw tantrums because they "only" got 14 presents instead of the 16 their siblings got, but almost all those toys are forgotten now a day later. I bought my daughter reproductions of prints from Anna Atkins (the first person to create a book of photography in 1843), a kit to make cyanotypes (the technique she used), and had them solve riddles to get their presents (my daughter's clue was "blue"). I bet she won't remember that. My kids are buried in junk, and it is partially my fault, but let's at least assign a little blame to relatives trying to make up for their parenting failures years ago.

I say all that because I disagree with DD's assertion that the low-cost strategy at Best Buy is something that will always win and is what Prusa should have done. Sure, they probably would have earned much more by somehow offshoring to China. But, I still try to buy things consciously, and would making a bunch of cheap plastic shit from a cheap 3D printer from China be better for my life? I am skeptical.

>Imagine a Prusa where it works out of the box, you can fire up a slicer in your browser which auto-connects to your printer and prints models from a Prusa-operated model repository, paying $10 for a premium model, $1 off the top goes to Prusa, with the same saved payment details which ensure that a fresh spool of Prusa filament arrives at your front door when it auto-detects that your printer is almost out. The print you want is too big for your build volume? Click here to have it cloud printed – do you want priority shipping for that? Your hot-end is reaching the end of its life – as one of our valued business customers on our premium support contract we would be happy to send you a temporary replacement printer while yours is shipped in for service.

What a nightmare. Grimly funny to see 3d printers getting pressured to take up all the 2d printer business models everyone hates (service contracts, proprietary consumables, cloud management software, etc.).

I wonder how Ultimaker fits into this picture. They were an early pioneer in 3D printing, had all of their stuff open source and most of it still IIRC, but pivoted from the consumer market to more business users, with a bunch of services on top.

Was that the right move? Their current printers are priced out of consumer range though, which is a pity.

I think this is missing a little context. I believe Prusa and to some extent the older market leader Creality were sideswiped by a better product.

A group of engineers got together and formed Bambu Labs. Their printer are all less than 2 years on market and they have become the new standard for the simple fact they just work. 3d Printing historically has been "early adopter". I'm long term tech. It took me a month of configuring and tinkering and changing to get me first ender 3 to work about 3 years ago.

I got a Bambu Labs P1P and it just worked. Right out of the box day 1. Beautiful multi color prints. All for less than my Ender 3 S1PRO cost.

I then got the new Creality K1 Max that they meant to compete with Bambu. Now 6 months later it's still not "just works". I have upgraded the Hot End and it has ruined 4 plates do to bad firmware. I am currently waiting on new mother board to fix the current issue. Waiting for 3 weeks as it comes from china. When it does work its very nice. But I have to say that's 50% of the time.

In the meantime I ordered the new Bambu A1 with the AMS Lite. Again it just works. Some issues. But in general it just works. And it's 2/3 the cost of the K1 Max.

Building a great product and doing it cheaper is why everyone is getting Bambu Labs and Not Prusa and a declined Creality market.

IMHO.