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

Prusa was better positioned than anyone else in the market to do exactly what Bambu did, but actively chose not to out of a combination of stubborness and hubris.

Prusa had an established reputation for relatively low hassle, premium machines.

There legitimately isn't much in the Bambu machines that didn't already exist in some form in the high end hobbyist space. What Bambu did was take the best of what was out there and combine it into a single coherent, easy to use package. And, just as critically, they cost-engineered it for mass production.

Prusa has long resisted anything outside their own ecosystem. They invest crazy amounts of effort into reimplementing and reinventing things because NIH syndrome is deeply engrained into their company culture. They clung to using 8 bit controllers long past their expiration date. They spent years working and reworking their flagship $2000 XL which still isn't widely available and suffers fundamental design flaws that will result in it being slower and producing worse prints than its competitors when it is.

A lot of this is Prusa refusing to move past their hobbyist roots. Their printers are still made largely out of aluminum extrusion and printed parts -- this is a great way for a hobbyist to prototype one-off designs, but it's an abysmal way to mass produce a machine.

Bambu's great innovation is the fact that the machine is largely stamped sheet metal and injection molded parts. This results in a machine that is sturdier, higher quality, and cheaper than the way Prusa insists on doing things. It requires a significant investment in tooling upfront -- this was the great tell that Bambu wasn't some scrappy startup when they launched their Kickstarter; they were easily deep into six if not seven figures in tooling costs before the X1 was ever publicly announced.

Prusa was one of the few players in the industry who had the resources and could have done all of this. They actively chose not to. They were stagnant and seemed to think they could continue selling $1000 bed slingers forever. The market finally moved on.

From experience in the 3D printing space, it's too early to say Bambu out-Prusa'd Prusa, because there hasn't been enough time to know whether the Bambu printers will outlast a Prusa printer. The business model the author is discussing is not unlike the business model for Glowforge, and based on my wife's experience in that industry I'm not sure that business model is working out so well.

I've been printing continuously on a pair of Mk3s for 4+ years, minimal maintenance. (That is, wear and tear on print plates and nozzles, and one thermistor replacement.) Maintenance is important once you venture beyond hobbyist needs.

I did buy a Bambu P1S instead of a Mk4 this year when it was time to add a another printer for my wife's side gig. It's a great machine, except when it has problems. The software is bad at diagnosing the problem, and the UI gets really confused on status messages, and the software wants nothing more than to hold your hand down the wrong path to fix the problem. There's a veneer to everything Bambu that makes it look good as long as you don't look too closely. I'll see where this printer is at after 4+ years of continuous printing, but based on my present experience I'd be surprised if my P1S is still running in 2 years. (And no, its not lost on me that as a Prusa purchaser I bought from their competitor this time around.)

I expect Bambu to push Prusa to compete on features - I am fine as a non-hobbyist paying a higher premium for reliability.

Prusa is floundering so much that I am about to order my second printer from them.

Pretty much this ^^^. Some people just want to _use_ tools and some people want to build/hack/tinker with them. Voron and Bambu seem to cover both use cases. Annex Engineering has some cool stuff in the 'build' category as well.

If you're sick of arguing maybe you shouldn't be starting arguments?

What you say makes very little sense. Prusa has an audience, you are not that audience. So go buy something else and write about how great your experience is instead of kicking Prusa, especially if you haven't bothered using their slicer, which is absolutely fantastic, runs locally and supports linux.