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

drewdevault.com

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

#71

Post by kiba »

drewdevault wrote: post #54
riddley wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again I have to ask if you've ever used a Prusa, no really this time? Prusa users use Prusaslicer, not Cura. Printables.com often hosts gcode files that require no slicing at all by end users. These points completely aside -- do you think 3d printer novices are going to last long without learning a slicer? Is that really your assertion? Also, is installing Cura a "nightmare" ? So much explosive language!

Yes, I have used a Prusa, but I have mostly used Cura with it. The bulk of my experience with Prusas started with finding one at the local hackerspace, firing up Cura and finding a profile for it, getting it to work and never questioning this procedure again. I used Prusaslicer once or twice, but nevertheless, I cut my teeth on Cura so I used the tool I knew. Not that the comment you're replying to alleges that most…

I used both Prusaslicer and Cura. They worked. Prusaslicer comes in with built in profile for my specific Prusa machine.

The generic profiles work well enough for my purposes.

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

#72

Post by riddley »

drewdevault wrote: post #54
riddley wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again I have to ask if you've ever used a Prusa, no really this time? Prusa users use Prusaslicer, not Cura. Printables.com often hosts gcode files that require no slicing at all by end users. These points completely aside -- do you think 3d printer novices are going to last long without learning a slicer? Is that really your assertion? Also, is installing Cura a "nightmare" ? So much explosive language!

Yes, I have used a Prusa, but I have mostly used Cura with it. The bulk of my experience with Prusas started with finding one at the local hackerspace, firing up Cura and finding a profile for it, getting it to work and never questioning this procedure again. I used Prusaslicer once or twice, but nevertheless, I cut my teeth on Cura so I used the tool I knew. Not that the comment you're replying to alleges that most…

I'm sorry you're sick of having to defend your baseless claims.

If you don't know about Prusaslicer, you download it, and in some cases click Next a few times to install it. You then select whatever printer(s) you have from a set of pre-populated profiles that include non-Prusa models, btw. You now have a highly tuned profile for your Prusa printer because -- and I can't stress this enough -- Prusa's QC... well exists! which means it's already better than the competition. Because they have QC, they're able to predict very well how the machine is going to behave and are able to release profiles that work very well for everyone.

Also, if you don't know about Prusaslicer -- it's the origin of Bamboo's slicer. They get to ride along for free while you chant "Innovation!"

Also, if you don't know about Prusaslicer, why do you feel so comfortable commenting on what Prusa has and hasn't done? Like when you say things like "comes with an ecosystem that Creality has invested in to a much greater extent than Prusa."

You don't what you're talking about.

> But that's the point: this product design locks it into the enthusiast market, and most consumers don't want to deal with that overhead.

What product design? Cura? Why are we talking about Cura again? Oh yea, you brought it up because you used it one time. Seriously though, what product design are you talking about?

I love it when people speak for "most consumers."

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

#73

Post by commandar »

riddley wrote: post #39
drewdevault wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. I have used Prusas, as well as many other 3D printers. I know how they are distinguished from the rest. The thing is, there really isn't much of a difference between an Ender 3 and a Mk4 that a typical consumer (that is, not an enthusiast) would understand as justifying the bigger price tag. The Mk4 is a better printer , by a long shot, but not by the same factor as the price tag. The Mk4 price completel…

> The thing is, there really isn't much of a difference between an Ender 3 and a Mk4 that a typical consumer (that is, not an enthusiast) would understand as justifying the bigger price tag. I'm not sure what makes you feel so comfortable deciding that for everyone? Having vastly better components that are much less likely to fail is something I think anyone would find valuable. If you give an absolute beginner an MK…

>If you give an absolute beginner an MK4 and an Ender 3, they're going to use the MK4 every time. It's vastly less effort to get started and the QC of one vs the other isn't even a competition.

The actual market isn't Ender 3 vs Mk4.

It's extremely hard to argue that Prusa printers represent a good value in any market segment in a post-Bambu world.

>What makes them "much, much better" ? Initial cost of ownership and what else?

They're cheaper and produce better prints faster without requiring any manual tuning by the user.

I'm a hobbyist. I own multiple high end printers that I've dumped $2k+ into. They're fantastic machines that I enjoy tinkering with.

But I've also got an X1 for when I just want a part and don't want to think about it. It's an appliance. It just works. That has massive value for people where printing is a means to an end rather than a hobbyist journey.

If you're a hobbyist that wants to tinker, there's nothing that justifies dropping 5x the cost of an E3 on a Mk4. $800 will go a long way toward making up any difference.

Or just go all-in and build any of the full hobbyist designs that will be a far better printer than a Mk4 anyway.

>And yet, they can't make printers fast enough.

Because they refuse to engineer their products for mass production. Which is, coincidentally, one of the reason why they're also failing to compete on price.

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

#74

Post by kiba »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #48
lawn wrote: post #25

> They have been struggling as of late, and came under criticism for making the firmware of their Mk4 printer non-free. One of the biggest reasons I didn't choose a Mk4 was precisely because they moved away from open source. If you're like me an values open source highly and is looking for a printer, the VORON printers are the way to go. They're DIY printers where you assemble them yourself, so they're not for you if…

I have a half assembled Trident on a table behind me right now. Like you, I greatly value open source. I didn't realize at the time I ordered the Trident that the Mk4 firmware was non-free, but Prusa didn't make the final cut regardless. In my mind, Prusa hasn't been showing enough innovation. The bed-slinging Mk4 coming out at the price it did against CoreXY printers like Voron and Bambu was like bringing a knife to…

MK4 firmware is mostly free AFAIK, except for graphics and design.

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

#75

Post by tjoff »

commandar wrote: post #62
TimMeade wrote: post #10

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…

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 ther…

What are the fundamental design flaws of XL?

I haven't looked into it in detail but the design appears from a glance to be really good.

If you ignore the cost, which is really hard to do in this case. But that is also somewhat justified by them targeting businesses. It just means they are lagging (which is evident by how delayed mk4 was, if it had been on time mk5 would be imminent by now).

I do feel that the XL is a good stepping stone for their consumer line though, and up until the mk4 launch that is what I thought mk4 would be all about.

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

#76

Post by Eisenstein »

drewdevault wrote: post #45
pierat wrote: post #31

Basically, the whole argument is "If Prusa had created a closed source moat to trap customers....", and that view is an anathema to open source where Josef came from. The current line of printers are this bastardized mixture of DRM and open source: There's a piece of the PCB you have to break to "allow" loading unsigned firmware. And breaking the PCB like that makes it non-returnable. That crap's lost a lot of open s…

[flagged]

> Note that none of this is material to the license of the product, be it free or non-free. It’s about building a brand, developing a customer relationship, and identifying and exploiting market opportunities.

Um... ok? But the product is what they are selling, and that is based on research on development, which is under a license. Other companies use this R&D, do not open it, and sell their product cheaper while having an completely opaque R&D process.

> Hackers and enthusiasts who found companies like Prusa tend to imagine that the product is everything, but it’s not. Maybe 10% of the work is developing the 3D printer itself – don’t abandon the other 90% of your business.

3D printers became accessible to consumers because of a focus on open source and engineering. It is no where near mature. To call it '10%' is ridiculous. You think they should spend 90% of their effort to heavily monetize something that isn't mainstream consumer ready? So they can choke the market while it is entirely filled with hobbyists and enthusiasts, who are probably the most notoriously picky consumers in the world when it comes to hardware?

> You need to deal with sales and marketing, chase down promising leads, identify and respond to risks, look for and exploit new market opportunities, and much more to be successful.

What does that even mean with regards to 3D printing?

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

#77

Post by StayTrue »

drewdevault wrote: post #54
riddley wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again I have to ask if you've ever used a Prusa, no really this time? Prusa users use Prusaslicer, not Cura. Printables.com often hosts gcode files that require no slicing at all by end users. These points completely aside -- do you think 3d printer novices are going to last long without learning a slicer? Is that really your assertion? Also, is installing Cura a "nightmare" ? So much explosive language!

Yes, I have used a Prusa, but I have mostly used Cura with it. The bulk of my experience with Prusas started with finding one at the local hackerspace, firing up Cura and finding a profile for it, getting it to work and never questioning this procedure again. I used Prusaslicer once or twice, but nevertheless, I cut my teeth on Cura so I used the tool I knew. Not that the comment you're replying to alleges that most…

I’ve lost track of where the goalposts are. The original author is all over the place.

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

#78

Post by riddley »

MegaDeKay wrote: post #69
riddley wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The thing is, there really isn't much of a difference between an Ender 3 and a Mk4 that a typical consumer (that is, not an enthusiast) would understand as justifying the bigger price tag. I'm not sure what makes you feel so comfortable deciding that for everyone? Having vastly better components that are much less likely to fail is something I think anyone would find valuable. If you give an absolute beginner an MK…

> And yet, they can't make printers fast enough. I generally agree with your comments but I think you've accidentally brought up a really good point. Prusa would do well do improve on getting their new models out the door faster. The Mk3S was getting fairly long in the tooth before the Mk4 came out. The printer they introduced before that also suffered from a very long development cycle. This leads to lost sales in a…

What you've said is true, but it assumes the goal is money. If that's the measurement, then yes they should do that. I'm not him so I can't say for certain, but money doesn't seem to be Jo's end-goal.

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

#79

Post by commandar »

slau wrote: post #35

I think Prusa has had a couple of missteps of late, but they’re not in the gutter yet. On the XL: the 0.6mm makes sense with the build volume, to significantly improve print times, but seems to really not work well with the 5 toolhead models, and introduces massive amounts of zits, stringing, cross-contamination, etc. On the Mk4: at the price point, it’s maybe missing a few features to really hold up against the X1C,…

>On the XL: the 0.6mm makes sense with the build volume, to significantly improve print times, but seems to really not work well with the 5 toolhead models, and introduces massive amounts of zits, stringing, cross-contamination, etc.

More fundamentally, the XL uses an open frame design specifically because Jo wanted to prioritize being able to easily see and remove prints.

The entire gantry sits on a cantilevered open frame -- that's a fundamental engineering failure that's going to mean the XL will always be slower and produce lower quality prints than closed frame designs.

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

#80

Post by Palomides »

mulmen wrote: post #58
Palomides wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, but I think the incentives tend to push towards user hostile results. It's a small jump for the business mind to go from free cloud optional to free cloud only to paid features cloud to subscription only cloud, or selling plastic to only supporting their own plastic, and so on. Web services are so cheap and profitable that it feels like every business converges towards them now. I'd really rather buy from a…

> but certainly the hardware is useless without ongoing software development, and we're back to the original issue Why is this true though? Are 3D printers still evolving so quickly?

All software requires maintenance, and there are continually ongoing software-driven print speed and quality improvements. That said, I could keep using the firmware and slicer software I have now until the hardware becomes unmaintainable (probably have to run it in a VM at some point), assuming no critical safety bugs.
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