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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

#81

Post by lawn »

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…

I'm a bit further on with my Trident than you are[0], and with around 350 print hours I'm starting to get into the modding swamp. There's just so many good/cool things to add!

I also disqualified the Mk4 on other factors. The Mk4 not having an enclosure and the Tridet having such a small footprint was another major factor for me. (I know there's an enclosure for the Mk4, but it's very large and expensive.)

Building the printer has been super fun too.

[0]: https://www.jonashietala.se/series/voron_trident/

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

#82

Post by rjbwork »

Palomides wrote: post #40
rjbwork wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I got into 3d printing a few years ago to start a side business for a niche hobby, got a nicer Creality CR-10S, I think it was. Endless hours tinkering with the thing, and still could only get nice solid prints like half the time. I just don't have the patience to deal w/ stuff like that anymore as I've gotten older. I just want something that works OOTB. I think in the next few years if I get back into it I'll…

I'm curious why you didn't buy a prusa? was price the only factor? It's sad to me that these low end machines have made so many people think that 3d printing is very finicky and tedious.

It's been years so I don't remember the exact details, but it's probably what I saw recommended as an entry level printer on various fora.

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

#83

Post by TheCleric »

Palomides wrote: post #6

>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 prin…

Agreed. I thought they had some good points up until this and immediately thought “I would RUN from a company that did this.”

Also do people REALLY pay for models, let alone $10? I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve paid for a model to 3d print. Much easier to find an existing one, hack one, or just make my own.

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

#84

Post by kiba »

commandar wrote: post #65
cmsj wrote: post #46

I have a lot of respect for Armin, but it's pretty clear he doesn't really understand the specifics of what he's talking about here. > people are complaining (The MK4 firmware is not Open Source) the link here is to a reddit post ( https://www.reddit.com/r/prusa3d/comments/10g6fgv/prusa_givi... ) in which the complaint is not only not about the MK4's firmware, it's also not even about something not being open source.…

I think what he's actually misinterpreted are complaints that the Mk4 controller board isn't open source. Prusa has long bragged about their hardware being open source and they've made an about face on that over the last couple of years.

Are you talking about the xBuddy board? I haven't been able to find the repository on their github page. I took a look and found Adafruit reporting on it.

If they're worried about cloning, I don't see how making it proprietary will prevent Prusa from being cloned.

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

#86

Post by commandar »

tjoff wrote: post #75
commandar wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The gantry is on a cantilevered open frame.

This is something that the hobbyist world recognized as a really bad idea a long time ago because it makes the machine fundamentally less rigid than a well-supported closed frame would be.

Lack of rigidity results in higher vibration which results in lower quality parts and limits the speed that you can run the machine at. Prusa has tried hard to frame this as them prioritizing quality over speed but that's absolute marketing bullshit -- the things that allow a printer to run fast are largely the same things that allow it to produce high quality parts. A fast printer simply has a higher ceiling and while a fast printer can run slower if you need it to, a slow printer will always be slow.

Jo's said explicitly in interviews that the choice to use that frame design is because he wanted to prioritize easily being able to see and remove completed parts from the print bed.

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

#87

Post by nmeofthestate »

TheCleric wrote: post #83
Palomides wrote: post #6

>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 prin…

Agreed. I thought they had some good points up until this and immediately thought “I would RUN from a company that did this.” Also do people REALLY pay for models, let alone $10? I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve paid for a model to 3d print. Much easier to find an existing one, hack one, or just make my own.

The icing on the cake is when he says that Chinese competitors implemented all this web-based stuff. So the big idea for Prusa to compete was to provide services that Chinese competitors can and did provide.

I think if you're going to take to the internet to stick to boot into a company you need to do better than this embarrassing drivel.

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

#88

Post by pierat »

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]

> None of the opportunities that Prusa missed called for them to compromise on open source. Not a single one.

I made a distinction of FLOSS, not just "open source". There's a massive distinction between them. And now, they're going closed source. (Or technically, they have been as long as they have DRM signed firmware.)

And Prusa started to go way off course with the required vandalization and warranty removal with "custom firmware". https://help.prusa3d.com/article/flashing-custom-firmware-mi...

> Especially when you make that 10% open: someone else is going to repurpose it, do the other 90%, and eat your lunch.

Which is why setting up moats is absolutely required with "open source" stuff, or stuff you plunder from open source. Which is why Bambu did cloud-shit with things like stl storage and slicing.

Prusa is doing the requisite dev work for everyone else. They too need a moat, lest they die. Which is the point of the article (them struggling).

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

#89

Post by sdflhasjd »

I think it's a bit premature to say Prusa is floundering. If they were a VC funded startup with billions of debt needing to grow x% YoY to prevent a catastrophic implosion I would agree. Prusa seems reasonably self sufficient though and if they stop growing or shrink I wouldn't say they've failed. I think some people forget that businesses can still continue to exist, pay their employees well, and that's success.

On the other hand, Bambu still has to prove itself as sustainable in this regard and if they're selling their printers with tiny margins (or even at a loss) we've yet to see what their actual plans are, and with an ecosystem comes the potential for exploiting customers. They've already been dishonest in terms of their use of OSS.

And while Bambu did "steal" some software, their hardware seems reasonably novel - I don't think they've exploited Prusa specifically, and any trouncing they've done is because Prusa sat on the MK3 a bit too long.

One last thing is I think Bambu and Prusa can coexist. Prusa evolved from RepRap and combine both out of the box quality and DIY-ability, which is still a good draw for the same kind of tinkerers after a printer in the first place. In the other hand, Bambu products are the Apple/HP of printers - you dont do any tinkering even if you want and if it stops working you send it back.

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

#90

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

cmsj wrote: post #46

I have a lot of respect for Armin, but it's pretty clear he doesn't really understand the specifics of what he's talking about here. > people are complaining (The MK4 firmware is not Open Source) the link here is to a reddit post ( https://www.reddit.com/r/prusa3d/comments/10g6fgv/prusa_givi... ) in which the complaint is not only not about the MK4's firmware, it's also not even about something not being open source.…

Thanks for the heads up, I have corrected the incorrect statement that the MK4 firmware is not open source. My post is primarily about the tensions of running an open source business and Prusa is on the record of expressing similar challenges. What the present state of firmware is, is not really all that relevant to what I wrote.

> but it's pretty clear he doesn't really understand the specifics of what he's talking about here

I think this goes without saying, my exposure to 3d printing is as mentioned measured in days.

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