this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2024
530 points (97.0% liked)
Technology
59421 readers
3117 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
For now anyway. Enshittification strikes too many products eventually.
Which is making me sad. 3d printing is so open atm, but I wouldn’t be surprised if enshittification will take place in this space in my lifetime.
That's mostly going to be in the hands of Bambu I think, they only recently just allowed users to flash custom firmware onto the X1.
If Prusa doesn't come back with a strong challenger we will be in trouble IMO. They have that amazing corexy that rivals the Bambu in performance (but not price!) but for a lot of people it's too big anyway sadly
There's a huge world of clone printers, aftermarket mainboards, hotends, extruders etc. that doesn't look like it's going away.
Some manufacturers may go closed but it's way too easy to build your own printer for it to be a big concern in the FDM world.
Resin on the other hand already has lots of custom slicers, firmware etc. probably because there's a lot less mechanics and a lot more screen. But I'm not sure of the future of consumer resin anyways, a lot of people are realizing how toxic that unlabelled Chinese product really is.
I had someone a while back arguing that FDM printers were hopelessly toxic and resin printers would be the only ones on the market within a year. Naturally, this was well over a year ago.
Resin printers have their uses, but man, they are a mess to use.
It sorta did, but pulled back. DaVinci tried selling printers that had chips in the filament spools and used the same razer blade business model as low end inkjets. Anet also sold printers that cut too many corners and they often caught fire.
Then Creality made the Ender 3. I unironically think it's a brilliant design. It cuts corners just enough to be cheap, but not so much that it's useless garbage. They had two issues early on: lack of thermal runaway protection in the firmware, and a bad connector to the power supply. Both were fixable by end users, and both have long been fixed in shipping models.
At the same time, companies like Prusa refused to join in that race to the bottom. Good for them. If you're an established player like that and already have a reputation for quality, never get involved in a race to the bottom. That's how you become what HP is now.