The Enshittification of 3D Printers – Are We Losing What Made Them Great?

Many people don’t care about FOSS or don’t know the benefits, they just want a NOW working product. Many belief in the goodness that nothing bad will happen, and if something happens, they still can switch. I often have this discussion with other colleagues and friends, it’s an endless debate of price , features , comfort and support. As long as there is both on the market , why argue? People can buy what fits their needs.

We have become so normalized to anti consumer behavior it doesn’t even matter anymore

Like it used to be that a videogame manufacturer charged for a dlc that was already on the game disc, you had to pay to unlock data that you technically had purchased but not licensed, and people threw a fucking fit. Now it’s like “this new tech device will only work if you insert $20 bills every 30 minutes” and people are like “oh well that sucks but what are you gonna do? I need a toaster that can send me a notification when my toast is done”

Fuck the companies that do anti consumer bullshit, fuck the youtuber dummies that normalize it because they got $50 and a free shitty printer, fuck the government that has completely failed to regulate anything, and fuck the dummies who constantly enable this nonsense because they refuse to spend 10 minutes researching their purchases and instead spend the rest of their life in credit card debt because they have $1100 in monthly subscriptions to stupid bullshit that makes their stuff work for 18 months until the company goes bankrupt, their device is bricked, and they replace it with another piece of shit that has the same anticonsumer bullshit

Despite this, they still receive glowing reviews, even from tech-savvy communities.

I mean, most people don't care. How often do you see mainstream smartphone reviewers making a single mention of the insane amount of bloatware and spyware on phones, or calling out Apple for their unrepairable devices? Shit just blows over eventually and consumers accept it for what it is. 3D printers are not exempt from this mentality.

Jeff Geerling made a video today about how he bought a dishwasher that was top-rated by RTINGS Consumer Reports with no mention of the fact that in order to make it do a God damn thing, you have to connect it to the app, create an account, and connect it to them OEM's cloud.

Several years ago I bought a DJI action cam and it was the same thing. You can't do jack shit with it without connecting it to an app and creating an account. I watched dozens of reviews and this was never mentioned. I returned it but I'm sure 99.9% either don't give a fuck or accepted it.

VORON

It is simply an entry level thing. You will find this in every market.

In a bike shop retail market I can sell you a serviceable bike for $500 that will last, or an $800 road bike you'll actually ride. Still the majority of bikes sold come from places like Walmart where they are made of unserviceable junk and are mostly nonfunctional. These are rarely ever ridden and often thrown away. In the shop I'll sell 20:1 on the cheapest model to the next options up the ladder.

It is strange to adapt to this kind of understanding at first, like just how skewed the real market is. I can target selling to clubs and teams but I can't touch the the garbage bike market where most people reside.

I think we are at a point where the influx of people into 3d printing are not real Makers or have any aspirations to be.

The reality is that people are often simply stupid. They seem to think that saving a few bucks here or there is smart but are not bright enough to see that everyone doing the same thing are buying the junk product over and over. There is nothing more expensive than being a cheap miser.

Ultimately, the only person that can fix stupid is ourselves. One can only inspire others to learn but can never force them. You cannot fix stupid in others. In the USA, stupidity is political currency and we have a long tradition of poor education and standardized exploitation. It is the American dream.

I think LDO and Voron are the only super relevant open source torchbearers.

Just wondering, is this "trend" you're talking about just the Bambulab situation, or are other manufacturers doing the same? I'm not super up to date on 3d printing news, so not sure if i missed more such changes.

If it's the bambulab situation, it's not entirely unexpected. When they started people were already worried about exactly this seeing how closed their ecosystem is. Then again, they did make a printer that just works better than the competition, and that's in the end what attracts users.

Personally i have diy 3d printers that i built myself, really happy with them, but for people who just want to print things, many other filament printers are just too annoying to work with. Not everyone is into diy, and many people just want to make cool stuff and not care about the printer, and bambulab really made the next step towards achieving that.

So if the open source community wants to compete with that, they must make printers that are as user friendly. My diy 3d printers are like running linux. Really great and customizable if you like to work on 3d printers, and really reliable now i as an expert built & tuned them. But most people just want to buy a machine that works, and that's not these open source printers. And as long as we just focus on making 3d printers for expert diy'ers, we'll end up in the same place as linux is for OS'es: used by experts and for specific advanced usecases, but beyond reach for the common user that's then stuck on systems like apple/windows that are more locked down, but actually just work without having to understand how the entire thing works.

Free systems were expensive, hard to use, and had worse finish

Bambu came, made a better [proprietary] product

People obviously bought it

Then other manufacturers saw that they could sell proprietary products just as well and jumped into the bandwagon

Holy shit. There is so much gatekeeping here that Cerberus themselves would say "Yo dog, take it down a notch"

I think there are two big aspects to this.

The first is that, yes, we are seeing a big push toward locked down ecosystems. Bambu is a great example of this and people are still falling all over each other to talk about how amazing their products are. And, as someone who has been pointing out that AMSes don't actually do what people think they do for years now, it has been frustrating to watch them take over the cultural zeitgeist even before the current bullshit.

Which leads into the second aspect. FDM printing is very much a "prosumer" hobby. It is about taking industrial/corporate processes and marketing them to hobbyists. Some of that is awesome because it provides a platform to rapidly prototype and iterate on new tech (which benefits the companies more than the users but...) and some of that is miserable because it means we have astroturfing campaigns out there to explain to people why they NEED 24 AMSes chained together for their single printer... because that model works a lot better for print farms.

And, as an aside before I get to the "real" point: We see the same with home cooking. There was a MASSIVE push that everyone should sous vide everything for a couple years. And.. that was mostly because we had restaurant chefs talking to The Masses without a Food Network/PBS producer telling them to shut up. So OBVIOUSLY the best steak you will ever eat is the one that spent 11 hours in a hot water bath and was quickly seared to be plated in under 5 minutes. Rather than the understanding that this is a crutch used because a line cook can't spend 10 minutes butter basting their steak.

And most of that still is incredibly obnoxious and outright wasteful. But it also led to people like J Kenji Lopez-Alt who used that to popularize "reverse sear" cooking.

So, now to the real point. People are gate keeping mother fuckers. They are angry that they had to read twelve different articles to figure out what "the paper trick" was rather than having a printer having an automatic tool that kind of gets you... probably closer than you would have gotten anyway. And countless other pain points that were resolved because... they were pain points.

And people decide THEY are heroes and legends rather than realizing that people like Naomi Wu et al came before them and got it to the point where it was learnable for the hobbyist sickos.

Which... not to shit on the OP TOO much (I would not be surprised if this came out of the LLM pass) but it is why I more than side eye anything that has "Make them great (again)". Because, invariably, it is a case of people yearning for a time that never actually existed where they are on top and everyone bows before them.

Some people want to 3d print for a hobby, while some want 3d printers as a hobby. You are the second type, while out of the box printers are for the first type.

Personally what kept me away from 3d printing my own terrain for miniature wargames is that I don't have time for another hobby. I just can't be bothered with endless fiddling with settings, temperatures, speed, and all that. But I understand your feelings

Voron. Make a Voron.

Btw most would rather read your own writing rather an ai. When my students edit with ai it’s typically pretty obvious and I think it wastes everyone’s time. Also, foreign students frequently write much better than the native English ones at my school, idk why. I bet your writing is better than you think :)

They try to keep it as simple as possible so that really everyone can start printing if they like to. For our luck, we got companies like Prusa and Creality that still allow modifications and have a big community.

It's giving me serious pause when looking at things like the new Bambu printer

I really like my x1c, but I haven't upgraded it's firmware yet, and probably never will, because the local features are just too good. I know I can replace a lot of the bambu cloud features with octoanywhere, but I shouldn't have to

I own a BambuLab A1M as I want a printer that just works. And while yes it is all proprietary they do sell replacement parts for most parts.

While I will not forgive them for their latest moves I am quite happy, I turn it on, load an stl into BambuStudio and let it run without any issues at all.

My next printer will however probably be a prusa as they are Europeans and I love that they keep everything up to the user so far. But I can not deal with anything that is more DIY than a Prusa, it is a tool for my hobby...not the hobby itself.

I don't understand why this is such a big deal. There is no huge open source scene for regular printers. Because it's a tool, not a hobby. People want a print on paper and move on. This gatekeeping gotta go: It's holding 3D printing back. Bambu did for 3D printing what Apple did for mobile phones: They made 3D printing clean, simple and easy. If you want to fiddle around with custom firmware and usability hacks and cobbled together components, power to you. I'll be over here, actually printing things.