Slashdot Mirror
Why MakerBot Didn't Kickstart A 3D Printing Revolution (backchannel.com)
Bre PettisâS once said MakerBot gave you a superpower -- "You can make anything you need." But four years later, mirandakatz writes that though MakerBot promised to revolutionize society, "That never happened."
At Backchannel, Andrew Zaleski has the definitive, investigative account of why the 3D printing revolution hasn't yet come to pass, culled from interviews with industry observers, current MakerBot leadership, and a dozen former MakerBot employees. As he tells it, "In the span of a few years, MakerBot had to pull off two very different coups. It had to introduce millions of people to the wonders of 3D printing, and then convince them to shell out more than $1,000 for a machine. It also had to develop the technology fast enough to keep its customers happy. Those two tasks were too much for the fledgling company."
Do I spend a grand and a bunch of time learning the software necessary to print the widget, or do I buy the widget for $2 and spend no time learning how to use software? Virtually everyone I know with a 3D printer uses it for pointless projects that have no practical value. If it isn't a premade design, they're not printing it.
nobody wants to spend £1000+ on a device which makes shitty low quality christmas cracker toys. It was obvious from the start that this was this seasons desktop publishing fad. The sort of people who it was argued would use these are already aware of better alternatives.
The internet was a revolution, starting with a few networked government buildings.
Mobile phones were a revolution, starting with heavy briefcases that barely worked anywhere.
Computers were a revolution, starting with speeds so slow a human could keep up.
None of these revolutions happened overnight.
3D printers will become cheaper and will become common place so slowly, we won't even notice it until only in hindsight we will say "it was a revolution".
It may take another 20 years to get there, but we will.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Mangled unicode in the second word. That's got to be a record!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
3D Printing is hardware, not software, you can't just re-write and make it better for everyone instantly at virtually no cost. As soon as you produce a better piece of hardware you have to distribute it, make it sound good enough to people that bought your last hardware, make it sound better to those who haven't bought it already, etc etc. Hardware takes time, it takes patience, it takes perseverance. People are still interested in 3D printing, other hardware designers love it for rapid prototyping, it's starting to be used more and more in industrial production altogether. But selling it to consumers? That was never the way to go, not everyone needs a 3d printer on their desk, and not everyone needs their potentially 3d printed object "RIGHT NOW!" or even fairly quickly. Someday, a while from now, you'll be able to go to a website, select a cup or a custom statue or whatever, have it 3D printed and delivered to your door for a fairly reasonable, even cheap, price. That'll be the revolution, not having some giant, cumbersome, noisy machine sitting in every garage for no reason.
They would have done better if they adopted the approach of copy machines.
Set top-line 3D printers up at Wal-Mart or similar locations and let people print from a catalog of pre-designed objects or home-designed objects.
Have a tech specialist there to fix and help to print. Maybe sell coffee and donuts to make some money.
Then, offer them basic models that they can take home if they like using it.
Makerbot was a hype-machine that didn't have the technical competency to compensate for their artisan pricing model. They were a bunch of creatives that were very good at branding and marketing, but what few Hardware Engineers they held in their employ left the sinking ship when they pushed their shitty printhead disposable printhead to production thereby killing any remaining ounce of brand loyalty that existed from their laser cut balsa "cupcake" days.
Their entire business model was built off of freeloading on the back of the Reprap community and when they finally needed to actually in-house talent to design for mass production(ie. the reprap community IP is useless at this scale) they didn't have the hiring skills or management talent to pull it off.
Hackaday did a good forensic analysis/post-mortem on the company. I'm not sure how many shares they were able to pass off to the "old kids on the block" at Stratasys of Z-corp or whoever it was that bought a sizeable portion of their company, but I hope it wasn't too many because I hate to see these sorts of shenanigans pay off for douchebags.
It didn't help that there were a billion "me too!" startups birth'ed from the same hype and froth which were all doomed to failure once China let the dust settle around the cheapest design to knockoff and undercut.
All that said: Thingiverse is a nicely designed front-end/community and if we give it a couple more years, I suspect that some combination of WebVR/Project Sansar/HTC Vive/Augmented Reality games like Pokemon Go will eventually give "Thingiverse" a second life(in much the same way Mt.Gox found a new purpose as a Bitcoin ponzi scheme). That is: if their lawyers can keep it in their pants regarding how aggressive they are on expanding the Intellectual Property provision of the terms of use.
And one of the key ones is that there are too many out there. With heatpads and without, with this or that plastic, and let's not get started on the various designs on how to get the filament on the ground. Many different designs, some looking rather ridiculous like something Dr. Strangelove would have invented. Yes, it still is a rather experimental thing, and it looks the part, too.
And people don't want that. Especially with something they're supposed to pay a thousand bucks for or even more. What people want is something that "just works". And "just works", it sure doesn't. It needs tweaking and a lot of try and error to get it right.
And in the end, what do you get out of it? You can print plastic parts. Provided you have the design files for them. Umm... yeah, that's ... well, ... why sugar coat it, it's bullshit. Unless there is something you can print that you can't buy MUCH cheaper, there is exactly no point to drop a thousand bucks and go through all the hassle on top of it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
3D printers will one day be able to print copies of themselves, circuits and all. Minor variations in each iteration will be tested for improvement. Improved machines will share their specifications with others. Also there will be gay printers.
1. There's a certain number where something becomes an impulse buy. For me and 3d printers that was $200. Ultimately I decided that with inflation, I spent more on my original NES set years and years ago.
Makerbot could have killed it at that price, and still can if they can figure out how to do it at this price.
2. The only hurdle past price is having the needed skills to create things in 3d. Printing other peoples stuff off the web gets old after a while. Luckily the 3d modeling software I taught myself to use really well can output STL files.
Only a few years ago the thought of quickly drawing a 3D CAD design and having it delivered to your door for any reasonably time or cost was ludicrous. Nowadays it is a standard service offered all over the world. Not that this matters as I know several people with 3D printers which is why I haven't bought one.
It may not have revolutionised society on a whole (it was never going to, that was just absurd), but it most certainly has revolutionised the hobby / DIY community.
It's the content holding back the revolution. That, and printers are still pretty crappy and still improving quickly. Making original models from scratch has a steep learning curve...it takes skill to use 3D modelling software. Handheld 3D scanners aren't cheap enough or good enough to make it worth having a 3D printer for the average toaster user. (and even with a good scanner, you have to clean up the model and modify it for printing). So, while 3D printers are fantastic if you have the skills to use them, it's not easier or cheaper for an ordinary person to use one versus just buying a part produced by someone else. And that's not even getting into the nuances of different print materials your printer can use versus the quality industrially molded plastic or other processes put out for less cost. I personally use my printer to make wargames terrain (toys), but a) I have the skills, and b) wargames stuff is expensive enough that it's often (but not always) cheaper or easier to print stuff, and I can customize the prints. It's kind of like saying that CNC router tables and/or laser cutters are the bomb for woodworking. Yep, they are great, but at the end of the day it's just another tool with a relatively specialized use in crafting. When we have a process that can scan and print copies of an object, at 1 micron resolution, at the push of a button, in under an hour, then it'll really start taking off. Because until that point, it's not really consumer ready.
Here in Sweden a typical Makerbot would set you back 18K Sek (that's roughly 2000$) and for what? A slow, primitive - made out of wood 3D printer that looks like it was made by a bunch of tech kids at a high school.
It also takes TONS of fiddling around, and the patience of a saint to even produce something useful with it. If you want something better like the Ultimaker 2 or 3, you pay around 4000-5000$ in Sweden, and most people aren't ready to fork out that kind of money. However, you can always gamble on cheap Chinese clones of the older makerbots, often made in plastic instead of wood or just coated wood for that matter, but the same enthusiast process involved, it is NOT just print and you're ready, it takes TONS of work. Lots of preparation, and you need to clean and prep. your 3D work before you hit the print button so to speak.
I'm a 3D modeler, I've been working with 3D for over 20 years. I've YET to see a useful home-model that isn't just "look - I - printed - a - stock - model - ma!" tech demo. You'll actually be better off with a good CNC machine if you want to make prototypes on the cheap.
But they're fun tho...if you have the time AND the money to burn on the countless rolls of ABS plastic you're gonna need.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
It's a 3D printer using flimsy plastic at a low resolution. Once the novelty wears of there's really little use for it.
Wake when there's a metal powder fed 3D printer cheap enough to own. That will start a revolution.
It was dirt cheap [around 300 dollars] and works AWESOME. There are some niggly downsides though and the biggest being the filament and the need for updated/upgraded extruders for multi color printing and the general handling of the filament in general kind of sucks. The other downside is the time it takes to print something and many people have no patients. If they can't say "Tea, Earl Grey" and poof it's there then screw that. I think it's still going to be a few years until they are ready for the masses. Once you can load 3 or 5 filaments to allow you to print the full color spectrem and it take FAR less time then it does now then the average joe will not want no need one of these. Lastly there is no really easy way to get the code from brain to platform. The "revolution" will come when your mom and pop can see a picture on a webpage and hit print and a little while later there you are. Bobs your uncle.
The MakerBot is like the Altair 8800... It's works, most of the time, but it's complicated and slow, and it's produce is not that useful. and... what am I really supposed to do with it??
The Altair 8800 came out in 1974, but it took another ~10 years for home computers to really take off... I'm sure that in less then 10 years we'll all have some kind of 3D printer at home.
I took one look at the consumable material and promptly forgot about the idea.
FDM style printers (the cheapest kind) require wrapping your head around calibration, nozzle diameters, temperatures, slices, alignments, supports, bed heating, the properties of PLA / ABS and all the rest. If you're lucky you'll set the printer going and hours later your efforts will yield some crudely finished single colour part. If you're unlucky you'll come back to discover something that has skewed left, warped on its base, or turned into some dante-esque spider's web that has stuck to everything.
Maybe SLA is better? Well it certainly yields better parts for sure (assuming it cured properly, but then you also must have space for a wash station. And all the sticky, smelly gunk resins to work with that get on EVERYTHING. Beyond that you've got stuff like SLS, SLM etc where things get more interesting. But now we're talking industrial equipment with the costs and power consumption to match.
I think the most likely form of 3D printing to take off is one which hasn't gotten much press - laminate printers. The price has to come down much more than where it is to be consumer attractive but I think that's viable.
Makerbot capitalized on a great idea that came from expired patents. It wasn't cutting edge stuff but it is part of the history of 3D printing revolution, much like the people with 2400 baud modems were part of the internet revolution. There have already been significant advancements in 3D printing (like SLS and SLM) but they are locked behind patents and a lack of inexpensive pulsed lasers. Once these issues can be addressed, there will be inexpensive SLS and SLM which can then easily be used for semiconductor fabrication. It wouldn't be anything cutting edge but being able to make micrometer ICs on the cheap would be a boon for everyone.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
...was making the assumption that public at large has the skills or the interest to make their own 3D models. The average person gets confused by their web browser and email client and 3D printer vendors expected them to master 3D modelling packages.
This article once again ignores the elephant in the room - which is that 99.9% of consumers do not need to manufacture stuff at home.
It is both easier, faster, cheaper and better quality to buy it at the store.
It was the journalistic hype about a "revolution" that was supposed to come that fueled the rise of Makerbot and now those same journalists are crucifying the company for not being able to deliver on something the company didn't even originally target. It is ridiculous.
That's not to say that Makerbot didn't commit a ton of mistakes and howlers, alienating both their customers and investors. But that has little to do with any "revolution".
It is the same hype BS we see with autonomous cars, with AI, with virtual reality and many other things - journalists writing about things they barely understand based on corporate press releases and extrapolating far beyond of what the technology can actually do, because they don't understand neither the tech, nor basic economy.
On the other hand, when looking beyond the uncritical hype and the notion that everyone will have a printer at home, 3D printing is fine and sound - there are plenty of other manufacturers than Makerbot who make good and affordable printers. However, it is now a mature technology that people who need it have and use already and the most of the rest doesn't really care about. Same as CNC machining or laser cutting or whatever. It is not the "new shiny" frontpage material anymore.
Also: 3D editing is hard on a 2D screen with primarily 2D input devices. It will probably always be hard until we get really good Brain-Computer Interfaces.
My monoprice mini was under $200.
3d printing still takes a LOT of education and skill. and the bulk of the population does not want to bother with learning and tinkering
THAT is the real reason.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
CNC machines more cheaply build higher quality parts given current technology. They can work with a wider range of materials. They are easier to maintain. They are just better.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
They didn't start a revolution, they killed one. Almost all of the consumer 3D printing tech came out of the RepRap project. All the companies grabbed RepRap's open sourced designs and research, added marketing, and then killed progress. Most companies don't invest in research, they invest in fooling people into buying their products and attacking competitors. As a donation funded business, RepRap quickly died under the weight of all those startups promising the world and none of those guys have the foresight to do any research (nor the funds). Well some of the more business savvy guys have, but they're busying locking up everything behind patents. The consumer 3D printing industry is now dying faster than its growing. Larger business are grabbing and locking it up. The little guys are dead or dying and the industry is turning into a patent mine field. Designers are doing their best to strengthen IP protections too.
What is needed is a not-very expensive device that can be put into the home that prints high quality metal parts, plastics, ceramics and electronics.
FTFY
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Actually CP/M ran just fine on the Altair 8800 and other S-100 bus computers, around 1975 or so (the first version of CP/M was released in 1974, but Wikipedia isn't clear as to what it ran on when). There were lots of different designs for personal computers, mostly built around the S-100 bus, and many of them were used by small businesses and hobbyist types even long after the first home computers hit the mass market.
But you're right, the Apple ][ was a new concept entirely. And by the time Atari, Commodore and the rest got into mass production the market changed. I think that the 3d printer world is in that same place as early PCs were in the late 1970s, still waiting for a great efficient design and mass market appeal. Unfortunately everyone thinks they're the next "the two Steves."
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
One place where I see a 3D printer being of use is when repairing things with hard-to-obtain parts. But of course you can't do this unless you have a database of parts you can print for the thing you are repairing. So like MP3 players (which did not explode until there was a database of downloadable songs that you could buy for 99 cents), we need a database of 3D printable parts for things like dishwashing machines and refrigerators and the like which can be downloaded for relatively cheap and printed on your printer which can be used to fix the broken component.
Of course not all parts can be replaced like this. But certainly there are plenty of components (such as the plastic drive gears in a garage door opener) which can be printed and replaced by consumers.
At the higher end I can see companies like auto repair shops using professional or pro-consumer level printers for printing harder, and more refined components for auto repairs, and even using 3D subtractive technologies (like CAD-driven lathes and CAD-driven milling machines) for making metal components which fail that do not require tight tolerances.
I think where things like the MakerBot gadget failed was that it seemed to be oriented around the idea that everyone could design their own components. But even in today's environment there are far fewer mechanical engineers and designers than folks like that give credit for.
For Makerbot to assume that they would revolutionize the world by selling a 3D printer at a low cost point is like someone assuming that houses will suddenly become super-cheap because they teach widespread classes on how to nail 2x4s together with a hammer and nails.
Let's start with the first problem...so Suzy Homemaker buys a 3D printer and brings it home to her family. Now what? "oh, it can make stuff." How do you define that 'stuff?' You have to design it, using 3D software...ah, whoops. Hm, bit of a learning curve there...and even if their son Bobby is plenty good with computers, you end up with a child who has the technical knowledge and adults who own the use cases...and let's face it, in almost no family is anyone good at packaging either the knowledge or the use cases so that others could make use of them. So you end up with parents who have a vague idea of what they would like but can't communicate it, and a kid who can probably figure things out but doesn't know how to teach it. (This is the "knowing how to build framing doesn't mean you have a design for a house to work from" part of the analogy.)
Then, let's look at the limitations...the material can only do certain things. You can basically make little plastic widgets. (This is the "houses have a lot more than 2x4s in them" part of the analogy.) You can't replicate a broken part very easily either...you're kind of focused down into a world where you're going to have to invent things for this to be useful. So add another necessary skill set to Suzy Homemaker's family for this whole thing to work.
I think MakerBot was a success...just not the kind of success they thought they would be. They helped put 3D printing on the map for Suzy Homemaker. People have gone into Home Depot and watched 3D printers at work, creating things...that's not a small accomplishment. The price of printing continues to come down, even for technologies that remain out of reach but are far more useful (being able to 3D print with metal is very important if you want to be real about this, because only toys are only made of plastic) and now the public is a bit better-prepared for a near future where they actually *can* print things. And now, there's an awareness that the printers are just the razor blade handles...and the designs are the razor blades. Once truly useful printing becomes accessible, there will be business activity that addresses that problem. I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes the same kind of shift that Eli Whitney created when he began the manufacture of devices that had interchangeable parts.
The moral of the story: massive shifts in society resulting from singular technologies are, in essence, Black Swan events. You cannot reliably predict them, no matter how badly you want VCs to give you money so that you can become the next Apple/Google/Microsoft/Facebook billionaires. Aim for major increments of change, and your business plans will be more viable.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I think the single biggest problem with 3D printing is that most people don't have any idea what they would use it for. It's a neat concept, and it does seem useful that you could create a custom-made little plastic doodad of any specifications you want. The idea of being able to share designs seems to also have potential. Still, if someone gave me a 3D printer for free, I can't think of what I would use it for.
Maybe I just don't have enough imagination, but I think most of the population probably has even less than I do. There are only so many little plastic pieces of junk I need in my life. I think I'd get more use out of an automated loom that could make clothes, or an automated printer/binder that could make books. Or a system that made custom Ikea pieces for assembling custom furniture. I suppose you could make plastic furniture with a big enough 3D printer, but I don't want plastic furniture-- or a big enough 3D printer for that.
I've read through articles online about all the useful things you could make with your 3D printer. It's always stuff like book ends or door stops. Basically stuff that I don't really need, but if I did, the same purpose could be served by a small rock.
The answer to this question is quite obvious to me: MakerBot is to Matter Compiling (see "The Diamond Age" from Neal Stephenson) what the C64 is to the Smartphones we carry around with uns today, that resemble some distant spacey science-fition vision of a 19981 Cray 2 supercomputer for your pocket and that cost roughly a days salary of a regular worker today in 2016.
MakerBot marks the beginning of a revolution, not the revolution itself.
Like Commodore is basically just some brandname used on some products no one buys today, it marks for many of use the beginning of commodity computing. We knew what it meant back then, but very very few people outside of the micro computer faszination could even dream about the high-res touchscreens and flat, light, sturdy, long-running and dirt cheap supercomputers we have today.
MakerBot could very well be long dead when, in 25 years or so, when 3D printing a device is better and cheaper than mass-production today and is as common as smartphones are today. It's the way technological developmennt happens.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I initially preordered a Thing-O-Matic, but was quickly warned off while waiting for it to cancel and get one of the many great RepRap kits available. I'm glad I did. Anyone that spent more than an hour or two a week trying to 3D print stuff quickly came to realize that MakerBot printers were to be avoided. They cost more and were less capable than most of the alternatives. When people can 3D-print their own custom designs and thereby rapidly improve existing 3D printer designs, mass-producing printers on a long product life cycle is a losing proposition. As far as I can tell they only got as far as they did on Bre Pettis' cult of personality and hype. While Thingiverse is handy it is/was also subject to their whims and censorship, and they blocked any weapons or weapon parts from being uploaded there, highlighting the need for other methods of sharing 3D printing designs. All I can say in conclusion is good riddance to MakerBot, long live 3D printing.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
A bunch of naive, excitable software nerds briefly touched some hardware, and not knowing how complex real-world objects are, they thought hardware was as simple as software.
Idiots. You CAN NOT compare information processing to the real world! Even a C64 will give you the right answers to math questions, but a paper airplane will never fly at the speed of sound no matter how excited you get!
You're not colonizing space or mining asteroids either, you dummies.
Porn has driven the progress of the WWW. Porn sites have been early adaptors of almost every web technology and they have stress tested every tech.
The progress of 3D tech will progress on the printing of sex toys (many people are embaressed to buy sex toys and would rather print the same)
**Life is too short to be serious**
3D printing just isn't there yet. You can make small plastic objects out of one or two materials, the surfaces are rough, and that's if you're lucky and the print doesn't fail (MakerBot is worse than many others in that way). It's also expensive and slow. And 3D printed objects are competing with $0.02 mass produced plastic stuff from China.
So, it's not that MakerBot somehow wasn't up to the task, it's that the technology that isn't ready for mass market use yet.
"But you're right, the Apple ][ was a new concept entirely. And by the time Atari, Commodore and the rest got into mass production the market changed."
What kind of revisionist bullshit is this? Commodore was already mass producing by the time the Apple 2 came along. And yes, I'm calling it the Apple 2 to rankle you.
Mostly random stuff.
Yep, you're right. Commodore had the PETs and CBM machines. Oh, but they were built after Commodore got a demo of an Apple 2 (happy?) prototype:
"In September 1976 Peddle got a demonstration of Jobs and Wozniak's Apple II prototype, when Jobs was offering to sell it to Commodore, but Commodore considered Jobs' offer too expensive.[3]"
There was a lot of work being done in parallel. That's what happens when new chips are introduced.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
The issue is, that I cannot 3D print a working 4TB SATA hard drive and even if, it will be much more expensive than buying one already made. If they would have found out a way to 3D print a girlfriend the nerds would have been all over it.
MakerBot had to pull off two very different coups.
>>> It had to introduce millions of people to the wonders of 3D printing,
>>> and then convince them to shell out more than $1,000 for a machine.
>>> It also had to develop the technology fast enough to keep its customers happy.
Those two tasks were too much for the fledgling company.
1+1+1 = 2
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Maybe the Makers shouldn't have been so pissy about supporting projects such as Ghost Gunner... ReasonTV interview with Cody Wilson https://www.youtube.com/watch?... https://ghostgunner.net/produc...
Metalicarap is the real 3D printing revolution: http://reprap.org/wiki/Metalic... It can print solar panels which means it can power itself. It can double as an electron microscope, and importantly it can refine, recycle and print metals. When complete Metalicarap is going to disrupt the entire world. The plastic 3D printers were never going to be more than toys. Eventually you might have both in your house, but the Metal 3D printers are the real game changers.
Maybe he himself believed it, but regardless, there was ZERO chance Makerbot was going to start a revolution.
A key problem is demographics, which apparently no one (including Stratsys and 3D systems) bothered to pay attention to, the bottom line is that not everyone is a maker. For the price of a Makerbot you can build a pretty decent garage woodshop, or buy a (cheap) dekstop CNC mill, but does the average person have one? No, because most people don't have the time, skill or willpower to actually do it.
And the killer app would be shoes. Imagine being able to print custom running shoes exactly to the size/shape of your foot.
Or at least be able to print foamy insoles and have that new shoe feeling every month.
Besides the fact you can print more than just "plastic", many times in manufacturing you use a tool to make the tools you need. This may be a jig or it can even be a mold which can be used to create something from plastic, resin, chocolate, ceramics, wax, or even metal.
3d printers are not a one stop manufacturing facility, it's a tool in your workshop.
It certainly seemed to me, from the all the talk, it was meant to do absolutely everything. When I realised it couldn't make a System-on-Chip I figured someone was bullshitting.
And people don't want that. Especially with something they're supposed to pay a thousand bucks for or even more. What people want is something that "just works". And "just works", it sure doesn't. It needs tweaking and a lot of try and error to get it right.
There are two key problems that have to be solved before FDM printers obtain "just works" ability:
1. You really can't fight warping problems without heated chamber! All heatbeds, PEI sheets & co are just bandaids. But heated chamber is patented and that insane patent expires in 2019 I think. Then we'll see much better quality prints.
2. Second problem is much worse. Even the same plastic from the same manufacturer but of different color requires seriously different tuning. You can't obtain "just works" without tight control on everything: machine, plastic source, slicer... and you know what happens then: manufacturer can't resist jacking up price to insane levels, using chips, etc, etc.
While #1 problem is going away within a few years, #2 is huge and can't be solved without some kind of manufacturer-independent filament profile standard and good luck designing that.
OTOH, the price has come down because the Chinese have recognized that the majority of 3D printer buyers, especially in the USA, don't know what they're buying and will pay $200-300 for a piece of crap that sort of looks like a 3D printer but barely functions as one. The crappy, cheapo printers and the cheapskates (who care nothing about quality) that buy them have guaranteed that 3D printing will remain a specialist product for years to come.
No. Don't forget that the world is not flat and not everyone has the money to buy non-cheap stuff. Most people from around the world don't have the luxury of choosing between good and crap, there is only choice between crap and nothing. There IS huge demand for lower price and chinese follow it, that's all. Just look at aliexpress orders, there are buyers from all parts of the world.
Recently I printed a very complicated start lever for my friend's chainsaw on my crappy $200 anet printer and it saved him from buying another chainsaw (replacement part is more expensive than chainsaw). Another case were some clips for an old Soviet fridge. Printer quality was more than enough to do these jobs.
Yes, printer quality is crap, acrylic parts cracked and half of year later anet board went bad and I had to replace it with standard arduino/ramps sandwich. Yet, it was light years better than fucking NOTHING, because I don't live in USA and I don't have usanian salary to buy "non-cheap" stuff (which is often same stuff from chinese, just rebranded and may be little tested).
I never bought a 3D printer myself, they are too expensive and I could not think of enough uses for one. Instead, twice I have used Thingverse to find something that fit my needs and ordered the item to be printed and mailed to me. There is a cottage industry of people with 3D printers that print the item and mail it to the end-customer. Both items combined cost less than $50 and that's with shipping. Delivery took an average of 4 days from the date of order.
For those curious, the 2 items I ordered are:
Cubicle Phone Mount:
http://www.thingiverse.com/thi...
Mini Desk Fan (turns a 120mm fan into a personal cooling fan):
http://www.thingiverse.com/thi...
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
I won a 3d printer (M3D) at a conference as a door prize. The big issue is: what to print, and how do you get it into a format for printing. For most stuff I've seen, you need a 3d scanner or something that can get [existing thing] into software to create [new thing].
I've recently been trying to build a case for my new phone because:
a) It would be cool to have a custom case
and
b) Cases for Zenfone 3 are not so common
Thus far I've had some luck scanning the phone to image, building the layers as 2d templates, and then converting to SVG in Inkscape. However, going to Inkscape to anything else is pretty much a f*** up as it does not map the dimensions properly, so my SVG ends up being imported as 2.335x (or whatever) the size of the actual item.
Apart from that, I've been using Octoprint and the M33-Fio module for actual printing, which works quite nicely. The next issue is that my tray is only 5"x5"x5" so a lot of items end up being too big. The software has the ability to "cut" meshes into pieces but it would be cool if it could do so in a way that wasn't straight so the joints could lock together better.
I recently dipped into the 3D printing world with a $300 printer, and while it's a low end printer, from what I've read, the issues are common: getting a print to stick and work is the blackest of arts. It's a complex, finicky process to go from design (which most software is complex and non-intuitive; so far, I've found tinkercad to be the best, albeit limited), to slicing (generating the printing commands - Simplify3D seems to be a lot better than the free options) to actually getting the printer to work (the object has to stay stuck to the bed until it's done, and the printer feed must not gum up). And it's slow. For something reasonably sized (e.g. a 100mm open cube), it can take half a day to print. It's a lot of fun when it works, but the value is primarily with people doing lots of real prototyping of small objects.
There is a reason that the leading edge of technology is called the "Bleeding Edge".
Remember when the Palm was going to revolutionize the worlds. Then it didn't. Except it did, just not as a Palm device, but as the Smart Phone which is a Palm + Phone + Touch Screen + Wifi.
There was not 3g/4g when Palm came out. There weren't great touch screens. Processors sucked. How Palm failed to be the first Smart Phone baffles me to this day.
Similarly, MakerBot and Dremmel and others are around. You can print stuff. The database is growing. But the big money savers are in parts and for parts you need companies to buy in. They need to start manufacturing using 3D printers so they can export their parts in 3D. You buy the model instead of the part.
#1. Appliance companies
#2. Car companies - For plastic Car parts
Next, you need to decrease printing time. 16 hours for a descent print isn't fast enough.
Also, we need printers that don't only use plastic.
Where is the metal printer that can print me a new car part that is metal?
Where is the printer that can print me custom chrome wheels?
Where is the printer that can just consume dirt (earth, silica, etc), and print bricks I can build a house with? So I can build house structures with less material cost.
Where is the printer that can print glass? Then I can print homes for the homeless. I can print glass green house in the Sahara desert and plant food there protected from the sand storms. I can also print homes and green houses on the Moon and Mars without sending people up there.
3D printing *is* revolutionary technology. Now that we *can* do it, we need get to where we can do it usefully.