Really nice to see steady incremental improvements to an already solid platform!
It's small stuff like no longer having to manually Z-Adjust, and having the print-head connected via easy to undo/replace connectors, that seem like small things but are huge time- and nerve-savers when it comes to actually running these things in production.
Crazy to see how far Prusa has come with his stuff, I still remember sitting and laughing in a hacker-space with him a couple years ago. He is one of the few people that actually stuck to the open-source rep-rap philosophy even after success (fun fact: he has a tattoo of the open hardware logos to remember his roots).
Getting your lunch absolutely eaten by some kickstarter printer in near silence, announcing the first few minutes of pre-orders for your already delayed printer will take months, near zero build up to the launch of the MK4...
And they won't even let the win from that just sizzle a bit, they need to take all that heat and dump it into the murky depths of Open Source Licensing.
It's a really, really bad look for them recently in my opinion.
The Prusa XL has been over a year and a half late. We had to preorder it, plunk down $200 as a deposit... and wait as they redesigned it over and over and blamed part shortages. Now, out of nowhere, "MK4 - Buy Now! No Preorder!"
They added a button to convert your XL preorder to an MK4 order with priority.
So they're alienating people plonking down $1,000 for a printer by letting people from an unrelated queue jump in front of them...
And then shaking the faith of people who already waited this long for the XL. It starts to scream "we won't even be able to make enough XLs and would much rather you just forget about that".
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Edit: Wow and actually something I didn't even realize, when the MK4 page first went up, there was no lead time...
So that's going to be another awfully sticky situation if enough XL owners actually take them up on that offer. Suddenly new buyers who were told no lead time will end up being bumped further and further back, since there aren't two queues: Printers ship by order date, and XL owners will all have order dates before new buyers.
Perhaps they set aside some percentage of XL preorders worth of MK4s that are ready to ship. As long as they overestimate that number vs reality, they can ship to the MK4 first order and XL conversions first, then start shipping to those that purchased with Lead Time stated.
And if they over estimate the conversions, (almost) nobody with a Lead Time is going to complain about getting it early.
> So if you ordered the 4 know that those swapping their XL orders have bumped all those that ordered quickly. I was scheduled for delivery next week and now its June.
Placate people you already disappointed for a year by disappointing a new cohort of users. Some companies just do not know how to let themselves win.
Thinking about it a bit more, I think Prusa is simply struggling to maintain a foot hold in the industry and remain open source. All the complaints are about the printers. But Prusa does more than just printers.
Prusa forked Slic3r into PrusaSlicer and continuously deliver great improvements and still keep it open source. If you go to the PrusaSlicer page, their github link is right there. And they support Windows, Linux and MacOS. They also attribute Alessandro on the website and the launch screen. The Prusa github also seems to have all their projects and software.
Bambu Labs forks PrusaSlicer and the github link is no where on their site and they only support Windows and MacOS On a piece of software that already had Linux support and the only acknowledge it's a fork on the github. Fortunately the github is still the 2nd link in google. But they aren't really committed to releasing their work if they won't even link to it. And their github has like 2 projects.
Prusa created printables.com to clean up the mess that is thingiverse. Creality created Creality Cloud and then just steals your models even after Naomi Wu advised them not to do that. Prusa runs competitions, has prizes.
Prusa seems to want to keep things open source, try and create a community. But like most open hardware, it's expensive relative to the competition.
As an Apple user, I completely understand the need to not mess about. But I also like to use opensource where possible. Especially for things I want to tinker with. So it's really surprising to me that what seems to be the majority of the hobbyist 3D printer community, a community that tinkers by definition, wants more closed, less repairable hardware. And more propriety software. They just want the cheapest appliance they can get for the money. I think this is what broke my brain. We started open, and could remain that way. But we'd rather not.
It's hard to fight against the might of cheap Chinese manufacturing. I hope Prusa works out a good strategy to survive before we end up in a situation where all the 3D printers requires Windows or MacOS and a login to some cloud service that I don't want.
> It's hard to fight against the might of cheap Chinese manufacturing.
This has increasingly been a problem, repeatedly. Cheap overseas manufacturers see open-source projects as free money. They are basically legally immune for what they do, can easily outcompete the original designers and project, the plans are free and cheap to modify, what's not to love? And so it's happening to not just hardware but also software, with Android being borrowed into "HarmonyOS" and so on...
I believe people should be free to choose whatever license they think fits their project best, and tend to trust their judgement and goodwill.
That said, I think strongly copyleft licenses even in commercial hardware are underappreciated. Arduino is the great example: sure, it has got tons of clones. But that's kind of the point: that other people make it, and get more people using it (Arduino themselves focused on quality of their in-house produced, and also goodwill of customers). If you have it open source, people can actually copy and modify and improve it, that's the spirit -- although I'd agree it may be tough to secure enough funding from first party product sales to sustain development of the project. In that case, I'd suggest looking for a stable stream of sponsorships/donations, through platforms like patreon or liberapay. And of course, if you're a user, make sure to donate!
Crazy to see how far Prusa has come with his stuff, I still remember sitting and laughing in a hacker-space with him a couple years ago. He is one of the few people that actually stuck to the open-source rep-rap philosophy even after success (fun fact: he has a tattoo of the open hardware logos to remember his roots).