this post was submitted on 04 Mar 2025
548 points (98.1% liked)
Technology
63897 readers
5025 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 other!
- 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
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Over time as 3D printers go from tinkerer's toy to household staple, I'd expect them to become more locked down and anti-consumer.
Bambu is working on it already — can’t print unless you’re connected to the internet and send your files through their server, can’t connect to the printer with other slicers besides their slicer.
They had to walk that back some; there is now a “developer mode” where old standard functionality is still exposed, but they’re clearly working as hard as they can to turn it shitty.
By my count, it's been tried twice.
Makerbot after the Stratasys buyout.
There were a bunch of companies that tried right after the FDM patents expired in 2009. Most of them were completely forgotten or ignored because they were closed source (and more importantly closed material) companies and never got very far off the starting blocks.
Bamboo learned from them and decided to pull the rug out after getting a foothold with finally selling decent prebuilt hardware for less than a fortune (see Ultimaker before buying out MakerBot at least).
They would have to become sci-fi level capable before they would be considered household staple items.