I’ve been noticing an unsettling trend in the 3D printing world: more and more printer manufacturers are locking down their devices with proprietary firmware, cloud-based software, and other anti-consumer restrictions. Despite this, they still receive glowing reviews, even from tech-savvy communities.
Back in the day, 3D printing was all about open-source hardware, modding, and user control. Now, it feels like we’re heading towards the same path as smartphones and other consumer tech—walled gardens, forced online accounts, and limited third-party compatibility. Some companies even prevent users from using alternative slicers or modifying firmware without jumping through hoops.
My question is: Has 3D printing gone too mainstream? Are newer users simply unaware (or uninterested) in the dangers of locked-down ecosystems? Have we lost the awareness of FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software) and user freedom that once defined this space?
I’d love to hear thoughts from the community. Do you think this is just a phase, or are we stuck on this trajectory? What can we do to push back against enshitification before it’s too late?
(Transparency Note: I wrote this text myself, but since English is not my first language, I used LLM to refine some formulations. The core content and ideas are entirely my own.)
Is it a price thing?
In my opinion Bambu Lab is a high-end consumer 3D-Printer and still modding, servicing etc. is bad. On the other side of the price-spectrum Anycubic copy-pasted all the bad stuff from Bambu.
It’s not. It’s the “premium” products that have this proprietary bs and branded parts trying to justify the inflated prices. The cheapest printers are all just generic clones with no lock in and mostly generic parts. Practically DIY kits only without the DIY unless something fails.
The “problem” is people just want to do stuff, they don’t want to spend hours and hours trouble shooting. And Bambu brought that to the market.
It is more complicated than just price. It is ultimately an intuitive self awareness and scope thing. People lack depth to understand the details or ask others that do understand before they make a purchase. The majority of people are more oriented towards interpersonal interactions and experiential aspects of life in their fundamental functional thought. They struggle to see detail and nuances or question fixation and biases.
We still live in the early era of human tribal primitivism when it is quite easy to exploit tribal stupidity on multiple fronts. For some it is fixation from initial exposure or emotional brand perception, others it is impulsive availability, for others they are masochistic misers. Abstractive thinking and understanding is rare in humans, and the majority do not understand it or value it in others.
Walmart bikes are targeting misers first, but spontaneous availability and access, along with controlling the perception of what the low bar of the market is are major factors as well. Each of these three factors exploits a specific niche. Walmart is a rogue wholesale distributor selling directly to consumers using massive capital. They are privateers (legal pirates) in the retail market as are most big box stores. Piracy has always been a nice short term business model for gains. It just happens to be true that people of today like being raided raped and pillaged so long as it is done slowly enough without violence, the ship looks pretty and the pirates wear a suit. Even worse is when pirates become entrenched as monarchs and feudal lords. This is the next step in the evolution when piracy is normalized. Welcome to neo feudalism.