Competition is good, except when it isn’t.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen some dramatic price drops in the desktop 3D printing market. This is sometimes called the “race to the bottom”, where the lowest cost products tend to win out in the end.
Because of the intense competition, we’ve seen two major “price resets” in the past couple of years:
- Bambu Lab introduced the X1C, shifting the price for professional FFF devices down to the US$800-US$1200 range
- Elegoo introduced the Centauri, shifting the price down further to around US$200-400
I believe the Elegoo move will ultimately result in the elimination of open gantry desktop 3D printers from the market, and even now, we are seeing many bedslingers being re-priced in the US$100 range.
This is all very good news for buyers, who can today obtain equipment similar to professional machines of five years ago at prices literally 20X less expensive. That opens up the technology to far more people, as well as enabling print farm expansions at lower costs.
But there’s also a dark side to this rapid competition.
Fabbaloo readers will know that we often review devices from manufacturers, perhaps 150 machines so far, which you can find with this search.
Recently, we’ve been seeing an increasing trend from at least some manufacturers: the equipment is being sold or shipped before it’s truly ready for use.
Most of the time, it’s not the hardware, but is instead the software and surrounding ecosystem that is deficient. Manufacturers seem to have figured out how to produce reasonable quality hardware, but often struggle with software.
In our reviews, you’ll sometimes see evidence of this as we find ourselves confused with menus, puzzled over poorly translated words, lost in tangled workflows, mixed up software versions, catastrophically confusing cloud systems, and more. It’s just that we’re seeing a lot more of this lately.
In at least one case, we’ve been testing a piece of hardware where the associated software not only does not work but does not include features being advertised at all — without even a “not implemented” stub. In that scenario, the product, while working in hardware form, simply does not provide any useful function because of deficient software. We’re still awaiting a major software upgrade from this manufacturer.
Why is this happening more these days? One factor certainly is the intense competition. There are so many options for 3D printers and related equipment that price wars have been triggered.
Achieving the lowest cost is most easily done when vast numbers of units are sold. This means that the leading manufacturers are likely to start outstripping the smaller manufacturers that can’t reach the same economies of scale. We will soon be in a world where there are far fewer desktop 3D printer manufacturers, and where it will be effectively impossible to launch a startup company manufacturing a 3D printer without a truly massive investment.
Manufacturers are forced to not only cut costs but also to provide increasingly sophisticated equipment and services. Make more with less.
If I could provide one piece of advice to these manufacturers, it would be to re-balance efforts to have more resources directed to software development. Buyers want systems that work, take less time to figure out, and are reliable, and a lot of that is the responsibility of the software. Don’t cut the software roles; cut the hardware roles!
Products that are the cheapest to buy but don’t actually work are not really options.
