How many sales do that 1% drive? They also tend to be the evangelical users / YouTubers / tech bloggers that drive sales for the company.
Bambu is following Synology's footsteps here. And just like Synology, they will wake up to press at some point and common wisdom "don't buy Synology, the elite moved off when Green came out and now the rest are leaving too".
I own the most expensive Bambu (The H2C) - and even I am willing to admit that the snap maker is a great printer, and a better technical path in someways then the H2C vortek system for anyone who doesn't care about engineering filament
Indeed these voices will drive some sales away, but unless other options are competitive with Bambu's offer, they still sell some of the best price-performance-reliability ratio printers on the market, and that's really attractive for the average buyer.
Most commenters here will value the openness of Prusa, but most lambda users will have limited budgets that Prusa does not cover. The U1 is a great attempt at taking on BambuLab head front, with interesting features at a reasonable price point.
In the end, a lot of people (including here) are using an iPhone even though it's locked down to a higher degree. Some people like a walled garden, some don't care.
That's not true - that's a canary that Bambu through out there to distract from the thing that they absolutely took steps to force everyone into their ecosystem (which just happens to only sell their product, and to monetize prints directly for them).
As I recall, the features in the Selectric where what sank the Killian documents forgery a few years ago. Even the Selectric (which was the defense about claiming that the proportionally spaced document that was produced perfectly out of Microsoft word with default settings) couldn't do some of the existing things that word did by default, but it was still a technical marvel for its day.
It's also worth remembering that Ted Turner also funded and asked for editorial changes to the the movie version of Gods and Generals, which downplayed slavyer and embraced the Confederate "lost cause" ideology. Most historians consider that as denial-ism on the same order as holocaust denial and the "stabbed in the back" claim that Hitler's used to seize power in the first place. He also attacked his own employees because of their religious beliefs. He later apologized for much of this, but if you want to find some of the reason for the modern return of fascism, you have to consider this.
I picked up the same monitor as the author. I'm pretty happy with it myself - I have the Pro-Art display that the author has as well, and the volume of color makes a huge difference for me.
But OLED is a remarkably personal technology. Some people also have issues with how the images are "strobed" during upgrades, etc.
I ordered a framework desktop and got it "by accident" - in that I forgot that I had put down a deposit on a fully maxed out Ai MAX395+. After a few days of using it, I decided to keep it, and given how incredibly expensive 8tb NVMe drives and DDR5-8000 has beocme since then (even if you could get DDR-8000 on desktop form factor) - I don't regret that decision at all. It's a great little box - and AI is getting closer to colser to being a good experience.
That said, I have run into a set of frustrations with it:
1) The PCIEx is completely useless on the board. Forget about room for the slot - it's not exposed, there isn't enough exposure inside of the case. This is a real miss - It seems perfect for a occulink port or another USB4 port.
2) USB4 + PCIe tunneling was a mess. Seems to be working better now.
3) There are some real thermal envelopes that are resulting in similar systems with the exact same architecture running 10% faster then this box. That's a big bummer - apparently it's tunable in their bios, but framework really limits the bios settings.
4) Randomly right now, the latest kernel on Ubuntu seems to freeze on boot. No idea why - I can move to the older .5 kernel, and it;s working.
All that said, for what it offers - Framework offers a lot. I really honestly believe that either Mac or Framework is the way to go if you need significant compute power on the desktop.
I feel ya on the PCIe slot. And the on-board NICs are sub-par Realtek garbage, unacceptable both on features and quality. However, you can fit a small SFP+ card inside if you (a) cut out a correctly shaped hole in your case, and (b) turn the fan on at 40% instead of letting it turn off. The card will sit at a small angle but work fine, and with some 3D printing I even got a mounting bracket in to keep it stable. A lower profile connector, like USB 4, might fit outright.
Yeah, I was thinking of running a Occulink connector to the side of the case, the problem is that this would need a riser, and I don't think that occulink - even with a redriver, would do well with two additional physical connectors.
On the 5GB realtek - i think their 5G is far better then their 1g or 2.5g devices where.
It may appear to work, but it uses a lot more CPU than a decent 10G network card, despite being half the speed. I shudder to think what their 2.5G must've been if this is better.
I really want to adopt the world view of this developer, but the more I read it, the more this comes across as someone relatively new to a particular industry who really doesn’t care about his job. I can empathize with part of this - who doesn’t want to live in the rat race, but this feels entitled more then questioning. That said, if his boss has a yacht, maybe there is a more money at this company then I assumed.
So where do you go, if you don’t care about growth? it feels like a government job (especially in Europe), a academic, or a factory line worker in Southeast Asia might be a better fit then software developer.
Bambu is following Synology's footsteps here. And just like Synology, they will wake up to press at some point and common wisdom "don't buy Synology, the elite moved off when Green came out and now the rest are leaving too".
I own the most expensive Bambu (The H2C) - and even I am willing to admit that the snap maker is a great printer, and a better technical path in someways then the H2C vortek system for anyone who doesn't care about engineering filament
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