Community Backlash Could Accelerate Bambu Lab’s Shift to Consumer-Centric 3D Printing

By on January 24th, 2025 in Ideas, news

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Bambu Lab may speed up their strategy [Source: Fabbaloo]

Community reaction to the Bambu Lab controversy may inadvertently result in the situation they fear most.

As Fabbaloo readers will be aware, there has been a large controversy surrounding Bambu Lab’s introduction of new security features. In summary:

  • Bambu Lab announced “Bambu Connect” as a method of connecting to their 3D printers to centralize a secure solution.
  • Bambu Connect changes the workflow for third-party systems like OrcaSlicer, Octoprint, and farm software.
  • Community reaction was mostly negative, partly due to incorrect assumptions, misinformation, and misunderstandings of the situation.
  • Bambu Lab issued clarifications to the changes, which some in the community accepted.
  • Many community members have sworn off Bambu Lab technology due to the controversy.

The problem here is that there is a conflict between groups of 3D printer operators. Some believe machines should be fully open, allowing operators the ability to tweak them as required to maximize performance and security. Others just want them to print great parts and don’t want to fiddle with the machine (or can’t).

Bambu Lab has achieved their tremendous level of performance partly by controlling the entire sequence of events during printing. Materials, profiles, monitoring, etc., all contribute to the great prints. In a way, Bambu Lab is doing the tuning work that would otherwise have to be done by a skilled operator.

Bambu Lab has made accommodations for those wishing to perform their own tuning on and control of the machines to some degree, but it seems that the latest changes have been too much for some. Many have declared they will never buy a Bambu Lab machine again, cancelled orders, etc.

I believe these actions will ultimately cause a transformation in Bambu Lab’s products.

In past years, the market for desktop 3D printers was largely skilled 3D printer operators. If they didn’t like your printer, sales would collapse. Therefore, most 3D printer manufacturers would cater to that market by open sourcing, offering customization capabilities, etc.

Things have changed. Bambu Lab has refined the printing process so much that many less skilled 3D printer operators are quite happy with how the machine operates and able to run them without skills required in the past. With just a bit more automation and tuning, Bambu Lab should be able to produce equipment that is truly usable by general consumers.

That’s an enormous market, far, far larger than the group of skilled 3D printer operators looking for open machines. This means that Bambu Lab, in the near future, may not need to cater to the skilled 3D printer operators anymore. They have a much larger market to be concerned with.

When I asked Dr. Tao about a strategy of going more toward consumers, he told me this:

“That’s the plan.”

This means that every community member that no longer buys a Bambu Lab printer creates just a bit more momentum toward that consumer product goal at Bambu Lab. It helps create a situation where there are fewer and fewer reasons for Bambu Lab to worry about the skilled 3D printer operator market.

If this continues, over time there will be increasingly less reason for Bambu Lab to care about that market. We may end up with a situation where Bambu Lab markets only highly controlled, inexpensive 3D printers that produce terrific parts.

The skilled 3D printer operators would then have to instead use equipment from a much smaller set of providers that would produce more open machines. But those manufacturers would have trouble competing with Bambu Lab that would have massive resources gained from selling into the huge consumer market. Just look at DJI dominating in the drone market — and by the way, Bambu Lab’s founders all came from DJI.

We may end up with a situation analogous to today’s 2D paper printers. You buy them, and they work. You pay for outrageously expensive ink because it works. You get amazing output, rivalling professional shops from decades ago.

You don’t see very many people tuning their 2D paper printers. Everyone just uses them because they work. There are, as far as I know, no manufacturers producing “open” 2D paper printers for skilled folks to tinker with.

That’s a future world where desktop 3D printing may be headed, assisted by this week’s controversy.

By Kerry Stevenson

Kerry Stevenson, aka "General Fabb" has written over 8,000 stories on 3D printing at Fabbaloo since he launched the venture in 2007, with an intention to promote and grow the incredible technology of 3D printing across the world. So far, it seems to be working!