First, leave the mini on the current firmware if you enjoy using Orca. Mine is locked to 1.04 and on LAN.

I’m a Prusa fan boy, so I would recommend the Core 1. If I was starting over, that’s what I would buy. But there a some other good choices out there.

Qidi often gets over looked, They have the Plus 4 and now the Q2 both can be used with the Qidi box, their ams knockoff.

The Elegoo Centari Carbon has been more good than bad it seems, but it seems there have been complaints about the klipper version it runs is locked so vanilla klipper won’t run on it. And Elegoo won’t release the open source parts of the code to allow it. YMMV

The new Snapmaker is interesting, but I would be wary until it gets out into the wild and the great unwashed masses start breaking it before I would invest.

Crealty has upped their game, but I’m personally still wary.

I don’t think Musk much cares or ever did. The goal was to milk tesla for every last dime.

I spent a mere $500 for my Pixel 9a. Most expensive phone I’ve ever owned. But at least I can send a text message from inside my house and make phones from out in my yard now.

2 mouse clicks and I can tell the slicer what filament and color is where on my AMS lite. If you are running a print farm and swapping filaments constantly, that’s maybe one thing. But I have 2 printers, only one of which is a Bambu. And the one spool of Bambu filament I bought demonstrated very clearly to me that the RFID tag is not worth any money to me.

I’m not hung up on any one brand. I’ve been doing this long enough to know I can make any cheap filament print well. I watch for sales and I can easily save $5 or more per kilo without needing to buy 10 or more kilos at time. I have 4 kilos of AnyCubic filament I just payed $10 per kilo for. So, yes Bambu filament costs a lot more for no better quality.

Unlike many here, I’m super big on inventory management. Storing large amounts of materials that I have no real immediate use for costs money. Money I can use elsewhere to better effect. Right now, discounting the spools hanging for my Bambu Mini and Prusa Mk3s, I have 6 kilos of new unopened and a few partials that are getting used up.

It’s getting harder and harder to afford high end computers. I have already decided my next new computer will be a mini desktop. They are noticeably cheaper, can be well spec’ed, and powerful with a small foot print.

My opinion is these printers are aimed a lot more at print farms and other businesses that use 3D printing than the average consumer/hobbyist. And the pricing will reflect that. I think that the X series printers get faded and Bambu keeps the A and P Series printers. The A series for beginners and the cheap bastids like me. The P series then becomes the flagship consumer models. While the H series is the prosumer market. The nozzle swapper is aimed at the heart of print farms where every milligram of waste is money lost.

I’m quite sure Bambu has all the patents locked up and it’s going to be a good while before we will other printers with similar technology.

I still have my Mk3s too. But, there was a a harder learning curve to getting a quality print from that Mk3s than there is to the Mini/AMS combo I have next to it. And casuals want that ease of use. Just unbox, plug it in hang a spool of Bambu branded filament with RFID then slice and print.

Like it or not, few people want to spent time running calibration models and temp towers. Raging against the sea is a losing battle.

Build plates are just sheet steel with a coating. And Bambu filament is just Sunlu with an RFID tag that isn’t worth the extra cost.

Yep. Bambu has done a lot for the perception of 3D printing in the main stream. They offer good hardware with ease of use that didn’t exist until they appeared. And at a decent price for casual hobbyists/users whether the pure haters like it or not.

***Full disclosure: I own a Mini with AMS Lite and a Prusa Mk3s. My take on Bambu is, “Good hardware with not always very good software and sketchy business practices.” YMMV

Be aware that old Joe Prusa even says that open source printing is dead at this point.

So I would expect to see even Prusa locking their new ideas away behind patents.

From what I read, it’s supposed to have only the one hotend. But perhaps I misread.

The swap-able nozzles are a clever idea. And does have it’s advantages over tool changers. And despite the in house testing Bambu says they have done, it will be interesting to see what happens when you turn such an unproven system loose on all the knuckle dragging, hoof handed, club footed, thumb fingered masses of the world.

But I suspect the price puts it out of the range of most hobbyists. Much like the Prusa XL, this is perhaps aimed at print farms more than the hobbyist.

Not with my tinnitus, which I’ve had to live with since I was about 5 years old.

Now if I could only afford a Framework…

So the poor others should do the breeding while the wealthy limit their offspring to preserve more wealth for themselves?

Being poor has very little to with having children. The poor across the world have more children than the wealthy.

Yep. My Wife and I raised 4 Daughters. Each one was their own type of terror and mayhem and need to be handled differently. No toddler needs to have a choice in anything. Their minds aren’t ready for that. But by the time they hit 4 or 5, they can handle limited choices pretty well. And they only get better after that.

The single most useful print is just a simple cylinder to repair a broken knob on a nearly brand new kitchen stove. A new knob cost $35 at the time and had a 2 month lead time from the factory, (it was during the covid lock down).

It took longer to turn on my computer and start up my CAD program than it did to design the repair part for the knob. 30 minutes later, I had the sleeve printed and super glued over the broken part and the knob reinstalled on the stove.

That’s been 7 years ago, the repaired knob is still there and in use daily. And one more knob got the same treatment. It probably took less than 10 cents of PLA and electricity for both repairs.

Nope. He’s saying that the weight of the battery pack eats up 2000lbs of towing capacity. Plus the shit frames they are built on to cut weight to help due to the battery packs.

So where do you apartment dwellers store your trailer?