Printable View
I don't know about you guys, but I feel that if the MOD-t is able to do what they claim at a price of only $249, once all of these units ship, and people begin showing these machines to friends, more and more people will be forking over $249 for a 3D printer. I think this could be the start of a 3D printing revolution of sorts where everyone can afford one. Following this revolution I think we will see more and more open source designs for 3d printable objects become available as well.
More likely, and I think more importantly, as the MOD-t progresses, other more established 3D printer makers will be watching. If they get convinced that it will get released and work as advertised, there will be a race among these companies to compete at the price point. Right now, the only reason people at say Makerbot have for not making a sub-$500 printer is that "it can't be done". Once somebody, (it doesn't have to be NewMatter, but my money is on them for now) breaks that price floor, everyone else will almost have to follow suit.
Of course, breaking that price floor (in any kind of sustainable way) tricky to say the least. With the current Darwin, Prusia and Delta form factors, it's effectively impossible, though the Tantilus, HBot and CoreXY drive systems come close to the $550 to $650 region. For the fully assembled printer, the sub $500 price point is still unclaimed territory.
I agree it will be interesting to see the reception this gets upon launch. If this thing prints the way they claim it will, this is a game changer. You will see hundreds of thousands of printers being sold within a years time. Whether it will be the MOD-t or another affordable printer, who knows. I do think Makerbot could eventually come down in price substancially, and leverage their Thingiverse platform as a means to profit off the expanding market. Sort of like how Google is trying to make the internet as cheap and fast as possible to take advantage of the expanding market. for their search ads.
Well, I don't see anyone really heading down the Google route (including Google) until someone figures out how to really capitalize on the sale of the printable models... And that would mean pushing for DRM on proprietary files, which is both bad for everyone in the short term and unprofitable in the long term. And there's no way to make printing of any kind into an advertising vehicle without being universally hated. (Looking at you fax-machine-spam-mailers, IMO the primary reason the entire medium went extinct at the first possible opportunity)
Besides, Google is kind of a special case, since their advertising is just the company's fuel, not the sole reason for them expanding fiber internet everywhere. Their goal (which they don't even try to keep secret) is nothing short of an AI-controlled utopia that scares the hell out of a lot of people.
Now note, while I said that the existence of a sub-$500 printer price point would get other companies to populate it, doesn't mean many (or any) of them will be printers anyone will be proud to use for making display pieces... Even if Makerbot and 3D Systems whip together $400 printers, I wouldn't want to buy them unless the savings were from a really new method of construction, the way the MOD-t is. Though there are some exciting things still happening with RepRap (I'm betting PrintPi alone might knock around $100 off the average cost to build a RepRap if it becomes commonplace and I am a gigantic fanboy for the GUS Simpson and am excited for GUS v2), the traditional setup consisting of stepper motors with rails and screws on the z-axis can only go down in price so far before quality suffers tremendously.
drm for 3d printer files is inevitable. It's the only way a big corporation can make money in the long term on the whole 3d printer mass market setup.
It's why they can offer the machine at a loss. If you have to pay for the models then the company has a guarenteed revenue stream. And that's where home 3d printing is heading for the masses.
It's similiar to inkjet printers - they can be bought for really silly prices - but the own brand ink is ridiculously expensive. At one point I calculated hp printer ink was selling for over £20,000 a litre. And that's when i stopped using and recommending hp printers.
The model-t setup is very slick.
The customer pays for the material to make the models, they pay for the models themselves and the actual printer is given away at cost.
Generates a long term revenue stream for the company and kicks open the door for every other big corporation to head the same way.
Just think of the sheer number of little plastic widgets that break in a household on a daily basis (I've made 4 in the last 2 days - if I could have bought the parts as a file - I might have done, as it was they were all pretty easy to design, but if the lure of a quick buy was there instead of sitting in front of the pc designing it myself, for the more complicated widgets I might be tempted) . Once a locked down drm file system is established, the big manufacturers will be clamouring to get on the bandwagon.
Customers print their own spares, pay for the machine and material to do it and you get money without having to do a damn thing apart from release the file for the part - which you already have from when you designed the relevant machine.
No more postage, no more stock rooms full of parts for older models, no more customer service lines.
Just a virtual warehouse of spare part files and a website/service you can buy the file from.
Seriously would anyone here take a bet that there won't be a google 3d store selling all these files in the next 10 years ? I'll offer pretty much any odds you like. It's going to happen, there's too much money at stake for it NOT to happen.
Now if you were to pitch that to any major manufacturer - they'd snatch your arm off to get the pen to sign the contract with.
And it looks like the people behind the mod-t are trying to get in on the groundfloor with a machine that can tap into an online store with locked down files.
If they float on the stock market - buy shares.
Remember bill gates ? A second year business student who came up with the idea that you rent software not sell it. That scumbag went onn to become the richest man in the world - and one of the most hated, but when you've got 60 billion dollars, who cares if everyone hates you :-)
Well this is the same business model. Rent files for one or two or three uses. never actually sell a digital model file. And you're set up to start printing your own money.
We can't stop it, at some point - I've no doubt - we will all,to one degree or another - buy into it.
Someone offers you money for designs you'd been releasing for free. And you're not independently wealthy - who could blame you for taking the money ?
Not me, I'll be right there with you grabbing as much money as I can.
I like the idealism of opensource, always supported it, but at the end of the day the home 3d printer market is just going to prove too valuable for it to remain the way it is at the moment.
While I've disagreed with you on other things, I pretty much agree with everything you've mentioned here. However it should be noted that the MOD-t doesn't use proprietary filament. They pretty clearly see what a PR hit printing companies take for doing that. Locking down files is a bit easier and more widely accepted. The MOD-t will take any old g-code you put into it, but I agree, if there's a neat thing on the NewMatter store, I'll probably buy it without a second thought. But then, even without widespread DRM, I do pay money for models every now and then.
I think a bit part of the DRM philosophy is that big companies must accept that no DRM method is perfect, and that a badly implemented DRM hurts sales more than piracy. This is what really hurt the big recording labels back in the early '00s. They were so desperate for it to perfectly lock down files that they were willing to hurt the customer experience. Not only did it hurt sales, but it pushed people towards piracy, encouraging more and more sophisticated ways of bypassing the DRM systems.
New Matter (and it appears most companies that are sophisticated enough to be in the 3D printing industry) seems to understand that DRM is acceptable if it stays out of the way of the user experience. To a degree, g-code is already more or less locked to a machine thanks to the machine's settings being hard-baked into the file. If a company is selling g-code they don't have to chip proprietary filament, they can just sell a "Guaranteed to work with New Matter Files" seal on filaments they've tested to have exactly the melting point and consistency that will work with the settings in their store-sold files. It's easy for them, easy and convenient for the user, lets them get a little money from filament, a bit more money from files, a lot of sales of the printers (maybe a little money there too), and nobody even sees the first hint of DRM slowing their machine down.
True.
But remember this is still stage one. And the first company and machine to try this.
Once the big lads enter the scene: hp, epson, brother, canon etc
They'll have their own filament - just as they have their own ink. Yes you will probably always be able to get round that - but most people don't bother.
And 'most people' is the target demographic.
I'm not sure I've upset the apple crowd round here yet - but essentially the target demographic are iphone and ipad users. People who buy things because they are white and trendy - and rarely consider cost or functionality.
Ipads still don't have sd-card slot, usb ports or hdmi built in. They don't have os deep back and menu buttons for every app. And for the same spec they cost more than twice what a similiar android tablet costs. And a lot of paid for apps on the apple store are free on the google store.
These are people who buy based on fashion and advertising and most of them probably use branded inks.
And there are a helluva lot of them.
The model-t is a good looking machine - I'm pretty sure it's aimed at the ipad crowd. It is white and very 'appley' styled (that's probably a word) .
And it works the way they expect things to work. IE: you buy files for it.
If New Matter get their marketing right, I can see files appearing on the apple store in the near future.
To really make money any 3d company needs to tie themselves into one of the big players in the online store market: amazon, google or apple.
Amazon will proabably bring out their own machine in the not to distant future so it's basically down to google and apple.
The first 3d player who gets that contract is set for life.
Well, we know New Matter's parent company Idea Labs isn't shy when working with the big names... They were the company responsible for Picasa, and Frog Design was partially behind the hardware design of the original iPhone... So yeah, Google or Apple is almost destined to get NewMatter someday.
And I'm okay with this. Both companies understand the value of being able to use your own files, even if Apple is slow to adopt new hardware, they don't lock you out of putting your non-proprietary mp3s on an i-device, and Google is more open than even that about their software.
g-code is more of a DRM than most laypeople will care to try to crack, and having "recommended filament" is cheaper and more profitable than chipped filament carts, and again just as effective on the average layperson.