Quote Originally Posted by mkapras View Post
CaptainObvious - do you consider yourself a pessimist or a realist? ;-)
Realist, if you see all the processes involved in integrated circuit manufacturing you'd understand why the idea of desktop 3D printer that can create anything, from a coffee mug to a smartphone is not a realistic one.

It's one thing to create conductive traces on a substrate, a very trivial one thing actually, but actual circuitry of the size and sophistication requiered for a microprocessor or a memory chip? I don't see it.
I think crude and bulky logical circuits are not impossible, like printing a dozen or so logic gates on a 1cm^2 area, that could be done I guess. But when you get down to the technology needed to print millions upon millions of transistors and logic gates in the same spot, with a machine that needs to also do all the other threedeeprintee stuff, now way Jose; just think of the ultra clean environment needed to create chips, the mind bogglingly pure crystals needed for semiconductors, how do you create such an environment inside a 3D printer that hypothetically would seat in the desktop of your average Joe? A speck of dust can ruin a chip after all.

Then how would you print a battery for the phone? it's an electrochemical device, a metallic electrode and a liquid (or semiliquid) electrolite; the printer would need to be stocked up with half the periodic table of elements too, in fact it would have to be something like a molecular manipulator rather than what we think of as a 3D printer.

At best I can envision a future were there would be molecular assemblers, using self replicating chemistry to in fact create something not very different from a living thing, after all we see every day the results of very sophisticated organic machinery building the most amazing structures, but it wouldn't be anything like the technology we use today.