Comment by Jaecen
14 days ago
I don't understand why Prusa thinks keeping their designs proprietary addresses the "unfair competition" problem they seem to be concerned about. Anyone wanting to release a printer can use freely available designs, like those from Voron. The openness of the Prusa Core ONE is not what would allow a competitor to enter the market "unfairly" with a competitive product. Maybe it would make sense if they were bringing some new innovations to the market, but for a catch-up product like the Core ONE restricting access feels like slighting your customers for no gain.
They're on a bit of a streak of very poor business decisions really. They did the same with the XL, they've been caught lying in marketing materials (the Mini for example was advertised as having power loss recovery at launch, which changed to coming soon, and eventually when they realised it wasn't possible was dropped entirely, about 2 years later).
On top of that there's the incredibly slow response to Bambu and the other Corexy options overshadowing them, and the stream of lies from Josef Prusa regarding Bambu labs (e.g his tweets claiming they stole code and violated the MIT license, which he's since removed from Twitter but thankfully was backed up in several reddit discussions as well as archive.org).
I've got a lot of respect for Prusa and what they've achived but they really do seem to be fumbling pretty hard. The Core One will certainly get them back in the right direction but things like cheaping out and not including a camera when its already a worse product than the one they're trying to compete with feels like an incredibly stupid decision.
It's such a cheap part to include, for some sort of comparison a Raspberry Pi Zero camera is £14 on Pimoroni and thats a consumer price. Even if it was costing Prusa £10 per camera, thats absolutely nothing.