Comment by switchbak
20 hours ago
"you only had to change one setting on the printer itself, and optionally block the printer from Internet access via the firewall to prevent automatic firmware updates and telemetry" - "only" is doing a lot of work here. Yes, this is easy for us, but that part alone is beyond most users.
I have a P1S myself, and I find Bambu to be a strange company. They're one that has benefited tremendously from OSS while sometimes violating both the ethos and licenses.
They specifically engineer it such that your prints need to go through an intermediary even when it could send it right to your device on a simple network. That'd be like a laserjet routing through the cloud instead of going to your device. With nothing much in the way of encrypting your designs and protecting your data, it feels like this was done on purpose. Given the shameless track record of many (most?) Chinese companies on IP, my assumption is that they're mainly doing this to steal designs. The juxtaposition of their poor track record on OSS, what seems like a shady approach to privacy and IP protection, and the aggressive legal posturing - all sum up to what I think is a very untrustworthy organization.
Luckily my designs are in the "look at this trash" territory, so I don't have anything to worry about, but I certainly wouldn't use this for important work.
>They specifically engineer it such that your prints need to go through an intermediary even when it could send it right to your device on a simple network.
You have people in this very same HN submission complain that they want to send prints even if they are not in the same network. Their primary complaint is that Bambu Labs won't let them use their cloud in combination with OrcaSlicer. In other words, they like the Bamub Lab cloud, they want it, they think it is a good idea.
Basically, there are users begging for this feature.
You're the one underestimating the difficulty of setting up networking for the average non-technical user. Nobody is begging to have to setup tailscale, etc.
I have to setup video game servers myself and honestly it is such a pain in the ass even though I've done it hundreds of times by now.
Here is the problem: When it comes to networking, every home has a different level of connectivity and each home router has a completely different UI. Some people do not have an IPv4 address that can be used to make a server accessible on the public internet. They have CGNAT. It's the same deal with WebRTC. In theory WebRTC lets you do peer to peer connections between browsers. In practice there are STUN and TURN servers. TURN servers are basically the equivalent of Bambu Labs cloud for WebRTC. You perform an outgoing connection to an external server that has an IPv4 address with an open port.
Honestly, blame the sorry and user hostile state of networking. Decades have passed and we're all running into the same problems over and over again. If ISPs offered a standardized TURN/Tailscale equivalent, then connectivity could be guaranteed even in the absence of a cloud.