Right there with you. Until there’s another product just like it, I’m going to stick with the ecosystem. I did the hobby thing tinkering on an Ender 3, now I just want my printer to print the models I make.

You go for a commercial-grade machine and spend thousands, honestly. Imo, none of the other consumer-grade machines really offer that out of the box experience. They all require something, and that something depends on the printer.

Bambu Lab printers to me are for the people who don’t care about tinkering on their printer as a hobby, and just want to print things without fuss. Stay in their Apple-like ecosystem and their cloud environment and you’ll be perfectly happy. If you want the printer itself to be the hobby, there are a number of similar spec devices that with some tinkering can work just as well.

I ran the back of the napkin math on this for my org (US local government). Not really possible unless you’re just doing office work. Microsoft is so deeply ingrained in govtech that you can’t even shrink your footprint. That’s not even counting the political and cultural buy-in before you start the lift.

Tax stamps are $0 as of Jan 1st this year. Silencershop even has kiosks at gun stores that’ll take your fingerprints for the Form 1, and the processing time is down to about a month before you take ownership.

I actually got a spam call from myself once. They spoofed my own number. Got a bunch of followup calls, voicemails, and texts for a month or so after that.