Does Creality support suck? Fuck yeah. You want a Xiaomi or Apple printer? A blob of injection-molded plastic with proprietary filament and software? That's where it was all going a few years ago. Prusa is great- but many aren't going to buy one delivering pizza or mowing lawns.

Canon, HP, Stratasys, the big names- they wanted in. But they lost & we fucking won- we didn't ekk out a little slice of the pie like Linux, @adrianbowyer's RepRap derivatives won on a vast scale. We absolutely dominate. We kicked their asses so hard they're scared to try again.

We've got this one little corner of hardware with no Jobs. no Edison, all Woz and Telsa. Our team for once. 3D printing is owned by the hackers the way nothing else is. And dealing with people who don't get why it's *not* injection-molded, cartridge taking, Big Box Store garbage-

-why it does not have a massive markup for slick marketing and "genius bars"- is exhausting.
Look we get it- you want all your technology to be indistinguishable from magic, you don't want to hack, or learn, or explore. You can go buy that- but why tear down others who want to?

VR, you know you're fucked right? You're going to have ads beamed straight into your eyeballs, tuned by the best AI Facebook can bring to bear on your distracted brain. And you'll have zero choice but to play by proprietary rules if you want access to that entire medium.

Your phone? Is fucked. Binary blobs all over, locked baseband modem, no privacy protection, governments saying what apps you can use. General computing? @doctorow has written about the war on that and checkout what's been going on if you think you'll own your hardware much longer

Cars? Tesla set the model- pay to unlock features of the car you thought you owned but can't do anything to. You think every other manufacturer isn't pivoting to recurring income? You think your politicians paid by their lobbyists are going to stop them?

Software? Fusion360, Adobe Creative Cloud, John Deere tractors- a tradesperson can't even own their own tools anymore. We're all sharecroppers. Everything is rented.

But 3D printers- we OWN that shit. You got a $200 Ender-3? You're 100% offline, 100% Open Source toolchain. You can 3D print everything from Gingery patterns for a full hand-scraped post-apocalyptic machine shop to an FGC-9 semiautomatic in case anyone tries to take it from you.

Every single thing we own is being taken, put in the cloud, and rented back to us. Willingly. Because no one wants to know how to do anything beyond a narrow scope. We're a world of carpenters willing to rent sharp chisels and saws rather than learn to sharpen them ourselves.

3D printers- you know almost all come with a toolkit? So you can fix it yourself. You know how rare that is? No, you don't throw it away. Ever. No, it's not all glued together into a glass slab. You just, fix it. It's all metal, you can fix it and run it indefinitely.

Millions of people do this, even if they've fixed *nothing* else in their lives. They live without instant returns, drop shipping, call centers in India and genius bars. They just, fix it themselves. And that can suck sometimes, but it's overall a very, very good thing.

And again, if you don't get that, don't see why, didn't have a problem with tying your Facebook account to Oculus, great- buy a Makerbot or something. But we've got this one thing left that we own- don't put so much time and effort into tearing it down.