And those moves just don't make sense. The company isn't stupid. I've watched interviews with their CEO, he's a sharp guy. They're popular because they make good hardware that works, I simply don't buy the narrative that they're trying to flush it all away.
The problem is that the current move
doesn't make sense either.
Look, OrcaSlicer and PandaTouch are popular because they address customer needs that Bambu hasn't met. OrcaSlicer has more advanced knobs and much better filament tuning; PandaTouch addresses print farms and the P1's laughable front panel. Even customers who aren't currently using those products value them: should you ever grow to need them, they exist.
Bambu decided to disable them without addressing those customer needs. It's not just some current customers losing functionality; it's current customers
losing potential functionality that had value to them... and a company demonstrating it doesn't care about customers' clearly-demonstrated desires.
They could've rolled out improvements to Bambu Studio backporting Orca features like advanced filament tuning before announcing the firmware update. They could've brought out a P2 model with a more modern control panel, and perhaps even a P1-to-P2 upgrade kit. They could've made Bambu Connect a print-farm management tool. Instead, they just yanked the carpet out from under their customers.
Worse, they justified it with "security," but the new solution is hideously insecure and demonstrates they've learned little, if anything, about security since their last hack. Which means it's not about security, it's about
controlling how the product is used.
And if that's true, it's perfectly reasonable to wonder
why they want that control, and how they might
use it... especially if they don't care about customer needs. Yeah, filament lockdowns are a stretch... but we've seen tech companies do worse.
Even worse: they've been making inroads into corporate. R&D departments have been buying Bambu printers instead of Stratasys, leading to the lawsuit. But corporate isn't going to buy a printer that insists on phoning home even in LAN mode—or being shut out of firmware updates or support otherwise. This move makes Bambu an instant no-go for those potential high-value customers.
If this had really been about security, they'd have implemented end-to-end encryption in a way that lets you avoid their cloud altogether. Let the new firmware generate a key; the printer displays a QR code and type-in code. You enter that code into a new Bambu Network Plugin, which lets the plugin connect to the printer and negotiate a new, stronger encryption key pair. Pretty standard stuff.
Of course, doing that wouldn't let you control how people use your product, or mine data about what they're printing for your own purposes.
