Shameless gushing appreciation post - if that’s not your thing, nothing to see here. 
I tried to get into 3d printing at the start of the pandemic - figured making face shield holders was a noble enough pursuit to merit buying in. I bought an Ender 3, and… had a terrible time. The .gcode that came with it printed great, but anything I sliced was garbage. Definitely user error there, but I was just starting my career and didn’t have the time to put into getting everything running, let alone running just right.
Fast forward to Dec '22 - I’ve found myself with significantly more disposable income, and suddenly remembered the 3d printing world. I bought a Prusa MK3S+ without doing much research into the current state of things. It has been a great printer, and it provided exactly what I was looking for: a way to get into the hobby without having to worry about performing breakfixes regularly, or having to potentially introduce failures myself through immediately upgrading the unit. Of course, as I imagine most folks quickly do, I began to look into how I could start printing faster. This is how the X1C came on my radar a couple weeks ago, and I suddenly felt like I had been robbed by Prusa! If the X1C could deliver what it promised on, the amount of functionality you get for $400 more than an assembled MK3S+… well, I just couldn’t help myself and took the risk.
And I don’t think I could be any happier.
This thing runs absolute laps around my MK3S+, and it does so with even less babysitting involved (not that there was much to begin with.) I have a bad tendency to do my most in-depth research on a purchase after the purchase (thanks ADHD!) and have read about a number of issues plaguing some X1C and AMS owners, but I seem to have been lucky enough to have avoided all of them so far. I do hope the general 3d printing community begins to welcome those of us who are finally dipping our toes into this hobby due to it becoming a bit more “stable” to truly let people dabble. The way I see it, this lets me spend more time learning about manipulating slicer settings and 3d design principles and learn about the printer parts as needed.
Of course, this is where I will concede that there are downsides - perhaps the only thing holding me back from selling my Prusa is that the hardware side of this is completely closed-source. It would be an absolute crime to see this team disappear after creating something so amazing, and as much as I’d like to think it won’t happen given the amount of support they have, there’s certainly precedent for it… please remember that, from sales rep to CEO, there are humans behind the accounts you’re typing your messages to.
I think that even the haters out there have to concede that what Bambu Labs is offering for $1.5k USD is an amazing deal, and certainly makes something like the MK3S+ seem like a much less attractive option. I (obviously) love my X1C, and I am equally excited to see how it influences vendors’ offerings in the coming years. I do wish it were an open source hardware design, but I can’t say I blame the Bambu team for wanting to capitalize on the amazing work that they’ve done - and, if I had to bet, I think the X1C will wind up inspiring a wave of (relatively) affordable, high-quality “easy button” printing, hopefully eventually leading Bambu to open source the hardware design and further cement themselves as a significant force in the prosumer printer space.