Hello - I notice the X1E is now available to buy or at least request quotes for businesses. When can we expect a consumer version so we hobbyists can buy it too? Thanks.
It’s already out. They call it the X1C.
Contact one of the local distributors listed on the website.
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Answer: Not any time soon.
As someone who’s spent 40 years in the electronics industry, this is a classic Sales Channel strategy and more importantly, a seismic shift in go-to-market for Bambu.
Think of the phases that companies go through and we can take companies like Dell or Apple as an example:
- Get some initial customers and maybe seed money. (Today, that was done with GoFundMe)
- Release a standard product after the Alpha and Beta phase(i.e. The difference between the Apple I and the Apple II)
- Market directly to the consumer(X1 and P1 series)
- Market through channel partners(X1E series)
I figure that Bambu has baked-in a base margin of $1,000 based on the preliminary price of the X1E and knowing full well that the BOM cost between that and the X1C is likely less than $100.
So now that Bambu has a channel set up to support their high end product, it will be a wait and see process. If the channel strategy fails to produce revenue, they’ll change that back to a direct sales model. If it succeeds, we’ll likely see more of their products get price-protected in order to protect their channel partners. That’s something that will be an absolute first in history for a Chinese company. Unlike Japanese companies, Chinese companies don’t even respect their own partners and have a rich history of cheating each other. In my experience on both sides of that business model as a channel partner and a manufacturer, if the company that wants to do business with me is speaking Mandarin, I want an iron-clad contract before they get an order and even then, I won’t pay the invoice until the product is in my hands and has gone through inspection. That’s not easy to do with Asian suppliers.
This is one of the reasons I find Bambu so incredibly fascinating. In many ways they act like a western company by competing on better quality and superior design as opposed to and Ender-like approach of competing on copycat cheap, which gives one hope. But then they’ll pull a stunt like Makerworld and it’s “ah so… a leopard can’t change its spots”.
The X1E will be worth watching just as a student of business. Will they or won’t they “eat their young” as the expression goes in this business.
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The X1E is still very far from an enterprise product, at the moment it is nothing more than an overpriced consumer product with an extra ethernet port.
Why? I’m missing a few things:
- Extended support
- Local service network
- SLA for services, customer support and cloud
- When using an internet connection (cloud), regional servers (do not connect to China from the EU)
- Extended data protection and guarantee for data security and confidentiality
- Use of reliable quality, durable materials
- Full access to the data on the printer (yes, the logs cannot be encrypted either) so that problem solving can be done quickly
- Spare parts are always available, even from 3rd party manufacturers, with short delivery times
- Full documentation of the unique G-Code set
- Full documentation of the device
- Security functions, e.g. using thermal fuses instead of a software (and buggy) solution to thermal runaway
- Assurance that the firmware does not violate copyright rights and licenses
- Commercial licensed software instead of the GPL-based slicer (they must also take responsibility for the software, but the GPL excludes this)
- Firmware update locally
(The last point is interesting by the way, I don’t understand why the firmware is so secret, that Bambu doesn’t even want to release the encrypted binary, even though you can sniff the network traffic at any time during an update and you have it. With your own name server, even for that you can make it look at a local machine as the cloud, so it downloads FW from where I want it. That’s why I don’t understand what’s so crazy about it. And the secrecy only strengthens people’s suspicions that the firmware is not their own work, since we know what people think about someone hiding something)
So, it is not enough to put an E in the name, to double the price, but also to undertake serious guarantees that the given product or service will be continuously functional and productive.
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I applaud 
all of your observations as being spot-on but the last two are among my favorites.
It does seem like Bambu is playing the double standard when it comes to this open source game. On the subject of firmware, the opacity that they display is one that really bothers me. What are they hiding and why? Is this yet another Huawei or TikTok situation where it is believed that the PRC intelligence community is forcing Chinese companies to bury back doors into as many products as possible for Cyber Attack purposes? The US DoD thinks so and won’t allow these devices in sensitive areas.
What Bambu must eventually face is that their own misdeeds in this area will force the open source community to give them the hacker treatment a la Anonymous-style attack as was perpetuated against Sony when they pulled their BS on the open source community in 2011. This is kind of effort to jailbreak the Bambu firmware already underway as evidenced by this recent YouTube video a week ago.
BTW: This is one of those rare moments when hackers and the western intelligence communities interests are in alignment.
If Bambu doesn’t wake up get out in front of this and release their source code, the community will find a way to bypass them. If anyone hasn’t connected the dots just yet, that hacker community may find unexpected help from the clandestine signal intelligence agencies of the west who may just mysteriously drop some source code “accidentally” in some dark web site. This ain’t Tom Clancy stuff either, it’s real.
I completely agree.
I believe that the real value is never hardware, software, or creative solutions. As in the list, it was given less weight. It is no coincidence that, for example, enterprise machines are never super innovative solutions. A business laptop very rarely has the latest hardware, but in return it is stable, it can withstand a lot of things, and if it does break down, it will be fixed within 24 hours.
HW and SW can be copied and improved, even the most secret things can be found out, since anyone can buy such a device and take it apart and reverse it. Quality, reliability, good customer service and extra services are different things.
There is no question that 2024 will be the year of CoreXY printers equipped with AMS, I think many manufacturers will come out with printers that will resemble Bambu printers. The question is whether they will be able to offer more in everything else. If so, it’s a very tough race against open cards.
There are more expensive FDMs that can run in a secure Enterprise. The US companies that buy them do it for exactly what you mention above.
Even to break into smaller companies in the US, reliability, results and service are a minimum. For large corporations, especially those that even make a single widget for goverment contracts have even higher performance and security requirements.
No cloud connection should be ever be required to use the equipment, if it does need it for servers beyond the equipment’s electronics, it still needs to check all the boxes.
Locking out a product for the consumer market is also not taken kindly by the experienced community.
For the inexperienced customer sold high expectations at a premium cost, need at minimum solid customer support. My experience with Prusa support has been very positive.