RE: Prusa Delays
Yep, I was referring to the Mk4 reveal. I didn't expect it so fast, but it makes sense to cycle out the Mk3 asap now and re-use the newest developments.
RE: Prusa Delays
Yep, I was referring to the Mk4 reveal. I didn't expect it so fast, but it makes sense to cycle out the Mk3 asap now and re-use the newest developments.
Reportedly (blog post), they have been test it for a while on the “farm”.
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Chuck H
3D Printer Review Blog
RE: Prusa Delays
Plus probably a lot of overlap with the XL for testing purposes & firmware. I wouldn't expect any major hickups with the Mk4. In fact I'm tempted to replace my Mk2.5s, but honestly I don't really need it right now.
Could be part of the XL supply problem came from sourcing some identical production parts for the two printers, who knows.
RE:
If you decide to get rid of the 2.5s, consider donating it to a school. You can write it off on your taxes, and they will get use of it,
Plus probably a lot of overlap with the XL for testing purposes & firmware. I wouldn't expect any major hickups with the Mk4. In fact I'm tempted to replace my Mk2.5s, but honestly I don't really need it right now.
Could be part of the XL supply problem came from sourcing some identical production parts for the two printers, who knows.
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Chuck H
3D Printer Review Blog
RE: Prusa Delays
I'd donate it to myself (i.e. my university). I work in research.
RE: Prusa Delays
Funny, when Prusa doesn’t have a previous model whose sales might be put off and delayed by promises of a new printer- they drag it out for years (The XL printer saga). But when a new printer rumor or announcement would hurt sales of existing printers, they are able to keep their pie-holes shut until it is ready to ship (MK4 immaculate launch).
So they will tease the XL when it won’t hurt their sales, and might hurt ones like Bambu, but when it comes to potentially hurting their Mk3 sales- mums the word.
So it was never an issue of PRrusa learning to not overdrive their headlights, it was a lack of caring. They can control their marketing diarrhea when they want to.
RE: Prusa Delays
I'm pretty pissed about it, once again I feel lied to. Why are XL's only being sent with Single Nextruder's in months when MK4's have a 3-4 week lead time? unless that's a lie too. Either way it's BS, it should be first come first serve. But I suspect that Prusa has given up on the people they have already pissed off and are trying to gain the trust of newer users that have no clue as to how they have let the long term users down. I've been with them for five years now, and I have seen what they do, I'm sure longer term users are seeing the same but it feels worse. the software is worse since the 2.5 release, then the respect for the long term forum users, and this MK$ release amid the shortages for the promised XL releases. One might get the impression that management doesn't know how to run a company.
I'm sad of this, even Mad of it.
RE:
I agree with you, but there is another thing that is bothering me. The shortage of electronic components as their main excuse. You have this "problem" and yet you go ahead and you build another product line. You get money on preorders, you have people waiting and believing your excuses that everything is due to this shortage and suddenly you put a smile on you face and proudly claim that for a year now you've been using part of these scarce resources for thoroughly testing a different product. If you had availability of components you could at LEAST prepare beta test units and send them last summer or fall. By now you should iron out the problems and start dispatching orders. No one else finds frustrating the fact that their almost two year preorder will take longer that a newly announced model? And i'm not even mentioning the redesign of mmu3?
Funny, when Prusa doesn’t have a previous model whose sales might be put off and delayed by promises of a new printer- they drag it out for years (The XL printer saga). But when a new printer rumor or announcement would hurt sales of existing printers, they are able to keep their pie-holes shut until it is ready to ship (MK4 immaculate launch).
So they will tease the XL when it won’t hurt their sales, and might hurt ones like Bambu, but when it comes to potentially hurting their Mk3 sales- mums the word.
So it was never an issue of PRrusa learning to not overdrive their headlights, it was a lack of caring. They can control their marketing diarrhea when they want to.
RE: Prusa Delays
Turns out it was the MK4 causing the delays…..
Sadly the global delays in electronics and other components as expected has delayed our beloved XL. Definitely understandable and sad to see but hopefully gives them time to further improve the components for an even better product when launched . I’m still excited and anxious to get one in hand , will just have to wait little longer .
RE: Prusa Delays
Not to be more of a pain than I am, but I’m waiting for my 5 head XL, while someone is getting a Mk4 with the same head tech?…. I guess they will blame some other component or reason…
RE: Prusa Delays
Not to be more of a pain than I am, but I’m waiting for my 5 head XL, while someone is getting a Mk4 with the same head tech?…. I guess they will blame some other component or reason…
The heads for the XL and and MK4 are not the same, so you aren't losing a thing. The MK4 has a smaller head.
RE: Prusa Delays
I'm sorry, but this looks like you will be angry no matter what they do. I'm not trying to start a fight or defend a company (lmao, it ain't a person), but I really don't know anymore what they should do to appease the customers that feel angry at the way they were treated. I get your frustration, but I don't know what do you expect to happen to stop feeling you were treated badly.
The XL situation started 2 years ago. They've learnt their lesson and you can clearly see it in MK4's launch being much better, with no needless teasing for years. Why are people angry that they're trying to learn from past mistakes? If they didn't have a good launch and instead had a repeat of XL, people would instead be angry that they didn't learn a thing and are disrespectful towards buyers again. I don't get it, what else is there to do?
The shortage is for specific items. For example: Product X can have issues due to needing item 1, 2, 3 and 2 + 3 not being available. Product Y can have less issues due to needing only item 1, which is available. They share some parts, but not everything. It's absolutely possible that the parts they had the most trouble with were used in XL, but not in MK4.
Also, the XL is literally shipping right now. MK4 started shipping after XL. It is possible that the shortage affecting parts shared between the printers cleared up just this very year, allowing both to be shipped. It's just - one wasn't announced prematurely.
I also wouldn't be surprised if they had MK4 ready to go (minus input shaping) for a while now, but waited to avoid pissing off XL customers. I dunno, no one knows sans Jo. Did people want them to wait an entire year to announce MK4 just to ship after XL orders clear up? Or what exactly? Because I do not see what else could they do in this situation aside from traveling back in time to postpone the XL announcement.
At the end of the day, this is all speculation on both your and my part. I have a preorder for a 5 toolhead, fwiw, and I will be ordering a MK4 kit once they become available. I'm not angry that I have to wait for the XL, I'm happy that they've learned something and didn't botch the launch of a new product after that XL situation.
RE: Prusa Delays
Apart from the control board, I don't see any overlap of components between XL and Mk4 that were affected by the supply situation? They are using a more available CPU now and are making the boards in-house. No reason to think they cannot crank them out fast.
Motors, frame, motion system, PSUs & beds are different. So in-house parts will prevalently come from different production lines. The nextruder was never really the bottleneck, except possibly for the big changes during development (which have hit Mk4 exactly the same, except that this product was not anticipated then). Possibly Mk4 development even sped up the XL, because of the common firmware (more programmers allocated). Same parts for hotends&same firmware = big win for everyone. For MMU3, they clearly stated it's a relatively small incremental upgrade and this makes perfect sense. The community already did a lot of work there, all it needed was better firmware, testing and the possibility to speak to the printer. I don't want to defend them in any way, just saying a lot of the things we're seeing make logical sense. I'm repeating myself, but their big mistake was quite simply to crank up the XL hype way too early.
At the end of the day, this is all speculation on both your and my part. I have a preorder for a 5 toolhead, fwiw, and I will be ordering a MK4 kit once they become available. I'm not angry that I have to wait for the XL, I'm happy that they've learned something and didn't botch the launch of a new product after that XL situation.
I fully agree. Better a late printer than a shitty printer which cannot deliver on its promises (lets not forget it's $$$).
RE: Prusa Delays
The issue here is not anger at everything they do. My personal and humble opinion (and no im not starting a fight) is that there could be more honesty. For two years now people wait for an item they advertised. They claimed lack of resources, changes in design, electronic parts shortage, PSU shortage etc. During that time though, you had another product with similar design on some of its parts (board, PSUs, nextruder etc) which for some reason was going for extensive testing for a year now. Not development but testing. Which mean it was ready a year ago. You don't want to unveil it because you are afraid that this would caused mk3s sales to drop? Maybe its an understandable excuse but not when you gave scarce to no updates to your already delayed one. And when you gave a light update every 3 to four months was always the same. Shipping difficulties, nextruder redesign, psu problems etc. You manage to develop in house boards for the MK4 a year ago but electronics for the XL where a problem? PSU for the MK4 are ok but for the XL there are hard to find? Maybe there are actual reasons for this but Prusa had a terrible approach to how it communicated with their customers. My personal opinion -and probably an erroneous one- is a portion of the problem with the XL was that they were actually developing two products in parallel with not enough resources. And instead of admitting that and trying to avoid complains they decided to keep silent for the MK4 and "blame" everything on the supply chain. The same supply chain that was used in developing MK4.
I'm sorry, but this looks like you will be angry no matter what they do. I'm not trying to start a fight or defend a company (lmao, it ain't a person), but I really don't know anymore what they should do to appease the customers that feel angry at the way they were treated. I get your frustration, but I don't know what do you expect to happen to stop feeling you were treated badly.
The XL situation started 2 years ago. They've learnt their lesson and you can clearly see it in MK4's launch being much better, with no needless teasing for years. Why are people angry that they're trying to learn from past mistakes? If they didn't have a good launch and instead had a repeat of XL, people would instead be angry that they didn't learn a thing and are disrespectful towards buyers again. I don't get it, what else is there to do?
The shortage is for specific items. For example: Product X can have issues due to needing item 1, 2, 3 and 2 + 3 not being available. Product Y can have less issues due to needing only item 1, which is available. They share some parts, but not everything. It's absolutely possible that the parts they had the most trouble with were used in XL, but not in MK4.
Also, the XL is literally shipping right now. MK4 started shipping after XL. It is possible that the shortage affecting parts shared between the printers cleared up just this very year, allowing both to be shipped. It's just - one wasn't announced prematurely.
I also wouldn't be surprised if they had MK4 ready to go (minus input shaping) for a while now, but waited to avoid pissing off XL customers. I dunno, no one knows sans Jo. Did people want them to wait an entire year to announce MK4 just to ship after XL orders clear up? Or what exactly? Because I do not see what else could they do in this situation aside from traveling back in time to postpone the XL announcement.
At the end of the day, this is all speculation on both your and my part. I have a preorder for a 5 toolhead, fwiw, and I will be ordering a MK4 kit once they become available. I'm not angry that I have to wait for the XL, I'm happy that they've learned something and didn't botch the launch of a new product after that XL situation.
RE:
I see what you mean, but it goes like this:
Apple releases a new iPhone every year. Sales will drop in the months before release. People wait for the price drop of the previous model or buy the new model.
If Apple doesn't release a new iPhone because something went wrong, they are losing massive money and suffer reputation damage. If they release a new iPhone where 50% are returned faulty, they are losing massive money and suffer reputation damage. If anyone had known a Mk4 is released in 2023, absolutely nobody except institutional customers and clueless people would have bought a Mk3s in 2022. If the Mk4 has a serious fault, they are dead in the water, based on the massive numbers of units expected to be sold. Hence a year of testing. Which probably would have killed PR or at least severely damaged their capability to develop anything. This is also the reason for the .5 / s / plus releases, to maintain the impression of a steady product cycle.
It is a pill we have to swallow. At least there are upgrade paths, unlike iPhone, cars, laptops etc. And you can look at their product cycle and decide to wait. I bought my Mk2s after a ton of research, only to see the Mk3 get released a few weeks later. I was mad as hell back then. On the other hand, it was a very usable printer and I've upgraded it multiple times. The XL is just a new product for them, with all the implications. My point is the XL has little to do with the Mk4. XL is not a typical consumer unit, it will be bought by professionals, extremely involved hobbyists and tech enthusiasts. We can only speculate, but in hindsight it is not unlikely that even the Nextruder started as a Mk4 development. Just based on the expected sales numbers, they'll sell so much more Mk4 units... 2000USD+ for an XL is a hard sell for any hobbyist, whereas a Mk4 is almost a no-brainer if you don't want to put in the time fiddling with a cheap chinese printer.
RE: Prusa Delays
Apple though doesn't promise to release an iphone model , which its delayed for a year because of supply chain problems and scarce resources and before they deliver it they start deliver another model which coincidental didn't suffer from any resource issues and was developed in parallel. I'm not judging them on the fact the developed MK4 or on the fact they didnt announce it. The problem is the one year delay on a product with vague excuses that now seems a bit disrespectful and borderline lying. If you have resources develop 100 models. If you promised something and is getting extremely delayed assign enough resources to speed it up. After a point where the delay is becoming more that just a small deviation be more truthful and better communicate the actual reason (more products that their supply chain and/or manpower could handle) to the thousands (their words) that prepaid and are on hold. If apple did this they would not been able to advertised their respect to the customer as a reason for their overpriced product. Something that Prusa is advertising to justify some of the premium on their price range.
RE: Prusa Delays
I was on my about 7 or 8th 3d printer when I bought my Prusa MK3 . I ran it since it came out (Hobby printer) and when I saw the XL i Ordered the 5 head as I had tried MMU2 and Pallette 2 Pro and Palette3 Pro and they never worked. Now I have sold my MK3 And I am waiting to order a MK4 and wait in angsiety for my Xl.. YES I trust Prusa as they have proven there track record that they WORK. My MK3 has paid for it self in all the Replacement parts it has made. So PLease Prusa send printers!
RE: Prusa Delays
You all make some good arguments criticizing Prusa or giving them the benefit of the doubt. I, like many of you, am a bit frustrated with the delays and I "almost" pulled the trigger on a Bambu Lab X1, then I looked real hard at the P1P and I've even seriously considered building a Voron 2.4 350x350x350. Bottom line for me is I really have enjoyed my Prusa Mini+ and I absolutely love the Prusa community and ecosystem and I like the direction and innovation Prusa is bringing to the mainstream market at a "somewhat" affordable price.
Each person has their limit as to what they can tolerate, but I have chosen to endure the delays and wait for my Corey, perfect first layer, 5 head tool changer, 36x36x36 cm XL because there is no other printer currently available that gives you all that in one package. If I have to wait a few more months so be it. But in a few months I will have a printer that will define a new 3D printer market segment.
RE: Prusa Delays
Does it even matter if they lied or not? I personally think they just underestimated the task. No company can afford to spread doubt about a product that is 80% ready, so they stalled. Mk4 is an evolutionary development, where production lines, support and suppliers for the previous product still exist and can partially be reused. They know exactly the customer structure and size of the market, and they have a lot of experience upgrading the i3 products.
XL is a completely new product line, where they didn't even know how big the potential market is.
Apple though doesn't promise to release an iphone model , which its delayed for a year because of supply chain problems and scarce resources and before they deliver it they start deliver another model which coincidental didn't suffer from any resource issues and was developed in parallel.
Made me smile there 😉 Remember "You're holding it wrong"? Or the charging mat? Or the sapphire glass? Or the million of reasons why they could not support USB connectivity and how all that is actually even better for the customer? They still have good products I enjoy using, just no buying blindly.
Seriously, all companies are doing it. Cybertruck, Xbox ring of death, Sony's super-slow servers and not coming out about losing all these credit card data, VW scandal, I could go on forever. Just vote with your feet and buy another product.