their proprietary slicer

That's the problem, it cannot be proprietary when based off slic3R. It's not their property to lock down.

Especially the makerworld integration for casual users. My wife puts about 80% of the print time on ours and it's all from the android app, printing models she finds on the app. I though of getting a Prusa, but to be realistic I can't even put the P1S in LAN only mode because that part won't work, so I'm stuck with it for now.

To be fair all of the companies in the 3D printing industry built their business on the backs of the open source community and pretty much all of them are some level of shitty towards the community. Creality and most others regularly violate licenses by dragging their feet and only complying when people really complain. Even Prusa has started to back away from open source.

Bambu is just catching shit for being the Apple of 3D printing. They are trying the hardest to build a walled garden.

Ender 3 Pro is a completely offline printer. It has a microSD slot and a USB port, that's it. No network connectivoty at all. It runs Marlin firmware which is a long-standing Arduino-based open source 3D printer firmware. It's highly customizable and upgradable. I added a CR Touch bed probe to mine and rebuilt the firmware to enable the unified bed leveling features. It's not the most user friendly but it's a decent, cheap platform, fully open source, and puts out decent prints.

I’ve come from an ender 3 pro to a Bambu P1S with AMS. As others have said the Bambu environment makes it “apple-like” (for better or for worse) to print. Set up, to print is maybe an hour? You spend the majority of your time with the printer actually printing. Which is why everyone (I included) are so upset about how Bambu is handling this.

Meanwhile the ender you spend the majority of your time getting the printer settings right, adding mods, adding firmware, trying new slicers, bed leveling, etc. I spent so much more time tinkering with my ender than printing that i just gave up printing altogether.

If you want to just print things it’s really hard to beat a Bambu. If you want to tinker and actually learn what 3d printing does and how it works, other printers like an Ender is the way to go.

I don't know much about the Snapmaker U1 other than what's stated on this thread and on their site. Just looks like a more open alternative to Bambu if you need fancy features like multi filament printing.

I buy most of my filament from Micro Center (their Inland brand) and some I've gotten from Amazon.

I went with the Qidi Q1 Pro and I've been very happy with it. Orca Slicer's built in profiles for it have worked great so I didn't have to tinker. It runs Fluidd so once it was connected to the local network I could monitor and control it that way (and it will display directly in Orca Slicer).

There is a setting in the printer's interface to restrict it to local network only (and just to be absolutely certain I blocked it in my firewall as well). There are no penalties for not connecting it to the internet.

I mean anyprinter can be offline even Bambus. Mine run in LAN mode and are blocked by the router so no internet access. iOS has a really nice handy replacement that works in LAN mode also. I'm not saying buy their printer just that every printer can work offline.

The thing is unless you need the slightly bigger bed size, the A1 mininfrom Bambu is simply a better product. It's faster, easier, and often cheaper (I got mine for like 150-ish). And the full-size A1 is also bigger.

That's the thing with Bambu. What's made them such a disruptor and given them the opportunity to be shitty is that they make a really good product with excellent software at less than half the price of a comparable Prusa.

And with the new SnapMaker U1 slapping back, they dropped their prices again. The new X2D is half the cost of the last-gen X1 and has an extra nozzle.