This would be exactly the same with paper printers.
"You can't print and bind books!"
"You have to order paper and ink!"
"Printer paper and ink are much too expensive!"
"The printer you buy will become out-dated too quickly!"
"Home printing does not leverage economies of scale!"
For something you can pick up at the supermarket for a few dollars that requires a lot of printing/materials (a book) it doesn't make sense. For something you can't (custom items, small parts, little toys, ...), home printing is (or will be) great.
3D printing doesn't have to meet every use case of commercial 3D printing to become very prevalent.
> For something you can't (custom items, small parts, little toys, ...), home printing is (or will be) great.
Custom items? Order them online (if they're semi-custom, e.g. a standard T-shirt with your custom text on it) - it takes less time and will probably be cheaper, despite the shipping cost. If it's a custom item you're 3D-modeling yourself, that's a different story - but that's for hobbyists - it won't be mainstream.
Toys? So instead of picking up that $5 doll in the supermarket, busy parents will find something online and wait a half hour while a noisy printer prints a product which is even more expensive than the $5?
Sure, I agree that 3D printers have a future as children's toys (I wrote that towards the end of my blog post). But the factory-at-home idea where you print cheap objects in order to save money/time is not realistic.
Sure, I agree that paper printers have a future as toys. The printer-at-home idea where you print cheap books in order to save money/time is not realistic.
Do the majority of people print books themselves at home? Not in my experience. And if they did, they'd waste both time and money and have an inferior product.
I don't know if we'll ever reach the "in every home" mark, or even say 90% of homes. This is different from computers for a lot of reasons. However the prevalence and wide-spread availability of 3d printing makes perfect sense.
Look at it logistically - if the cost of transporting bulk finished goods rises to a certain point, it makes more sense to just ship containers of plastic pellets, via slow and less reliable methods. Then local caches of the pellets are used in local printing facilities to make whatever. I can order a part, widget, or doo-dad and pick it up anywhere, or delivery by guy on bicycle happens, or whatever.
3d printing just has less waste and shipping overhead than making goods and sending them to a destination half way around the world.
There are price points where 3d printing makes more sense logistically than injection molding. I don't know what they are, but basic logistics suggests it is true.
May want to rethink your proposed hurdles. Printers are too small is purely a function of utility. If the use case changes the technology will change. There's not even a technical hurdle to bridge. It's simply form following function.
Your raw material issue is slain by the same slingshot.
The rest of the argument kind of falls apart after that. No disrespect intended.
As an aside, I've talked to a number of people involved with manufacturing and product design who use 3D printers for prototyping. Not a single one of them believe that we'll have 3D printing factories at home (although one of them did mention that 3D printers might be popular as toys).
Compare with laser printers. Similar objections.
I imagine when the 'printer head' becomes an integrated circuit, and the materials become the equivalent of toner cartridges, we'll see rapid adoption.
Home laser printers haven't replaced books, magazines, or professional marketing materials like brochures or flyers. The same way that 3D printing won't replace factory manufacturing.
Yet home laser printers have their place. They are ubiquitous. They are useful. They replaced entire classes of professional (typists, copyeditors, pasteup artists).
Indeed. Who would have more than one material to print with? Well, probably everyone. And material science being what it is, you can imagine it won't be long before we can combine materials in ways previously unforeseen.
There's also an implicit assumption here that the design of objects will not change to support their production method. So, if we're limited by size or number of materials then designers will adapt to those constraints.
> Who would have more than one material to print with? Well, probably everyone.
Currently the number of materials you'd need to stock in your home to be able to print various kinds of products would be quite large (20 or more). That doesn't make sense from an economic perspective.
Let's image, then, that we'll see products made from fewer raw materials because the design changes to accomodate printers. What reason would designers/manufacturers have to do that when they know they won't be able to make a living when their products get pirated?
I agree that it doesn't make economic sense now to hold various types of material, but then I guess laser printers and cartridges used to be pretty expensive too. I'm thinking long-term here.
> What reason would designers/manufacturers have to do that when they know they won't be able to make a living when their products get pirated?
The same reasons people still write software and make music, even though they know their products get pirated - you can still make money from it. I agree though, it will be a completely disruptive innovation from the point of view of designers and manufacturers.
While some technologies (like personal computers) have flourished, others haven't lived up to the hype. If the tech hype from the early eighties were true, we'd all have flying cars and intelligent machines in our homes, and normal passenger airplanes would fly at 5,000 km/h.
Timescales might be wrong, but do you really think that flying personal transportation (or helicopters, as we currently call them) and intelligent machines are an unlikely prospect?
Flying cars and helicopters are not the same thing. The idea proposed in the early eighties was that "everyone" (meaning the majority of consumers in first world countries) would use flying cars instead of normal ones. This isn't even close to coming true (or being feasible), even if flying cars actually do exist (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHXnLCIgNug).
"You can't print and bind books!"
"You have to order paper and ink!"
"Printer paper and ink are much too expensive!"
"The printer you buy will become out-dated too quickly!"
"Home printing does not leverage economies of scale!"
For something you can pick up at the supermarket for a few dollars that requires a lot of printing/materials (a book) it doesn't make sense. For something you can't (custom items, small parts, little toys, ...), home printing is (or will be) great.
3D printing doesn't have to meet every use case of commercial 3D printing to become very prevalent.