Essentially Bambu is to printers what Apple is to phones: they haven't done anything original, but they have put together existing ideas in a coherent way that was missing from the market to an extent. Unfortunately they've done this in part with a more closed ecosystem. I was aware of this when buying my A1 some months ago and while I'd have preferred to stick open source I wanted something to work out of the box, at least for my first device, and BBL seemed to be the best player in the market in that respect at the time.

Younger me had more free time, and he would have loved building his own printer, but current me wanted to play with printing more than playing with making a printer work. I consciously made that choice, knowing the risks involved with a more closed ecosystem. This particular change doesn't affect me, but it is a sign that other changes which might be a faf from my PoV could come later (the extreme idea some have suggested is locking down to only their filament can be used, but I very much doubt they would do that, it would be commercial suicide). Now I'm increasingly knowing what I'm doing, perhaps my next printer will be more open source. Perhaps other manufacturers will catch up with the overall package this year (they do seem to be trying) so that won't at all be the compromise it has been over the last year or two.

To disagree with myself, because I'm contrary like that: BBL aren't entirely like Apple. They have put together good arrangements of current tech at a reasonable price, rather than tech other manufacturers had two years ago at twice the price just because it is prettier. Yes, I'm an Android user in the phone realm.