The real story isn't the $170 "AI printer"—it's that open-source tooling and firmware are finally catching up to Bambu's cloud lock-in. Prusa's steady firmware release cadence and the emergence of community-built alternatives (local CLI, browser tools, DIY clones) signal a shift: closed ecosystems only win if they're *dramatically* better, and they're not anymore. The scanner discount and stencil hacks are nice, but ignore the noise—watch whether these open alternatives actually deliver reliability at scale, because that's where proprietary systems will either innovate or lose.