Why factories won’t close if you buy a 3D printer | http://bit.ly/12a3KgY
I agree with this article. Does anyone think 3D printing could start to hurt manufacturing as it is right now? Let me know what you think!
“Mass production” and “manufacturing” are not the same thing. There are manufacturing applications that do not involve large scale mass production of consumer goods.
The article mentions prototyping, but 3D printing can also work for individually customized goods, repair parts, very short production runs, “low capital” manufacturing, and difficult-to-mass-produce artwork. (Check out shapeways for some amazing items that would be economically impractical to mass produce!)
These areas are all underserved by other manufacturing methods, and will benefit from greater availability of 3D printing.
@Stan_Seibert Shapeways is a great example for showing this. Some of the items could be made 10x faster if they were for example injection molded.
i believe that 3d printing is for the things that big corps “could” make, but wont. making iphones at home is not (currently) feasible but making an ever increasing range of things that you dont know you want until you have the capability to create said things, is where the disruption lies because those things will make manufacturers look and say “hmm…why didnt/dont we make this!?” to which the answer will be “because there is no great financial incentive based on its specialization” not to mention that the rate of evolution in this space is much faster and more organic than product introduction cycles of current consumer product manufacturers.
by the time a home 3d printer can print perfect consumer grade products, (smart) companies will have integrated themselves completely into the concept and will probably push it forward as an extension of their own product categories, IMO. and that would take at least (factoring for the rate of evolution by halving what i think the real time scale is) 6-8 years.