Just bought a used, but very well calibrated MK3S last month as my first foray into 3D printing. I love this thing so far.

And it doesn’t know my wifi network or password. I save files to an SD card, plug that into the printer, and print. No apps, no printer connecting to the internet to verify registration, no sending my files somewhere outside the home when printing.

Might run it through a MK3.5 hardware upgrade in not too long, which is another cool thing they do: give you an upgrade path for older models (like mine) to use newer equipment from newer models.

It’s hard to keep track of all the things I’m not supposed to download. That’s why I have a NAS. I get a sense of fulfillment from seeing those empty, empty drives that can’t be used by anyone else to download things they shouldn’t.

Exactly. If it’s displaying the line-in correctly, I don’t see what a firmware update would bring to the table.

It’s a display. Once it’s achieved being able to act like that, then you should be done for as long as the hardware lasts.

And I’m not your mate, shining star, light of my life

Pal, my dude, my buddy, you’re raging against someone’s garage proof-of-concept as if they held the key to the software problems on modern smartphones, and downvoting anyone who tells you to chill out. Lots of people do much more useless things than this every day, so why does this one thing enrage you so much?

Dude. It’s a hobby project. It doesn’t need to solve major global market problems for you. What an absolutely bizarre thing to get this angry over.

I mean, if that fits your use-case, I’m not gonna tell you not to get it. Plenty of folks just need a machine for scrolling a social media feed, documents, and Youtube.

But anyone who wants more than what amounts to a Chromebook can get it pretty affordably with the low-end macbooks. Effectively tripling your speed for another $200 is definitely worth it for lots of folks, and memory paging is a lot faster than it used to be.

Benchmarks can be hit or miss, but aren’t totally useless:

N150: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+N150

Low-end M1 from 2020: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+M1+8+Core+3200+MHz

And finally, the A19 they’re talking about using: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Apple+A19+Pro

Intel celeron N150?

I mean, yeah, technically it’s got more ram, but that’s literally the only thing going for it. I’ve got a mini-pc server with that exact CPU. It’s good enough for what I need it for, by my wife’s 5 generation old M1 Air from 2020 trounces it several times over in terms of speed, even with 8GB.

For AI, it’s because they’re the cheapest way to hook up tons of memory to a GPU.

Lol, tell me about it.

And the serial dongle sounds much more sensible than requiring what amounted to a SCSI terminator, of which you could typically only have one. Need to use other software with a SCSI dongle? Shut down your machine, swap them out, and start it up again, 'cause SCSI don’t like that hot swapping.

I remember it as far back as the 90’s. Usually referred to things like SCSI dongles that authorized the use of expensive software like Maya (which was ~$50k at the time), because online DRM activation wasn’t really a thing yet. Probably goes back further than that.

Goop loop