Back in the 1960s, British politicians complained bitterly that Japan was copying products of British manufacturers, driving them out of business. Then Sony flooded the market with transistor radios that were clearly original and better than the British valve sets.

The same sort of thing is happening right now with China which has moved out of the 'copying' phase and some manufacturers are aggressively producing original products. There was never a shortage of talented Chinese engineers, I have known many, but they all had the same complaint: Chinese companies only wanted to hire them to reverse engineer existing products, They came to the US because they wanted to create their own designs.

I have half a dozen 3D printers made by US manufacturers and they all sucked. The developers lacked the capital to do full production engineering with custom made components, the results were pricey and underperformed. First Chinese printer I bought was the first to deliver results, pity I had to retire it because a hardware fault meant they were catching fire.

In 2022 Bambu Labs completely changed the 3D printing market with the release of their X1C, the first consumer 3D printer that really worked. It also delivered multi-color printing. Their range now has ten printers and they are about to launch two more which appear set to take FDM printing to a whole new level. Meanwhile XTool which revolutionized the laser cutter space with machines with built in cameras that made the process easy in 2021 is now promoting a machine that combines the gantry and galvo head approaches with swappable laser source modules.

I am about to put my Delta Unisaw up for sale, I bought mine in 2021 but the machine Delta sells today is identical in every way. There has been zero product development by the company since and very little since the machine was first produced in 1938. The only major upgrade has been the addition of the Bissemeyer fence and they stole that from Bill Bissemeyer until his patent lawsuit forced them to buy out his company.