But Tom, what basis do you have for suggesting they can't sustainably deliver the product? I don't know whether this is the case, I'm waiting to find out. But I'm perplexed by the assumption that they can't, and thought the grandparent comment assumed its conclusions. I don't agree on the inferior product angle; that assumes someone else should define what the minimal acceptable functionality is.
I don't necessarily think the PandaBot is directly competitive with the Makerbot- I'm sure corners have been cut to achieve that low price. But I don't necessarily need everything that the Makerbot does. It seems to me that as a technology is refined, you have the choice of adding more features, or keeping more limited features and lowering the price - that's what I'm referring to as price innovation.
Consider that the Thing-o-matic was $1200 or so, and people were happy with that at the time of release (3q 2010, IIRC). So the new Markerbot is a lot better, but it's also nearly twice the price. The PandaBot is offering something similar but simpler for $800-ish, which doesn't seem wildly unrealistic to me given the 2-year interval. I can see from the Kickstarter page that it's more of a no-frills product - one which requires more user supervision and safety-awareness, for example - but the tradeoff is that it costs less. I'm not sure whether I'd buy one (since it would be more of a hobby than a tool purchase), but being under $1000 is a big factor in any purchase decision.
