I wasn’t really sold on the 4/4S, but I recently upgraded a 3S+ to a 4S and am amazed how much improved. The new touchscreen LCD is a huge improvement over the old two line monochrome LCD. Remote access and wife printing is a nice plus — I don’t even run OctoPi anymore. Automatic bed leveling and no more Live Z tweaking for each sheet has been a major quality of life upgrade and eliminates one of the major pain points in swapping out nozzles. The nozzle is much easier to swap out and is now high flow. Add in Input Shaping and it prints significantly faster.

I hadn’t had any experience with the new platform prior to this upgrade and I skipped over the MK4, but the 4S upgrade is a significant step up over the 3S/3S+. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the upgrade kit — that took much longer than expected to complete (about two days) and I regret not buying a new printer instead. But, I have a 3S I plan to upgrade to 3.5 just to get the new electronics; that upgrade is far less intensive.

If you haven’t tried out a 4S you might be pleasantly surprised by how much nicer it is than the 3S+.

wife printing sounds nice!

the future is now

Are those still in PLA or you can print them organic now?

Heh, whoops. Definitely a typo, but in all seriousness the printer is actually usable by wife now, so that is a huge plus. She could use it before, but hadn’t learned how to adjust Live Z and thus didn’t like changing the sheet. If you do it wrong you can drive the nozzle into the sheet.

Similar experience with PRUSA for me -- I had a MK3S+ (which I loved) and paid ~$250 for the upgrade to the MK3.5S. Very, very impressed, for a modest investment I now have the new color LCD, a good chunk of the MK4 features and the print speed is at least 2x improved (if not better, I haven't quantitatively measured it but it's noticeably faster).

I went for the 3.5 upgrade as the upgrade from 3S+ to 4 was almost as much as outright buying a new 4. I'm glad I did it this way because now I'm thinking of getting the CORE One and then I'll have 2 excellent printers.

I wondered if the bamboo was sold for a loss

Bambu Labs printers are not cheap. Even their entry level A1 printer is twice the price of an Ender3.

Sure, it is a better printer, but it is clear that they are going for scale, and most of what makes them better is in the software rather than in using premium hardware.

initially maybe but the way the printers are built makes for cheap mass production. Theres no special sauce in the hardware, it's all low cost off the shelf stuff, it's just optimised very well.

The problem is even with Prusas recent efforts to catch up with the Core One, it's expensive, and they still dont have a viable answer to the AMS. The MMU is still a hot mess, requires tinkering, isn't stable and overall just doesnt come close to an out of the box experience.

They still seem to be thinking the primary audience of 3d printers is people who tinker. It's not been that way for a long time. People just want to be able to unbox, plug it in and print. The second you add in the "oh just spend 5 hours tweaking this spaghetti mess of an MMU" you've lost them.

A Prusa MK4, completely factory built, is a reliable workhorse for me.

I didn't suggest otherwise, nor was that even part of my point.

Prusa’s primary audience has been people who don’t want to tinker.

I think they just screwed up the design of the MMU but they never went back to the drawing board.

"hot mess" is not a fair assessment. The MMU2 was terribly unreliable, but the MMU3 is OK. It's surely more complicated to set up and requires more space than the AMS, but on the other hand, I think AMS concept is just plain bad. It's incredibly slow and produces a ton of plastic waste.