Makerbot announces new filaments that enable 3D printing in materials that mimic limestone, metal, and wood, available late 2015
Russell Brandom / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
MakerBot's new limestone-, metal- and wood-look filaments are a materials-differentiation play for its desktop printers: no hardware change, just new consumables shipping in late 2015. It lands in a year when the rest of the field is competing on capability instead of appearance — Carbon3D's resin-growth process prints 25–100 times faster than layer-by-layer methods, backed by Autodesk's $10M investment and a $100 million round led by Google Ventures.
Formlabs' $3,499 Form 2 pushed resolution and print intelligence upmarket at the same time, squeezing the middle of the desktop market. Within about a year, MakerBot stopped building its own printers entirely, outsourcing manufacturing to Jabil — which frames these filaments less as a platform shift than one of the company's last in-house product moves.
First-order effects
- MakerBot gets a recurring-revenue consumable line and a fresh reason for existing desktop owners to buy filament rather than a new machine, with availability promised for late 2015.
- Buyers get parts that look like stone, metal, or wood from a desktop extruder — but the objects remain plastic composites, not load-bearing or functional metal components.
Second-order effects
- Rivals respond on capability, not cosmetics: Carbon3D's speed claim and Formlabs' higher-resolution Form 2 give professional buyers reasons to skip the consumer segment altogether, pressuring MakerBot's price-value position.
- Filament makers and accessory suppliers gain a template — surface-mimicking materials are cheap to iterate — while MakerBot's own margins stay exposed, foreshadowing its shift to Jabil-run contract manufacturing.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the market splits structurally: desktop machines settle into hobby and prototyping niches selling looks and convenience, while real metal parts migrate to powder-fusion systems like the laser-based approach FreeForm is building — a gap that took a decade to close.
- Imitation materials also highlight the qualification bottleneck: parts that merely resemble metal can't substitute for certified functional components, keeping aesthetic printing and industrial printing on separate tracks.
The trend: Desktop 3D printing is bifurcating between cosmetic consumable differentiation at the low end and speed-and-materials arms races — resin growth, better resolution, metal powder fusion — at the high end.