One aspect I haven’t seen mentioned yet is the rise of local premium cola brands in recent years. Brands like Fritz Kola, Afri Cola and Mio Mio have taken a significant chunk out of Coca colas marketshare without competing on price. Instead, they focus on standout features like higher caffeine levels, local bottling in reusable glass bottles, and/or organic ingredients. And since it’s working, more and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon, like the red bull, the brewery Flensburger and even some localised water bottling brands all offer their own colas now.

In light of this, this advertising campaign from coca cola feels like a desperate move to me.

I’m running 1.0.6 apparently. It simply didn’t occur to me to update it, since it’s not connected to the internet and worked fine out of the box for me.

I’d consider the performance quite good given the low price. Sure there are faster printers out there, but with the default profile in orca slicer it can do a benchy in ~50 minutes which is good enough for me. And quality wise the prints seem to be on par with what other people are producing with much more expensive printers.

What’s missing are some comfort features: no runout sensor, no failed print detection and no network connectivity mean that printing is a relatively manual process and it’s “risky” to do long prints unsupervised, because this thing will happily produce spaghetti until the gcode is done.

I have an Ender 3 V3 SE, never did a firmware update and haven’t had any issues with bed levelling. The auto calibration does its job pretty reliably for me. However, mine had some issues with the gantry being at not quite right angle. It could still print, but it got much better after printing and inserting the appropriate shims under the z-rail mounts.