Dogfooding is valuable. If there is a fundamental flaw in their printers, they're going to find out about it firsthand.
It is also nice to know that I can print replacement parts and that my replacement is pretty much identical to the original.
It is also nice to know that I can print replacement parts and that my replacement is pretty much identical to the original.
Managing a printer farm sounds like a lot work, but they did do that work and can reap the benefit that prototyping and manufacturing are the exact same process. It's like saying "why does Google have all these servers when they could just buy them from AWS?" Well, they got good at building datacenters before you could just rent a datacenter from Amazon. If you're good at something, keep it up!