In short
There are so many good ones out there already, it didn't seem like the right path.
At length……
We don’t really want to make printers, we never have. Our goal has always been to make printing better, to expand the range of objects you can create. The printing companies of today are making awesome products. Instead of replicating their efforts to get to a similar product, we thought we'd take a swing at designing something new. Something to make your printing experience better. To let you do that much more.
We hold a few beliefs as a company that led us to this decision:
First, feedback is key. In order to make the best possible product we need feedback from you. This cycle would have been much slower if we were also trying to build a printer.
Think of it like this: We started in the ideation phase on June 1st 2014, it's taken us ~9 months to get to the point where we have a fully functional, fully scalable (manufacturing) prototype.
Now think about how long it takes most companies to design, and deliver on a printer. I know this number varies a lot, but we’ll just go with 9 months. Now take the 9 from before, and add this 9. That’s 18 months, almost half of which would be spent designing something that hundreds of companies have already created!
It's March 2015 right now, if we wanted to build our own printer it wouldn’t have seen the light of day until (at least) December 2015.
We didn't feel it was efficient to spend our time on things that other people have already perfected. There’s over a hundred printer companies out there that are very good at what they do, entering with our own printer just seemed like the wrong path to take. We're also letting you skip the upgrade cycle, and get more out of the printer you've already invested in.
We’ll leave the printer improvements and infrastructure to those who know it best, and we’ll keep turning out new tech to let you create a wider variety of objects than you could before.