Boing Boing: About 5 years ago, I bought a simple 3D printer*. It cost only $400, but it was fussy and the software was hard to use. The printer bed needed frequent adjusting, and the printed parts would get stuck to the printer bed. The overall quality of the prints was just OK, not great. Even with all of its finickiness and shortcomings, I found it useful for making simple repairs of stuff that broke around the house.
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I remember when I first learned of 3D printing, 8 years ago now. Back then it seemed amazing but the idea of ever being able to 3D print my own objects, let alone own a 3D printer seems absurd. Just 3 years after that i got to use one for the first time, and now it seems trivial to me to be able to find a printer to job out my parts to. On campus right now their are dozens of 3D printers, possibly even hundreds, that print in everything from plastics to resins to rubbers to metals. What really boggles my mind now, though, is that there are so many affordable, easy to use 3D printers on the market. Above and beyond that, even, is that their are also many many different kits and plans you can follow to build your own, and the mechanisms they use are so unbelievable diverse, from the stupidly simple (sand paper drum friction drive) to the complex (delta configuration 3D printer with interchangeable magnetic heads) and from prices as cheap as a few hundred dollars up to thousands of dollars. 3D printing is still a budding technology, and I would still classify it as in the early adopter stage, but I can tell that the world is on the edge of a 3D printing breakthrough. P.S. if you are interested in futures like this, Cory Doctorow's "Makers" is a tremendous book that looks at one potential future of 3D printing: http://craphound.com/makers/about/
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