But not two orders of magnitude too expensive for a high end machine shop with a small warehouse. You can see this as something that you may dream about as a 'maker', but more importantly this could be something that allows small companies to make parts locally rather than overseas.
I'd say the two go hand-in-hand. The holy grail of the maker movement is microfactories where individuals or small teams can produce local-scale consumer products out of their garages/basements to sell to their communities. That by definition is a small business with a small warehouse. :)
From a marketing standpoint alone the ability to rapidly produce metal cases for things would give products an air of quality that you could never match with a plastic 3D printer and might cost too much to CNC. Between this and the costs of pick-and-place machines coming down I'd love the ability to design/build my own
consumer electronics products and sell them out of my garage.
You can already get into a small-scale CNC mill for under $10k to make parts, look at the Tormach offering.
For better or worse it's a long ways from "machining/printing a part" to having something ready to sell. Even just dealing with aluminum (easy to machine), you have deburring, polishing and/or tumbling, and (probably) anodizing standing in the way of selling your new consumer part. Some of that is fairly easy to get going with - small scale anodize is problematic.
Other 3D printing technologies is already well into this territory. I've used companies like Sculpteo and Xometry numerous times for professional 3D printed parts in various technologies (mostly SLS nylon). The per unit cost is more than having a Makerbot running in an office, but the quality is way better. Even for FDM sometimes I prefer to have someone else make the part.
I can imagine those companies buying these machines and passing on the cost savings -- I would definitely start to think about using it instead of CNC.
Even if only the price of the prototyper comes down a bit more, it'll improve things significantly.
The ability to rapidly prototype in low cost, low latency iterations will be a boon across many industries - regardless of whether or not you end up outsourcing production.
And of course, you may just end up outsourcing down the road.
