For media coverage, does injection molding have flashy new use cases etc? My (non-expert) impression is that injection molding is the "boring default" for many use cases, and thus improvement in it won't see much coverage. (+ the specific submission is on a website specializing on 3D printing as a topic). If you show me an industrially made part and say "they injection molded that", the reaction is "sure, as you would", not "Oh? that's interesting, why did they do that?".
Similar to how news will rather report on unusual building materials rather than run stories to remind people that bricks are cool too. (and if a home buyer insists on using something fancy new over bricks or whatever default would be more appropriate, that's their fault)
That's not to say that defaults actually are boring if you deal with them directly, I find people explaining details of things like injection molding fascinating, but "we improved X in a standard industry process" just isn't as easy to make briefly interesting to mass audience and thus gets reported less.
Apple actually gets a decent amount of coverage for their very impressive injection moldings. Most advancements in IM today are not in the ability to make complex parts, but more in the ability to make them pretty.
Apple makes many parts with extremely tight tolerances with almost no visual defects, and within the industry it's understood that it's extremely hard to make your IM parts look like Apple's for that reason.
Yes, even mainstream media covers that every now and then (e.g. "Apple just bought an entire company making X to make even better macbooks/iPhones/..."), but as the parent poster complained 3D printing is getting more attention.
Whereas "within the industry" is exactly the thing I'm talking about: the threshold for getting into more mainstream media is not necessarily related to actual importance and different from what field-specific or even just enthusiast perception focuses on. E.g. the bits and pieces I know about injection molding mostly come from "maker-type" publications that, while of course also talking about 3D printing a lot, also cover entry-level discussions of what happens if you try taking something to larger-scale production - and "forget about your product looking like an Apple product" is high on that list ;)
Yeah I think it's just how news media works I guess. Especially since 3D printing is a cool technology that hasn't quite hit it's stride yet, people are want to see how it's going to change things.
IM has been the same old IM for the past 5 decades more or less.
Similar to how news will rather report on unusual building materials rather than run stories to remind people that bricks are cool too. (and if a home buyer insists on using something fancy new over bricks or whatever default would be more appropriate, that's their fault)
That's not to say that defaults actually are boring if you deal with them directly, I find people explaining details of things like injection molding fascinating, but "we improved X in a standard industry process" just isn't as easy to make briefly interesting to mass audience and thus gets reported less.