In it’s current form, sure. It was a crude example. The biggest hurdles being the precision of the available printers and availability of necessary materials. But saying ‘never’ is foolish. You should look into what is currently being worked on and imagine the way this is going to go.
It is more likely that ‘open source’ devices where people can print most parts and purchase others to build a final product will be more viable for quite some time. So, you wouldn’t be scanning an ipad and printing it, but you’d be able to build something comparable using printed parts and purchasing some of the more complex ones.
Things like this are getting us closer and closer though:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130425103318.htm
I’m quite comfortable saying ‘never’ in the case of most semiconductors.
The equipment and process steps used in making a leading edge semi are so incredibly complex they’ll never be done by additive manufacturing. The A7 processor that powers Apples newest iPad is 1 cm square and has over a billion transistors on it. Critical layer transistors have feature sizes of 28 nanometers. The fabrication facility it’s built in cost Samsung over 3 billion dollars to build. The air in the fabrication areas is the cleanest in the world, as even the smallest little particle of dust can make the end-product useless.
I’m very, very comfortable in saying never. Additive manufacturing is a wonderful process and will enable many, many things. But there’s also a lot of hype in it, and there’s an awful lot that it will never be able to do.
Oh - also, thanks for the link. There’s some interesting stuff there. I particularly like the spray-can image sensor article.