Archived from the Tools In Action forum (Makita). This thread is read-only.
Makita is not making many bench tools, they do mostly cordless, but they are missing out on a huge opportunity by not making stands for their cordless tools!
For example, their band saw is almost useless without a stand. They are selling it just to hobbyists now because of that, but they could be selling it to professionals too just by making a stand so it can achieve straight cuts.
They can also do that for the angle drill. It’s an amazing tool for drilling holes into earth, or mixing things, but for drilling into wood and metal – almost useless since you cannot achieve straight cuts. Which is ironic, because that’s supposed to be its main job.. A stand would transform it into a proper bench drill. It has a beefy motor so it would not be like those cheap stands for small drills.
Imho they gave up in many things actually. Their main focus is almost entirely cordless tools and imho I can imagine why, cause from the economic point of view, this is the bast way to chain customer to their brand because of batteries!
Of course now they’re the only company that didn’t upgrade their 18V line tools batteries. Instead they’ve broken backward compatibility introducing the XGT line. So only there you can have higher output and higher Ah batteries. While in the 18V line there’s nothing compared to others where you can have even 12Ah batteries already.
That’s big question mark here cause they’re actually one of the biggest brands making money on the tools as Makita is not small company. But this is what can be seen right now, the question is what future will bring to us.