45 days to go

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My guess is if the hardware’s ready, they’ll ship by 31-Dec. Even if that means half-baked software since they can and will keep tweaking that on their side.

I know @dan said he’d rather deliver a perfect product that does everything it’s supposed to rather than deliver on time, blah blah blah. But I imagine they’re sitting there going “Well, crap… The software really isn’t quite ready. We can’t delay again or they’ll lynch us! The media, the customers, everybody will want our heads this time!”

So that’s all 100% speculation, of course. To be clear, I haven’t installed any surveillance devices at Glowforge HQ.

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And I TOTALLYYY haven’t been wearing a camo outfit and tiptoeing behind @dan for the past few months to figure out how things are going… I would NEVERRRR do that… :wink::wink::wink::wink:

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Probably won’t see any updates for a couple weeks. History has proven that changes aren’t announced until the ship has long sailed. And if they remain on schedule then they won’t announce because “on schedule” doesn’t mean an unknown won’t still pop up. Don’t mean this to be read negatively. Just is what it is.

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That’s okay. I’ve been known to lie. :smiling_imp:

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I neverrrr lie. :wink::wink::wink::wink:

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Since the User Manual is like the very last thing you get put together before releasing a product, I’m feeling pretty darn good these days. It means most things are almost done, and there are procedures in place for them, and they just need to get them written down so that us dummies can follow:

:blush:

Barring “force majeure” to quote the great JB…

:squeeee:

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Their original 30 day Pre-Orders were roughly 10,000 units (not sure where I read that, but it was somewhere so it must be true). That means that they need to ship roughly 200 per day starting today. It will be interesting to see if they can achieve those numbers. Here’s hoping!

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…orrrr…

simply ship the 10,000 on Dec 31st 2016 at 23:59 lol

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Yep :slightly_smiling_face:

Or create 10,000 UPS labels and wait for the brown trucks to show up after New Years.

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I’d be surprised if any (let alone all) preorders would have shipped just yet. Last I’d seen, the goal was to get crowdfund campaign orders shipped by the end of the year - so they still have weeks to get units out the door. I don’t have a link handy, but I recall reading something recently about aiming to ship the first units by the end of November… we’re a couple weeks away from that, and eagerly awaiting an email asking for shipping details.

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You can rest assured that the first person to get the e-mail requesting their address will post that event here somewhere. I don’d think we’ll have to guess when the shipping starts. :wink:

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I remember reading that too, but there were 10,000 units sold in the month long pre-order. So to ship them all before Dec. 31st and not starting shipping until end of November that means that they will need to ship roughly 300 per day. That’s a tall order for a small shop. But here’s still hoping…

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GF may be a small company, but apparently their manufacturing contractor is not (dan has hinted coyly). So ultimate production and shipping rates could be quite high (although you wouldn’t want to run continuously at those rates or you’d build up a backlog).

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Who’s to say they have not already started manufacturing and has been for weeks? months?

But this is heavily filed in the ‘speculation’ dept.

At this point all we can do is sit and wait.

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My thought also.

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Dan hasn’t mentioned any hardware tweaks in the past month or so. I’d agree that manufacturing has probably been ramped up.

I expect (speculate) that the next set of pre-release shipments he said would be starting soon are likely shipping tests - real world validation of the drip tests and things they have already done. Ship a bunch all over the country (maybe some internationally) and see how they arrived - undamaged, still aligned, etc. It also shakes out the logistics of getting the right device to the right recipient.

That would seem to need a couple of weeks for trucks traversing the country. After that they can release the hounds (assuming no bad things happen).

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FWIW, this is what I think will happen…

They’ve contracted a reputable (large) manufacturing outfit to build them… @dan and crew are not actually doing the assembly, they are overseeing it. (We don’t know who, just that it’s here in the US.)

The units are going to ship directly from the manufacturer, not from Seattle. No idea how many they can ship, but a few thousand a week is certainly feasible, depending on who they’re using to build them. :slight_smile:

In order to get your hands on one of the units that are shipping at the end of November, you had to have signed up as a Beta Tester. (And those folks do have to agree to a certain amount of tight-lippedness, so I’m not sure we will get an immediate post here that they’re shipping.)

That is really the final stage of Beta Testing, with the machines that GF thinks are ready to ship - to check for ANYTHING they didn’t catch. The people who get them are not going to be posting about it, they’re going to be checking for problems (mainly with shipping, breakage, that sort of thing) and contacting Glowforge immediately if they find anything. It’s like a dry run before the main ship out.

If they find something…we can probably expect an announcement in mid-December about another delay.

If they don’t find anything…they throw in a bunch of User Manuals and some proofgrade and out the door go our machines. :relaxed:

It would be really smart of @dan and crew to use every single bit of the time they have left for checking for problems before shipping out ten thousand units, and they strike me as being pretty smart.

So I’m not really expecting to hear anything for several more weeks. They’re very busy right now, as you can imagine, trying to coordinate a beehive of activity. There is probably going to be less input from @dan while this goes down, so if we don’t hear from him as much, it’s actually a good sign. It means that things have progressed to that “Oh crap!” final stage of activity. (It also means that we might not see “proof” of various specific tests that we have requested until right before the units ship, or not at all, if they run out of time.)

It’s all good, we’re in the home stretch, and this thing is about to happen…get ready for arrival.

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Which argues that our Christmas presents are likely to be emails confirming shipping info for shipment near New Years and arrival in January.

Which while technically meeting the last set of GF commitments will be the subject of much negative press in the first two weeks of January. If possible, it would be prudent for Dan & team to get a non-trivial number of machines delivered in December to dampen any public negativity about shipments that don’t actually start showing up until 2017. They won’t be parsing exactly when or even if the commitment was expressed as or changed to “shipping” by year end. Opportunities for negative comments and opinions will be sought out by the nattering class so it would behoove GF to avoid providing fodder if they can.

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The nattering class is going to natter whether the units are delivered or not. It’s what they do. (Facts are not necessary, and are usually in pretty short supply anyway.)

A failure of the units that might have been caught with a little more caution would be catastrophic.
Of the two, the latter is the one that I would choose to avoid if at all possible. (Just my belief.) And yes, additional delays will cost a few sales. They know that.

Fortunately, it’s not our call to make - it’s the folks at Glowforge. So it’s not an easy choice for them, they have my sympathy. :worried:

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