45 days to go

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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The only reason I’m posting this is because a lot of people keep thinking that @Dan stated that the units would only ship in December, not arrive, but that’s not true. If there’s been an update to the statement below then I’m all ears. It is very old so I’m open to hearing about an update because I’m still planning for my unit to arrive in 2016.

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D’accord! Referring to Ward’s First Law: “If you stood on a street corner and handed out $100 bills to everyone who walked by, somebody would complain.”

Btw, Ward’s Second Law: “Everything costs more than everything costs.”

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Unfortunately it is true. The message you linked is from April.

This link from less than a month ago reiterates it’s shipping this year, not arriving.

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This is holiday season, so any attempt at an arrival guarantee using one of the major carriers is bound to be foolhardy. They’d have to all be shipped by the 15th or so to promise december arrival. (Some might make it, but some almost certainly wouldn’t.)

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All I see is that “Our schedule is still unchanged”. The original update back in April also said shipping in December, it was from a clarification email that Dan stated arrive in 2016. I’d just like clarification that the pre-release units are still shipping end of November. If there’s been another delay before they even get to the production units I would like to know.

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If you read the whole sentence it says:
“Our schedule is still unchanged: ship 30-day crowdfunding units in December and units ordered subsequently in March.”

(my emphasis)

Your message said “a lot of people keep thinking that @Dan stated that the units would only ship in December, not arrive, but that’s not true.

Again, my emphasis. As you can see from Dan’s quote it is exactly true that he said they’re shipping, and he’s making no comment about arriving. As long as they ship before 11:59PM on 12/31/2016 he’s met his latest commitment. Whether that’s going to happen is subject to the evaluation he’s doing after the November pre-release ones ship (and presumably arrive). He left the door open for another change in ship dates.

He also said in the message I linked to that he’ll make another official announcement after the pre-release units go out. We shouldn’t expect to hear anything before then.

No one should expect from the official pronouncements that anyone is getting anything this year except possibly an email asking for their shipping info. The only exceptions are beta testers or pre-release units going to people who signed up to be considered for beta testing.

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The sound of a Jack-in-the-Box with a sticky release comes to mind. Y’all are sitting around frantically turning that crank. You know when the tune is supposed to end, but…

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I don’t see how it’s even possible to manufacturer 10,000 units in one month, let alone ship them!

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It all depends on the scale of your production line. Automotive assembly plants turn out roughly 10,000 units a month (per shift, no weekends) of a vastly more complex product.

But, as people have been saying, we really have not a lot of information, so either it will go as planned/promised, or it won’t.

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Come on. This is the internet, we need conspiracy theories!

For the first two weeks, they will ship only to people who have not yet registered for the forums.

:wink: :stuck_out_tongue:

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Note that it says ship “in December” not “by the end of December”, and states nothing about when they will arrive. It also says “schedule is still unchanged”, which would imply, in the absence of any additional comment on the subject, that the arrival target specified in the previously quoted comment is unchanged, and that we should expect to have our units by the end of December.

That said, I would fully expect that some units may not arrive by 12/31. There are always issues with shipping, and when 10,000+ units ship out, you can bet that a couple will get lost, damaged, etc…

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well I guess Dan intelligently managed to drop the sentence about “it is our intention, but December may not happen either”. was it me the only one paying attention?

Except he keeps saying that it’s subject to the results of the Nov pre-release experience. He’s been extremely adept at not making any promises. And it’s pointless even if he did - schedules slip sometimes. It’s happened already and as he said explicitly in April it can happen again (and reaffirmed that by reference just last month).

He has been very clear that they will only ship when they’re satisfied with the quality. Since there’s no way for those of us outside their shop to know what the criteria for that are or where the current product stands against those criteria, it’s all just faith that anything will ship this year. It’s optimism built on a foundation of faith that anything will arrive this year as well since they’ve made no assertions to that effect despite what people want to read into things.

It’ll get to our doors some amount of time after Dan is satisfied that it’s ready. That’s the only thing we can count on. It’s going to get to us when it gets to us.

But it’s extremely likely that they’re reasonably sure that it’ll ship in December - they’re too close to that to pull an April surprise again. If there was something significant that they know about now, they’d have let us know as they did in the spring. We’re all probably pretty safe in counting on having it in our hands in January (UPS or whomever notwithstanding).

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last big delay was preceeded by silence as well. we’ll see. besides their quality eye, they must take both public opinion and investors into the equation and convince us all of why such delay.

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As a Pro model purchaser, I’m more than a little concerned (as I’ve said before) that we have not seen or heard a single bit of information relating to the Pro units. Not even a peep or hint if it is at the same “stage” of readiness as the Basic. So maybe it would be easier to see all Basic’s from the original 10,000 crowdfunding units shipping by year end 2016 than all units? I have a hard time seeing how total silence on the progress of the Pro units can be seen a positive signal. Ya, ya, I know. It’s the glass half empty guy. . .

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@rpegg Your analogy falls a little bit off the mark. With the Jack-In-The-Box the faster you turn the crank the faster the song goes (and thereby the inevitable horrible horrible stupid little clown thing!).

A more apt analogy would be a stoplight that’s on red. No matter how much you inch forward and inch forward, the red light will turn green when it was programmed to. But I guess you can feel like you are forcing progress by inching and inching…

Or maybe an elevator. The more you push the button the faster the elevator gets to your level, right?

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We still appreciate someone willing to say what others are worried about. I’ll try to put a little good light on the Pro. I want to say that I’ve seen Dan say that the Pro units currently are functioning exactly like the Basic units, just with better hardware.

From that reasoning, Anything stated with Basic also applies to Pro. The major difference that you are referring to (absolutely correctly btw) is that the software has not been demonstrated. I believe Dan has also said that the Pro software is not ready and will be delivered after the units are delivered. So while the passthrough works (essentially as you keep pushing in the piece the laser just sees more material to laser), the registration might not.

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