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.
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.
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.