My thought also.
Dan hasnât mentioned any hardware tweaks in the past month or so. Iâd 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).
FWIW, this is what I think will happenâŚ
Theyâve contracted a reputable (large) manufacturing outfit to build them⌠@dan and crew are not actually doing the assembly, they are overseeing it. (We donât know who, just that itâs 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 theyâre 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 Iâm not sure we will get an immediate post here that theyâre 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 didnât catch. The people who get them are not going to be posting about it, theyâre going to be checking for problems (mainly with shipping, breakage, that sort of thing) and contacting Glowforge immediately if they find anything. Itâs like a dry run before the main ship out.
If they find somethingâŚwe can probably expect an announcement in mid-December about another delay.
If they donât find anythingâŚthey 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 Iâm not really expecting to hear anything for several more weeks. Theyâre 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 donât hear from him as much, itâs actually a good sign. It means that things have progressed to that âOh crap!â final stage of activity. (It also means that we might not see âproofâ of various specific tests that we have requested until right before the units ship, or not at all, if they run out of time.)
Itâs all good, weâre in the home stretch, and this thing is about to happenâŚget ready for arrival.
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 donât actually start showing up until 2017. They wonât be parsing exactly when or even if the commitment was expressed as or changed to âshippingâ 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.
The nattering class is going to natter whether the units are delivered or not. Itâs 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, itâs not our call to make - itâs the folks at Glowforge. So itâs not an easy choice for them, they have my sympathy.
The only reason Iâm posting this is because a lot of people keep thinking that @Dan stated that the units would only ship in December, not arrive, but thatâs not true. If thereâs been an update to the statement below then Iâm all ears. It is very old so Iâm open to hearing about an update because Iâm still planning for my unit to arrive in 2016.
Dâaccord! Referring to Wardâs First Law: âIf you stood on a street corner and handed out $100 bills to everyone who walked by, somebody would complain.â
Btw, Wardâs Second Law: âEverything costs more than everything costs.â
Unfortunately it is true. The message you linked is from April.
This link from less than a month ago reiterates itâs shipping this year, not arriving.
This is holiday season, so any attempt at an arrival guarantee using one of the major carriers is bound to be foolhardy. Theyâd have to all be shipped by the 15th or so to promise december arrival. (Some might make it, but some almost certainly wouldnât.)
All I see is that âOur schedule is still unchangedâ. The original update back in April also said shipping in December, it was from a clarification email that Dan stated arrive in 2016. Iâd just like clarification that the pre-release units are still shipping end of November. If thereâs been another delay before they even get to the production units I would like to know.
If you read the whole sentence it says:
âOur schedule is still unchanged: ship 30-day crowdfunding units in December and units ordered subsequently in March.â
(my emphasis)
Your message said âa lot of people keep thinking that @Dan stated that the units would only ship in December, not arrive, but thatâs not true.â
Again, my emphasis. As you can see from Danâs quote it is exactly true that he said theyâre shipping, and heâs making no comment about arriving. As long as they ship before 11:59PM on 12/31/2016 heâs met his latest commitment. Whether thatâs going to happen is subject to the evaluation heâs 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 heâll make another official announcement after the pre-release units go out. We shouldnât 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.
The sound of a Jack-in-the-Box with a sticky release comes to mind. Yâall are sitting around frantically turning that crank. You know when the tune is supposed to end, butâŚ
I donât see how itâs even possible to manufacturer 10,000 units in one month, let alone ship them!
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 wonât.
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.
Note that it says ship âin Decemberâ not âby the end of Decemberâ, and states nothing about when they will arrive. It also says âschedule is still unchangedâ, 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, etcâŚ
well I guess Dan intelligently managed to drop the sentence about âit is our intention, but December may not happen eitherâ. was it me the only one paying attention?
Except he keeps saying that itâs subject to the results of the Nov pre-release experience. Heâs been extremely adept at not making any promises. And itâs pointless even if he did - schedules slip sometimes. Itâs 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 theyâre satisfied with the quality. Since thereâs 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, itâs all just faith that anything will ship this year. Itâs optimism built on a foundation of faith that anything will arrive this year as well since theyâve made no assertions to that effect despite what people want to read into things.
Itâll get to our doors some amount of time after Dan is satisfied that itâs ready. Thatâs the only thing we can count on. Itâs going to get to us when it gets to us.
But itâs extremely likely that theyâre reasonably sure that itâll ship in December - theyâre too close to that to pull an April surprise again. If there was something significant that they know about now, theyâd have let us know as they did in the spring. Weâre all probably pretty safe in counting on having it in our hands in January (UPS or whomever notwithstanding).
last big delay was preceeded by silence as well. weâll see. besides their quality eye, they must take both public opinion and investors into the equation and convince us all of why such delay.