There’s a difference between expressing your opinion that the price is too high (many of us agree with you on that) and trashing the entire company and everything they’ve ever done because they’ve made ONE decision you don’t like. Just like people, companies are rarely perfect. Everyone has good traits and bad traits, and having a bad trait doesn’t make you a bad person.
Black and white thinking is deciding the whole thing is bad because of one thing you don’t agree with. (It’s also, incidentally, a hallmark of certain psychiatric disorders.) I personally have very little patience with it, because in the general population it indicates a lack of bothering to think rationally, and it irritates me when people with perfectly good brains don’t bother to USE them. (It also doesn’t make you a bad person. It just makes me not want to spend my leisure time reading your posts.)
We own two Teslas in our household. Tesla is getting into the S&P 500 this month so I don’t think they are closing up any time soon.
My portfolio hopes they don’t either as it would really be nice to buy a house with a reasonable sized makerspace in it (read that as ‘basement’). I figure they still have some “unrealized” funds from pre-selling the FSD (Full Self Driving), the Cybertruck is on the horizon, along with the Semi, Solar roofs & Power Walls, and the next gen Roadster. So I probably won’t be buying a house for awhile…not quite ready to cash in yet when my stock split earlier this year with a 5 to 1
Here is some news about repairing Teslas that just came out, the release of service manuals and diagnostic tools:
That being said, it’s like my birthday every time there is a new software update — it’s either a “aww just bug fixes” (well we need those too) to a “OMG we now have a whoopie cushion in the car!” (no I didn’t rejoice but my 3 year old nephew didn’t tire of making each person in the car fart LOL). I mean when I bought my car I never knew that they would push out over the air “surveillance” that would be able to record ahem people marring your car or someone backing into your parked car giving a good view of that license plate. Add to that the romantic side of Tesla – a roaring fireplace that puts out warm air and romantic music. While waiting for a certain store to finally bring out my curbside, I can watch movie trailers on YouTube or even start watching Disney+ or other channels!! Don’t forget about the video games you can plan when in park.
My son can still beat my AWD LR Model 3 of 0-60 in 4 seconds with his Performance Model 3 in 3.5 seconds … but I’m completely OK with that. Most of all the fun is in the drive… each and every time! My Model 3 is two years and I still wake up with a smile on my face thinking I get to drive “Life, the Universe, and Everything” yet again today.
----derailed, but not my fault — someone mentioned Tesla and forgot about all the good parts.
P.S. I subscribe to the premium features and I’m not an etsy shop. Today the premium paid for itself this month with that “create outline” feature that allows you to easily add a trace around of a design. The designs had a lot of shapes in it and I thought no way am I going to even try to trace around this design in Photoshop (old version not subscription). The outline feature rocked it! Woot!
Lol, I’m sure Teslas have lots of good features. My only experience with them was sitting in a mall display model while my kids played with the whoopie cushion setting. My only point was that if you are comparing Glowforge to a car (and GF has a lot of good points people seem to forget about also) that there are direct comparisons.
Coming from an owner of 2 Silhouettes … it’s no comparison to a Glowforge. I can’t even cut cardboard with the Silhouettes and definitely not acrylic or wood! So can’t use the expensive compared to there… maybe compared to a chinese knockoff laser cutter where a friend bought his.
I had never had nor operated a laser cutter prior to the Glowforge. I had a friend, quite the tech guru I might add, that owned an imported laser and spent a LOT of time trying to get it to print correctly. We see so many people unboxing and printing the same day. Huge difference. I am a big fan.
Well my son makes his own money and I make mine. We share the same house as I made the decision to invest in a Tesla rather than drive my 1994 Camry and possibly get a house (and then buy a car because mine was falling apart). It’s a personal priority scenario. Mine was also the least expensive of the lines (other than I wanted AWD and red)
Kinda funny though … I know quite a few people that belong to the local group that aren’t “rolling in it” (and neither are we), but decided that the Tesla could save them money in the long run on maintenance, no gas, no oil, no fan belts, no radiator, no exhaust pipes, no water pump–you get the idea. I have 41K on my car now and have only changed the tires and windshield wipers, charged at home unless on trips, and added water to the windshield wipers…oh and replace the cabin filters once. If someone travels a lot, business or personal, it could potentially save the owner a lot of money.
If you’re bored, but want a great read that explains a real life scenario of a Model X (now that model is expensive!) that has 400,000 miles (yes 400K) on it:
Yep I followed your point. I’m saving money with my GF by making quite a few Christmas presents and they are personalized and not something they can buy in a store. I love that. I’m a crafty person to begin with; the biggest thing has been learning the software and it’s chugging along although my knowledge gain isn’t near as fast as my car.
Zero judgement. Just different choices. I want for nothing, but mainly because there isn’t anything I really want. Never paid more than $15K for a car in my life. 200K miles is about the time I figure a vehicle is finally broke in. There have been a few impulse buys. Ended up with a GF because I had three craft beers while reading a tech magazine instead of my normal 2 craft beers. 2 hours of research later and I ordered the first day.
Chinese laser= that hoopty car that’s always being tinkered with in the neighborhood to run.
Gf = the lowest end model from the dealer, not much more than the hoopty, but it works without all the tinkering.
Low end epilog and others= full size sedans
Wonder what would equal a Bugatti?
Reading through this thread… wow, a lot of negative feedback on the premium sub. I have been using my Glowforge in spurts over the past year, so I barely noticed the Premium features and trial until this past weekend. I was apparently still in trial mode, but it expired about an hour before I was done doing a fairly large project.
What happened after the trial? So far I haven’t noticed a difference with server performance. But I am noticing, and wondering what all features they are going to start removing from what I am used to. For example, I just learned that they will be removing my uploads if I don’t open them for 30 days. That is a bit of a pain (I got back sometimes 3-6+ months for designs) which means I will have to re-upload them now, and go in and change all the settings. They are taking away a nice convenience feature, though it’s fairly easy for me to re-upload and pick the settings. Maybe there are some other nuances like this I am missing also. I worry what else they might decide to remove, or make more difficult/annoying over time to gently “push” premium.
Having said that, I am currently not the target audience for these feature sets, since I do all my own designs with existing tools and look at Glowforge merely as the laser cutter/hardware. Up until now I’ve strongly recommended GF and have sold several with my referral code. Moving forward, I will definitely caveat my recommendations because of what they are doing with Premium.
The one positive thing I see is that Glowforge is finding a way to innovate and possibly draw in a bigger audience to buy the laser by selling some features that some of the market may find valuable. That means more $$'s for the company, which means our lasers continue to operate and hopefully we continue to get better optimizations and features with our laser. I don’t know any other laser company that is doing that… The same $$'s we paid (for me, over 2 years ago) is still reaping benefits. I think everyone should keep this in perspective. At this point, I feel the benefits of premium outweigh the negatives, I just hope that we don’t lose more over time and end up slowly boiling like the frog in the hot water.
Are you sure? I am getting a pop up that says I have to upgrade to premium to keep Past Prints. Maybe I missed the memo, or the popup message is just inaccurate/ confusing.
Past Prints is actually a separate feature that automatically saves multiple versions of a file, one for each time you print it. (It also saves all the settings used for each print.)
Legacy users don’t get Past Prints for free, but they do continue to get unlimited storage for files they upload.
Actually this is probably the most rational post from someone not subscribing to premium in this entire thread. You didn’t notice any change, because without premium you have exactly what you had before (except possibly snap marks). All the servers were sped up several months ago (regardless of premium) and premium just goes that extra bit. And if nobody has told you about premium you would have just gone about your GF day doing your thing…
Cool, thanks for the info! Glad to hear that I am not losing the files that I have uploaded. Although it probably wouldn’t hurt if I cleaned some of them out anyway.
Yep!! I totally agree. I almost didn’t notice it, but because of the fast lane popup during my trial, and the other popup once my trial expired, I did notice it. For what it’s worth I also didn’t notice anything being faster either. But my laser cutter is also about 50 ft from my computer. By the time I walk over to it, the button is usually glowing either way.
Exactly, unless you do huge jobs the difference is hard to notice. I mean if it only takes 5 seconds normally even double the speed is only 2.5 second faster… Not like that would be life altering. Considering the carve time is what you really care about.
I am a big fan.
