Earliest International Estimate?

Hose - I couldn’t think of the blinking word. Thanks

While I agree it appears the company wasn’t as prepared as they could be for making a product for the whole world, as I near two decades in a regulated industry I am still amazed how hard it is to get concrete information on regulations. Despite there being an entire department dedicated just to regulatory matters, outside of susceptibility, safety and emissions, getting answers (and answers that don’t change six months later) is frustratingly difficult. And this is from companies with a hundred million in yearly revenue up to billions. Sadly, it can be just as difficult getting answers from the company you’re paying to do the certification testing. “You’re doing the testing, how don’t you know?!?!?!” And god forbid they update a standard during design and development.

Not defending glowforge so much as ranting about a near 20-year pain in my side.

7 Likes

I went from march 7th to march 6th! Netherlands here.

1 Like

Good to know. I never really had this issue in Europe in in vitro diagnostics but we weren’t innovating an entirely new category of device. Much harder if you are, which I guess GF is doing. Sounds like they were operating on shoddy information in the beginning and someone set them straight, hence the design change.

I better get my air extraction sorted. At this rate, I’ll run out of time heh!

Unless it’s because a standard has been updated I’ve never had any real hardware-related issues; those are all pretty prescriptive. Maybe they have some board layer acting like an antennae they can’t beat, or picked a part that was good for the old radio directive but not the new (as of last June-ish) RED directive; I just can’t imagine it’s hardware at this point. I would suspect it is something squishier like an ISO certification audit or something. Norway being pushed, without the rest of the EU, surprised me. I wonder if they thought they could get away with an English manual and at the last minute someone said, sorry no? Or someone was tricked into eating lutefisk and said, oh hell no they’re not getting a glowforge.

My current employer got caught in a squeeze when they couldn’t pay someone enough to audit them for an ISO cert. All of the recognized bodies were booked tight doing audits for the new US-Brazil-some other countries unified cert-thing. There are just so many things that can prevent you from being able to ship somewhere that don’t have to do with hardware.

Personally, I have the most issues with software standards because so much of what has to/should be done is vague. You know you have to do this, and that, and review it, but to what extent? The danger inherent in a pacemaker is not the same as a glucose meter, but the same standard tries to cover both. One person says you have to do this and another says that. Aaaarghhhh!

2 Likes

Germany, ordered a Basic on Day 1. Current estimate is Feb 20 (and hasn’t moved for quite a while).

2 Likes

Yeh I absolutely know where you’re coming from on the software side. We found this easier on the EU aside as it’s CE so you’re required to do the testing and sign off that it does what it should so we concentrated on functionality and chemistry. Once we’d proved our results would be good the normal electronics certs were fine. FDA 510K though… Yeh that was a different kettle of fish! Every time the software changed, complete a full V&V of the whole software as you don’t know your little change won’t affect this bit of the software and change results… Ugh!

1 Like

still feb 20 ?

2 Likes

Just now estimate moved to Feb 27.

my shipping date vanished after changing it from usa to germany… so i am in the dark now.

Mine just dropped back a day to the 29th :confused: grrr. I just want to know what’s going on. So close, so frustrating

Mine just went back a week to 5th March.

Back two days here… Come on, @dan, you told us almost three weeks ago you were running production on international units… Give us a reason why we should believe you!

1 Like

the good news is we can hope for another 20 $ dollar voucher :wink:

1 Like

For what it’s worth my “Estimated Shipping Notification Date” for a pro is now at 1st March 2018 to the UK (as of 5 mins ago). Original order date was 25th September 2015.

It was I believe for a long while at 26th February 2018.

Curious as this is now out of step with @espen_svebak who ordered before me. Presumably down to certification?

Assuming nothing changes not long to go now…

Why do I feel like I’ve somehow jinxed it with the above statement?

2 Likes

Our date was also pushed back a week.

Glowforge Pro Feb 27, 2018

Pushed forward a day, now back again. GF Pro 15.03.

I am still at: Glowforge Pro Mar 19, 2018

The tragedy is that I probably will at least have 300$ usd dollar in vouchers before delivery :unamused:

How do I keep track of the vouchers?

I was also pushed back again 2 days. March 8th, NL, GF Pro