As December looms ever closer, and having experience in product design and release, I assume that right now GF is prioritizing software features for release day. What promised features will and will not be available on delivery day?
2 Likes
Their main goal is to have everything promised at launch working well at start of delivery. You can see those on the main page.
2 Likes
They have repeatedly said something along the lines of they’d rather delay shipping (again) than send out something sub-par. I believe that the full feature-set will be working at shipment.
NOTE: Although extremely rare, I could be completely wrong.
7 Likes
How often are you partially wrong? 
3 Likes
I think they were referring to hardware. Having spent a long career in software product development, it’s incredibly common for software to ship without all of it’s planned features available. When coupled with hardware the hardware always takes priority because once it’s shipped you’re stuck with it. Cloud-based software is a lot easier to continue to update after release.
Some features we haven’t heard much about lately:
-2-sided engraving: haven’t seen an example or any indication that it works yet
-2.5d/3d engraving: Last time this was talked about was October last year
-pass-through: We know it’s hardware feature, but we’ve not seen it in action, probably because the optical recognition isn’t quite there yet
2 Likes
Correct, we would ship even if some of the software features were not yet released (although we’re working hard to make that not the case). As far as hardware, I don’t believe we have any missing features; our work is all a matter of reliability, precision durability, passing tests, etc.
If there are any features that are unavailable when your Glowforge is ready for delivery, we’ll let you know before you provide your shipping address and confirm that you want your machine delivered.
18 Likes
Oh no, don’t get me wrong, I’m desperate to get my machine! Was more a general question, thanks for the note!
1 Like
I think this is the definitive answer we’ve been looking for.
4 Likes
This is exactly what I wanted to hear.
fair enough, glad the hardware is moving beyond the, “Oh, crap! Now how are we going to do that?” phase of iterations 
3 Likes