Apologies for the tangent, but is this working again? There were some UI modifications quite awhile ago that broke the beep mod. There was some discussion of updating it to get it working again, but I never saw that reach a resolution. I was going to try to fix it myself, but it hasn’t made it to the top of my priority stack yet. having just done a run of holiday cards, I definitely miss it.
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I submitted an updated version to @chris1 a while back, he’s been busy and hasn’t approved the update.
I’m not at home or I’d just give you my working version until Chris approves it (or requests changes to my update).
I’ll ping you later this week and set you up. (Tell me if I forget lol)
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Oh yeah. Thanks for the reminder. I’ve only been sitting on it for 9 months… I’ll make another attempt tonight.
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I haven’t ever seen evidence that ever factored into their decisions. They have a sticky product - once you’ve got a fair number of designs loaded or you use their premium tools to create designs in the app, it’s extremely difficult for a non-technical user to switch platforms.
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I already decided not to buy a replacement from GF. I’ve got two (one working, one for parts) but I’ve already purchased a different machine. All of my designs are on my computer so I don’t care about the rest of the GF ecosystem. But we’re not the target market so it won’t matter to them until that market turns on them and @evansd2 is right - inertia.
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What will be the result? Just a “No Premium, no Snapmarks” or are you grandfathering current Snapmark users?
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And the answer is (drum roll please)
“No Premium, no Snapmarks”
Here is the reply from my inquiry to support on my (formerly) snap mark enabled first day machine:
“Thank you for reaching out regarding the Snapmark feature on your Glowforge Pro. I understand your concern about the Snapmark feature being disabled on your machine, especially after being informed that it would remain enabled for the life of the machine.
Snapmark was initially a beta feature and was not guaranteed to be a permanent feature on all machines. With the recent updates and the rollout of new features, Snapmark is now part of the Glowforge Premium subscription. This change means that Snapmark is no longer available by default on machines that do not have an active Glowforge Premium subscription.
If you are interested in continuing to use Snapmark, you might consider subscribing to Glowforge Premium, which offers a range of additional features and benefits, including the Snapmark tool.
Best Regards,
Ray N
Glowforge Customer Care
+1-888-8GLOWFORGE “
As a side note, how do you even dial the phone listed above?
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well that sucks. and that’s an old-school way of making a number memorable. use the letters under the numbers on your dialpad. but it’s a pretty lame one since it’s 14 characters instead of 10.
1-888-845-6936 (the rest of the letters are superfluous).
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See this post. Tired of crossposting.
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Hi Brandon,
Curious if there are any updates here? I’ve tried working with customer support, but to be honest, it has been more frustrating than supportive. To start, when I first called them, the person I spoke to didn’t know what Snapmarks were. I explained them to him, and then we switched to email so I could show him through pictures, and he said he’d look into them and get back to me.
When he did get back to me, he said he couldn’t find any record of me being a customer in the GF system and insisted I must have used a different email address to sign up (I didn’t). I gave him all kinds of other things he could use to look up my account, order numbers from previous Proofgrade orders, the serial number on my machine, etc. but to no avail. I even sent him screenshots of the emails I got when I first bought my GF and the email I got in 2018 inviting me to be a beta tester for the Snapmarks.
When he finally got back to me about the Snapmarks, he basically just copy and pasted Dan’s recent announcement about them…
So I then, as per your suggestion above, asked him if there was a ticket number for my initial support call, along with a couple other questions regarding whether or not I am, in fact, a GF customer, and when he responded he answered none of my question. So I’m replying to you because I don’t know where else to go…?
My apologies for pestering you, especially on this open forum. Any info/update you can give regarding the beta testers of Snapmarks is very appreciative, especially at this time of the year.
Thank you,
Austin
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@Brandon.B Just checking in. It’s been another week on this. As somebody who received one of the very first few machines off the line, I am beyond troubled by this. (And maybe I should say, that’s an understatement.) I’ve been using Snapmark for nearly a decade now. It’s part of my workflow. I don’t even think about it. You’ve been using me all this time to gather data on how we use Snapmark and how well it works. And now you (Glowforge) do this to us right before the holiday rush? Shame. Seriously. Shame.
Anyway… Please let us know the ultimate decision.
Thanks!
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Late to the party, as usual. I rarely use my laser these days, but when I do, I always see the various snapmark jigs hanging on the wall behind it, reminding me that I don’t like to be nickel-and-dimed. After the non-delivery on useable open sourced firmware (to quote Dan: “Once you buy it, it’s your machine, you can do what you want with it”) and non-existing tube replacement (another quote: “We will be shipping replacement tubes!”) - both promises without which I wouldn’t have bought a GF - I’m really only waiting for the machine to give up the ghost so I can replace it with something that is fully under my control. I doubt I’ll find a buyer easily in Switzerland - the expression “going Glowforge” is used in local maker circles as a metaphor for this particular variety of moving things behind subscriptions (not to use Cory Doctorow’s “e”-word…)
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Anytime you have a direct quote it’s always good to include sources to back them up. Not that I’m doubting you exactly but just for thoroughness I decided to go back and try to find direct quotes that match what you are attributing to Dan here. This is what I found:
Claim:
Sources:
There are many other posts where they start to walk this back, and they give reasons for it. I’ll leave that as an exercise for people to go find on their own.
Claim:
Source:
The final word on the firmware release is here:
None of this is to “catch out” glowforge on any of this: these were early ideas and ambitions and were always subject to change. The claim that glowforge was baking the cost of cloud services into the price of their machines didn’t and could never have aged well, Glowforge had no way to know how cloud services and their economy would change over the years.
Anyway. There’s a lot in each of these threads, if you want to dig in and get a glimpse of what they were thinking and what we users were hoping for it’s fun to look at that snapshot.
Lastly:
This isn’t directly related to your post but it is an interesting sentiment that I think it’s important to remember:
The whole thread is worth reading, it’s a glimpse into what people were thinking at the time. Bear in mind that this was in 2015 which is very early days, but it is pretty good advice.
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Thanks for doing the due diligence I lacked, much appreciated. In my defense, I was eating my lunch sandwich while writing my post 
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@Brandon.B, buddy. You still with us? What’s the word?
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To quote (purportedly) a big movie producer’s response to George Lucas’ “Star Wars” pitch, “I don’t have a good feeling about this…”
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I have given that a fair amount of thought, and I believe I could create a model that would allow for in the field tube replacement. and lose none of the functionality.
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(ominous deep voiceover)And that’s the last time anybody had ever heard of Brandon B.(/ominous deep voiceover)
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Has anyone been offered anything? Privately?
I find it odd that they’ve just gone radio silent on us.
@Brandon.B @dan Have your teams had a chance to discuss this at all? Any update coming soon?
Let us know, thanks!
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