Didn’t they say that the cameras take nine images and stitch them together for increased placement resolution?
Interesting they fix the corner over burn problem in exactly the way I proposed yesterday: Pre-Release | I am Groot
Odd he said it was 45W, which I have only seen on Glowforge Pro before. Their web advert says 40W.
Is it really shipping now?
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They say that expected tube lifespan is 2 years WITH water cooling, and GF 2 years WITHOUT. That says something about tube quality.
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The Forge is liquid cooled too.
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GF cooling is internal. A big advantage in my book. It does seem to make it very noisy though.
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I wonder if the Muse has a chiller integrated into the cooling system, like the Pro has (but not the basic).
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It must have a large, front-mounted, air-cooled radiator full of coolant that in turn cools the water that is pumped through the laser, because he compared the water-cooling system in the Muse to the oil in an automobile engine.
…Unless I’m missing something about how cold water lubricates the gears and pistons of a laser tube, and carries away all the metal shavings and crud. 
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edit: the cw-5000 water chiller is apparently just an air-cooled radiator full of anti-freeze with a small compressor and a pair of fans. So the cooling system in the muse is closer to the a/c system in a car, and not at all like the oil system.
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I found the bigger z axis and the rotary options exciting but when you add in the cost of those items, you are getting up in the range of some of the Universal lasers that have been around for years and have a pretty good reputation. If the price for a fully equipped Muse really is close to a similarly spec’d Universal, I’d choose the Universal. If not for those features, I’m still intrigued by the reliability and ease-of-use promises of the Glowforge. I’ll continue to keep my eye on the Muse but, at this time, I don’t believe it meets my needs better than the other lasers.
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My bad 
But still internal cooling is “cooler”, you got it? Cooler 
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Cloud software upgrade might be considered a downside by some - There are countless stories of new upgrades messing with some previously working workflow/functionality that you are at the mercy of the manufacturer. The ability to upgrade software certainly is a must, but the control of when and why upgrade is better when the end user is in control.
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It might be running a perimeter to check for obstacles perhaps?
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That’s a very good point. I always panic when a new version of Matlab comes out. Often breaks old programs.
That’s the danger of early promotion of new ideas before you’re shipping. You’ve provided something for the competitors to aim for. Now if a competitor can short-circuit the dev process somehow and deliver 80% of what you’re promising earlier than you can deliver your 100% solution you’re at risk of losing sales. If the competitor does 80% + some things you won’t be doing with your “100%” solution, they start to look like the folks defining the market & the product.
That’s why you can’t be too late in delivering.
If this were the same price as a GF, I wonder how many people would take it rather than wait. They give up some stuff but they get other stuff and they get it now. FSL missed the boat by pricing it much higher than the GF. This also puts pressure on GF to deliver this summer - otherwise another delay starts to get weighed against getting the Muse then vs waiting for Godot. It’s always a tough call on how much to reveal how soon and there is never a right answer that’s obvious at the time. History tells whether someone was right or not. I don’t envy Dan and his team 
It is a derivative of their existing line in new clothes, but there’s enough cool new stuff to make it of interest to a segment of the market.
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Could be an actual chiller unit vs the pump in a bucket. I’m okay with the bucket for my $350 K40, I’d want an active chiller for a $5K+ machine. LO’s chiller is certainly cheap enough that FSL could have those included (http://www.lightobject.com/CW5000-800W-Water-chiller-for-CO2-laser-machine-AC110V-60Hz-P823.aspx).
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Yeah there’s a good chance they did, or maybe the cheaper cw3000 that a lot of the red sail clones ship with.
If done properly you should always have access to the old version for a set period of time until everything is publicly tested on the new version.
IIRC dan has stated this will be the case with glowforge firmware, that you could stay on an older version for a period of time after a new release. I could be wrong.
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I thought I read you or Yves got pushed an upgrade without asking for it.
We get UI updates occasionally. These are prerelease units though. !=production in a lot of respects. we went into this knowing were going to be testing and finding broken things and dealing with it, so the sooner they can push updates to us the sooner we can start trying to poke holes in them.
I know not to rely on the functionality of this machine 100% of the time right now which is a huge difference than trying to run a small business dependent on it.
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Video from CES (still watching it): (just in case you missed it above…)
