For myself I would caveat with “don’t send them till you get the H/W right”. Even if initially the GF only did little more than cut and engrave with power and speed control I could find a gazillion things to do with it while waiting for additional S/W features to launch. Other than burning through my warranty period while waiting for added capabilities there wouldn’t be a downside. Of course there are always a small number of owners who will complain about what they see as broken promises on still evolving S/W, causing the rest of us to wait many, many more months while the S/W matures.
Hey I will gladly volunteer to be a guinea pig as long as the H/W is production ready.
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I agree with most of the last few comments. I can wait for the machine to be working correctly, and the local makerspaces to be guinea pigs so when I get mine it works flawlessly. The only way I would cancel my order before it ships is if I saw another company like Epilog integrate the same sort of optical recognition and camera features into one of their units with a larger pass-through slot, and it was ready to ship the next day when I pay my money.
Those things alone are what’s keeping me on the list. Anyone can make a laser. I want one with the pass-through (even though GF only has a 1/4 inch pass-though) and optical recognition so when I push the material in more on a continued job, it picks up where it left off. And I love that it has a camera in the lid for material alignment.
I don’t know why so many are having issues with not getting it in Dec… I thought they did a great job of letting us know that most of us wouldn’t…
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My thoughts exactly. I got on board about 1/3 into the pre-sale campaign and it was well-noted then. Not sure if it wasn’t made clear at the start or not, but it was pretty clear in everything I’ve seen about the GF.
I told my husband I was buying this for myself for next Christmas. August would be a welcome surprise. I imagine I’m about 8000 down the list and I’m international which will add to delivery time.
My kids are both terribly excited that we are getting one, and horribly disappointed that it might not be here for a year… my six year old understands, but my four year old seems unable to grasp the concept of ‘pre-order’. He now thinks I’m crazy for buying something ‘invisible’, but in the meantime he’s being kept happy by a bunch of laser-cut fluoro acrylic hexagons from the dead space in my last Ponoko order and a UV finger torch.
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When we placed our pre-order in September, we thought the FAQ was pretty clear that shipments would start in December, and in a couple different places it was spelled out pretty clearly that the initial shipments would go to schools and maker spaces.
I’m encouraged by news that they plan on getting all the pre-orders shipped in the first half of the year, I had previously expected it to take them the bulk of 2016 to ship more than $25m worth of orders. You figure that those first few batches will be fairly small quantity, as they fine-tune the manufacturing process and slowly ramp up production.
I really appreciate the thoughtfulness and understanding here. There’s only one thing that’s more important to us than shipping you your Glowforge on time, and that’s shipping you an amazing product. We’re working like mad on it!
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"We’re working like mad on it!"
Don’t do that, We won’t like you mad. 
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