Early in my career (roughly 20 years ago) I heard horror stories of ARCNET, where you had to set the network address on each NIC using DIP switches. Of course, I’m nerdy enough that I probably would have enjoyed it!
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Perhaps this is too old a reference, but the Glowforge crosses the adoption chasm as described in Geoffrey Moore’s book “Crossing the Chasm”. It explains that early adopters are willing to put in the effort to bridge the gap between getting something done and the effort to get ready to get something done. Early adopters will generally forgive difficulties and may even enjoy the challenge to solve for gaps.
The Glowforge team is solving for the typical gaps for users so that they can easily get work done reliably and consistently with less effort. They’re also adding innovations to make the Glowforge a magnitude better than the alternatives. These extra efforts not only grabs the interest of early adopters, but also brings the early majority into the laser market who otherwise wouldn’t have been compelled.
Examples include: Apple 1st gen iPhone and LaserWriter printer, Waze mapping, Uber, Facebook photo sharing…
During this transition, early adopters may request customization features that can complicate the product for the early majority. They do this because they want to continue to tinker. The removable lens unit is an excellent example of how the GF team is seeking to bridge the gap between early adopter desires and early majority desire for no hassles. You can see examples of the clash when some talk of defeating safety features and modifying the case for larger pass through capabilities. If you read the forum regarding Chinese lasers, you’ll see comments on access panels to replace the current laser tubes with longer ones. If this were a car, this would be similar to saying that you wanted to know if the block mounts supported putting in a larger engine.
Cheers to the GF team for striking the right balance.
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Same here… it is getting harder to build a computer for less than fully built. And even I am tempted by the dark side (mac). Sick and tired of the BS MS is pulling these days. Win 8 I skipped (got the joy of having it on my wonderful work laptop) and windows 10 if a complete joke. Office has been in a downward spiral since 2000 or 2003, each new edition has more bells and whistles but less usablibitly/efficiency…but looks fancy…
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To be honest, I think Windows 10 is largely fine, now; it fixed the biggest issues with the win8 UI (forcing a tablet mode on desktop users, etc). That said, I leave windows to my gaming PC and use my Macbook for most things these days.
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I still build my own, but I don’t do it very often. I bought a Win 8 ultrabook and as I only used it to consume media it was fine. Then I upgraded to 8.1 for a casting feature. And things didn’t work so well. I upgraded it to Win 10 and now I have to restart, disconnect from WiFi and reconnect from WiFi before I can access the Internet.
My Win 10 desktop I have no issues with.
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It is pretty funny how often the Glowforge is referred to as “niche” in that group. I think maybe “untapped” might be a more accurate description of the GF population.
Great line.
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I married a Mac Man 12 years ago. He talked admiringly of the Mac Evangelists and - I think - felt like he would have been a ringleader if born a decade earlier.
With that background, understand when I say,
DON’T DO IT!
We feel like Apple is abandoning the computer business for phones, watches, and iPads. Mas OS isn’t getting better, and their hardware hasn’t done anything inspired for 5 years. They are overpriced and NOT cutting edge.
He’s a Mac fanboy; but he isn’t a blind follower. He isn’t in love with MS, either, these days. And he changes his Linux distributions way too frequently to even think of putting that on my machine.
The husband refers to this frequently. He especially goes to the bell curve.
And I’ve referenced the iPhone repeatedly in my vision of what the Glowforge will do. The Apple 1st gen iPhone was such a significant disrupter… we watched the keynote repeatedly and giggled over the changes that would come about. We couldn’t afford to upvote that with our wallets; and I think that’s part of why we’re so enthusiastic about the GlowForge. We aren’t typically early adopters.
But, to circle back to the original post, that 3D engrave is SO incredible. It’s going to shift things. I think it help will bring the maker movement more to the mainstream.
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For the love of god, please don’t start going back and forth on whether someone should use Windows vs macOS vs some flavor of linux. I’d rather see people debating politics.
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… or religion!
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There’s one thing that has me confused by the 3D engrave…maybe it’s obvious to everyone else, so here goes…
The GF can cut wood up to 1/4" thick, how was the 1/2" wood in the engrave piece cut?
Thanks!
edz
Guess there’s an Easter Egg in that one. 
Whoo-hoo!
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It can cut wood up to a quarter of an inch thick in one pass.
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Cmreeder: I started with an Apple IIe and was the only guy at my grad school with a personal computer - a Mac 512. I even possess a Microsoft Excel v1.00 floppy disk. I lived the revolution and they continue today in the world, but Apple seems a lot like it was before Steve Jobs returned as CEO - defocused and lacking exacting standards. When I was at AOL, I ran broadband product management and had to have both a Mac and a Windows box to test the service. The both had their crashes and hassles and each their particular UX strengths, but neither trounced the other. The BS happens on both sides. My fiancé was just mentioning that she hates to update her iPhone because they change the interface and leave her trying to figure it out again.
Back to exacting standards… It took guts for Steve to hold a release until the product was absolutely right. He would reduce the feature set down to just the most important things and then make those spectacular. I see a parallel with what @Dan is trying to do. So I respect that. Another thing that Steve did is that he would get his team to achieve the seemingly impossible in his “reality distortion field”. I’d like to see that with the GF schedule. 
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The only limit to how deep you can engrave is the focus range. When doing a through cut the depth is limited by the hourglass shape of the beam. I.e. if you try to focus at the bottom of the cut then the wider part of the beam hits the sides at the top of the cut. To go deeper you would need to widen out the top of the cut and make a V shaped trench.
There will be a limit to how steep you can make deep edges when engraving.
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Thank you, upon seeing this piece, I was hoping that someone would explain how it was a 1/2 inch thick. Do we know what the focus range is. I would assume a limit on the Z axis of movement for the laser head would also affect the focus depth limit?
I know very few people have a GF yet, but how thick of a piece should we realistically expect to be able to cut?
This is welcome news for me as I thought we were limited to 1/4" thick!
edz
The focal range is .5 inches. Unless they release another head with a different focal range (which they most possibly could!), .5 will probably be close to the limit at which you can cleanly cut through something.
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The Glowforge doesn’t have a moving Z axis. It just has a variable focus lens. That is probably achieved by moving the lens 1/2" up and down within the head but I wouldn’t class that as a Z axis.
I think thin cuts will be limited to about 1/4" unless you flip the material and cut from both sides or you cut a sloping V trench by using variable focus engrave to give 1/2".
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Apple vs Windows is religion
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I almost made the same comment :v
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Still trying to understand how this works. If a sloping V trench is cut, the laser refocused and another cut done on a second pass, would the resulting cut be a straight cut?
The alternative mentioned is to flip and do another 1/4" cut. How would the piece be aligned in such a precise manner?
Thanks
edz