The cloud

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Since the Glowforge is cloud powered I am beginning to worry about this.
I recently updated my iMac to the Sierra operating system and it is like dragging feet in molasses in January.
I am hoping to be able to revert back to OS 10.11 but it is going to be very painful.
Have there been any such problems with the Glowforge utilizing the cloud?

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The way that the Glowforge is likely to use the cloud is very different from the approach taken by Mac OS. Your Mac is likely copying large amounts of data to/from the cloud and this should speed up once your initial data transfers are complete. I’m expecting the Glowforge to use powerful cloud servers to analyze scans and use this to quickly generate a set of commands to send back to the Glowforge. This isn’t much data to transfer and this approach helps Glowforge avoid the need for an expensive non-upgradable computer in the Glowforge device.

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I’ve already updated my iMac to Sierra, too. I’m betting that @CharlesDarwin is right on the money about why your iMac has slowed down.

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Just to echo @CharlesDarwin, the two uses of cloud computing is very different. For the Mac you are basically using “cloud storage” meaning it’s saving a lot of your data on Apple’s servers. For the Glowforge it is more accurately “cloud computing” meaning it’s using online servers to parse and process the data then send it back to the glow forge to cut. In this case, and assuming they are using distributive Programming (using multiple processors and cores on huge server farms, the idea of cloud computing can be much faster than your desktop.

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I hope you’re right @CharlesDarwin. I upgraded about the middle of October and I don’t see any increase in speed yet.

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You may want to try some of the suggestions on this page: http://osxdaily.com/2016/10/04/macos-sierra-slow-fix/

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If you are at 4 Gigs and on a spinning drive, you probably need to consider an SSD to help performance. Memory is great to open more apps, but drive access times just show tremendous improvements with an SSD.

I still have one Mac Mini on Yosemite and one on El Capitan because I know they has been behaving.

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As I don’t use any of the Apple cloud services I seen no slow down on my iMac after upgrading to Sierra. I did have one application that no longer works, but it’s been on it’s last leg for a couple years as the developer was not keeping up with OSx changes.

I don’t expect any issues like this with the Glowforge. If there is not enough capacity in the Glowforge cloud environment, that is the great thing about using cloud services, they can quickly be increased.

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