Single use light saber? 
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Modern houses here donāt have attics or basements. I havenāt lived in a house that did since I was a child and lived in a Victorian era terrace house. Our house is about 25 years old and houses from that era have a loft in the roof space with a trapdoor for access that is too small for a Glowforge box. Some new houses nearby have bedrooms in the roof space because land is now at a premium, so they are on three floors.
Unless the box can collapse to go through a 22" hole I will bin it. I am not prepared to have it in my living space.
If my GF fails under warranty I expect GF to send me replacements parts and I will fix it myself. If they donāt I can probably fix most faults myself anyway. I donāt see how the ship back warranty and tube replacement is practical for most customers though. How many have storage space for something 46ā³ x 29ā³ x 16ā³ or are prepared to keep it in their living space for years?
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Iām with you on many of your issues. I was miffed having to buy multiple graphing TIs for multiple children. Seemed like a real racket to me. A simple four function Casio would have sufficed. Algebra and graphing should be taught by hand.
Didnāt buy another TI of my own after the TI-59 in the late '70s. It lasted me until I had a personal computer and could do advanced calculations easier in programs like Matlab than on a calculator. Iāve had a long string of $15 scientific calculators (usually Casio) since then. Now, itās just my phone when I need a quick number crunch.
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Maybe it could be a coffee table with a little rework 
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Ha! I love that you think we have room for a coffee table.
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Sorry, we live in 1800sqft with 6 kids a dog and a catā¦ but I have a large shop and land so that helps. But I like cozy:-)
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Maybe itās sturdy enough to be a table for the Forge with a sheet of plywood on top?
6 kids?! Geez! Must be a madhouse! I need the ālarge shop.ā We have an unfinished basement thatās prone to flooding so thatās a no go. The garage could be used as a workshop but, in all honesty, I live in a crappy neighborhood and Iād be afraid to put expensive things like a Glowforge in the garage.
Next house will be quite different. Weāre almost ready to move. Need to do a lot to our current house before we can sell it. Painting and new carpet top to bottom, move some stuff to storage to open the place up. Itāll happen. Just gonna take a while.
Both are building requirements in New England here in the USA but yes we have other warmer states that are on slabs instead
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How interesting! My house certainly isnāt new at ~100 years. But itās definitely common here to have both an attic and a basement.
Iām with ya! Itās literally wasted space. And thatās space I canāt afford to have.
Garages usually have overhead sqf. available. One of the ceiling mounted storage racks would accommodate the box + more.
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Our garage is internal to the house, so doesnāt have a high ceiling. I use it as a workshop and it currently is completely full of tools and machines. To make room for my Glowforge I have to get rid of two 3D printers as it is. I donāt want to get rid of more tools just to store the box!
Unfortunately it wonāt work for you, but may be an option for others.
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Have friends that own several Self Storage locations. They might be looking for a list of Glowforge buyers. 
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The drift of this topic to the early days of replacing the slide rule with a digital calculator took me down memory lane. I was one of the few non-engineers selling for Hewlett-Packard at that time. It wasnt the behemoth that it is now; Bill and Dave were still intimately involved. HP had no idea how to sell to ānon-engineersā, hence my opportunity. The HP-80 financial calculator follow the extraordinary success of the HP-35 scientific slide rule replacement. The HP-80 quickly became the standard in pocket calculating for bankers, bond managers, mortgage brokers, and real estate agents because books of ātablesā no longer needed to be referenced to find a monthly mortgage payment or yield-to-maturity. All to often I got calls from real estate attorneys who had to argue with banks about amortization tables. Calculating 10 digits to the right of the decimal was not something banks did, but the inaccuracy of bank calculations accumulated over 360 payments did make a slight and explainable difference.
Perhaps one of HPās biggest product development blunders was the HP-01. That model designation had been reserved for almost 40 years for a spectacular product and is a prime example of a company loosing its way, though temporarily. HP made technological wonders. Never inexpensive, but always engineered to near perfection. And so with the success of the early HP calculators, significant investment was made miniaturize a calculator. The HP-01 was bornāa wrist calculator, 200-year calendar, and time keeperānot because there was a need, just because they could.
The decision was made to sell the HP-01 through fine jewelry stores along side the Rolexs. It came in stainless steel, silver, and gold, something like $595 to about $2500, and there was no ladies version. It weighed over 6 ounces and the joke was that you had to alter all of your dress shirt cuff to fit over it.
It was very cool and a lot of techies wanted one. Unfortunately, when I called on fine jewelers often I heard āyou represent who?ā, āhow long have you been watch makers?ā, and āyour margin in totally unacceptable.ā Most jewelers are not engineers and cool to them were diamonds and a Swiss movement.
Since corporate management had all convinced themselves of the demand for this product, no heads rolled at that level with the quick demise of HP-01. It was rumored that dies, manufacturing equipment, and documentation for the HP-01 were destroyed so no one could would have access to the miniaturization technology developed by HP for this product. Kind of like Lockheed destroying the dies used to build the SR-71 Blackbird.
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I really canāt remember (or maybe I blocked it)ā¦ āAlgebra 2ā sounds about right.
Thatās about right. And I did not do particularly well on the math section of the SATs (maybe partly due to a poor understanding of the calculator?) I think I scored somewhere in the low 500s, whereas I scored in the upper 700s on the reading/writing/comprehension section.
The first several times I heard it mentioned, I didnāt pick up on the people saying āRā, I thought they were saying āourā and I was just missing something. But R is in use, at least with some small companies like Facebook, Google and Twitter.
http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2014/05/companies-using-r-in-2014.html
University of Colorado at Boulder. Go Buffs.
Just barely, but yeah. I think that makes you Late Gen-X, and I think I am considered a āCusp-Millennialā. Class Of '99.
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I graduated in '96. None of my classes required a graphing calculator. (But we were permitted to use them if we did buy them.)
I do remember my math teacher reviewing a new crop of textbooks and complaining that they all were full of instructions on using TI-82 calculators. I believe he ended up convincing the school to stick with existing textbooks rather than buying new ones that year. Iām sure the administration was thrilled to save some money on math textbooks.
Apparently Texas Instruments had made a deal with all the textbook publishers to feature their calculators. So Iām not surprised that someone who graduated in '99 would have ended up in courses that ārequiredā a TI calculator.
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I predate you a bit 
I remember the noise about using calculators in class (and then again on tests) and whether it was āfairā. As well as all of the ākids arenāt going to learn the math, theyāre just going to learn the calculatorā which I have to admit is somewhat true - more today than then simply because kids start with the calculator vs. having it added as a tool later on.
Now weāve come around to what calculator is approved. Gotta love progress 
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Texas has a statewide uniform book buying program and a board to approve books for it. As Texas buys a lot of schoolbooks, books approved there are used lots of places. So if Texas Instruments gets into a Texas approved math schoolbook, bingo to TIās bottom line.
Our calculus math teacher recommended a programmable calculator, but one was never required. I received an HP for Christmas my senior year (and it had a Northwest Airlines property sticker on the back so mom must have found it used.) It had an alpha keyboard so in college I programmed in definitions and key terms for classes that werenāt math or science classes but for some reason allowed calculators. Saved a lot of studying.
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Class of 80ā¦ Calcuā¦what? We had pencil and paper 
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