Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If you buy this, you are permanently relying on Glowforge, a notoriously untrustworthy company, not to Alter the Deal. You would be much better off to buy a relatively generic Chinese laser, especially if you have any thoughts about using it for any kind of business, even a hobby business, or if you care about using it for very long. You will get more bang for your buck, and you'll get some certainty that the thing will do what you need *next* week as well as *this* week. Buy this, and Glowforge still effectively owns it, because it relies on Glowforge's cloud service, which Glowforge is free to shut down at any moment. When that happens, you'll lose most of the distinguishing features. Of course, if you want to at least keep using your hardware in some crippled form, you'll be free to rewrite the firmware. Provided you don't mind voiding the warranty on said hardware, of course. Now, I want to make it clear that there's really nothing wrong with the *device* or even the *features*. I mean, OK, they haven't delivered features they promised 3 years ago to distinguish this from the "generics". They still don't have multipoint autofocus. They still don't have reasonably accurate camera alignment (Glowforge says it can be off by a quarter inch at the edges!!!!). They still don't auto-recognize of anything other than their overpriced materials (and they still don't have the promised invisible bar codes, either...). It's a lot of money to pay for a 40- or 45-watt laser with minimal intrinsic accuracy, a heavy reliance on software calibration, and little claim to do anything special or interesting. But there's nothing really *wrong* with the product. The main problem is that the thing totally relies on the cloud (and the software pushes you toward using Glowforge's "Proofgrade" materials, as well). That ties you permanently to Glowforge, and Glowforge has demonstrated total contempt for its customers. The contempt is "polite", smiling, "aw shucks" contempt, but it's obvious contempt nonetheless. There's no reason to believe they won't shut down service for these when they come out with a new model, or if they sell the company, or if they feel like it for any other reason. There's no reason to believe they won't take away software features you rely on (or Alter the Deal and start charging for them). In fact there's every reason to believe that they will, because of their past behavior. Their pre-order campaign started with a demo video that made it look like they had a nearly finished product, which they said they'd ship in 6 months (WITH all the above still-missing features). Then we got a series of "we'll have it in N months" promises. A couple of weeks before the N months were up, suddenly it'd be another 3 or 6 or however many months. And this repeated over and over. Never any communication before the last minute. In the end, they were years late. By the way, when the finally shipped the product to pre-orders, they Altered the Deal with a bunch of previously unmentioned, obnoxious, one-sided, unreasonable contract provisions you had to accept to actually get the unit. You actively agree not to use the thing in any way not described in the manual, so forget innovating. There's also the usual abusive boilerplate. Nobody under 13 to use the "service"... even though they loudly promoted the thing for home use based on features obviously only interesting if you have kids younger than that. Binding arbitration ('cause these guys *sure* must want to avoid class actions...). Glowforge allowed to terminate your service if you do anything Glowforge considers to be "objectionable"... in its sole judgement. They actually exclude the EU from a lot of their contract, presumably because the EU actually enforces its consumer protection laws and they don't want to be fined into oblivion for trying to pull that stuff. Still, their abuse of their international customers is even more amazing than their abuse of their US customers. Even later delivery, even worse communication, little goodies like the "design store" not being available... it's endless with these guys. It's hard to ever catch Glowforge in an outright provable *lie*. But Glowforge *misleads* people all the time. Avoid Glowforge, and avoid any enterprise having anything to do with its founders or major investors. They're not trustworthy partners.