Cricut's USB exposes itself as a serial USB port, and it looks like the library is there to make SVGs cut for it.
EDIT: It looks like there is some sort of encryption between the host and Cricut as well? So Cricut makes it intentionally unfriendly to make it work with thir party vendors.
IIRC this stopped working quite a few years ago. Now it appears every device has a factory-installed key, and cut files are encrypted with that key by their cloud software.
The makers of Cricut have sued those who have tried to market alternative software before. I'm guessing they'd issue DRM related takedown notices for any open source projects. Won't block the effort but make it less useful to the non-technical audience that usually buys Cricuts.
Services that require a cloud connection without a compelling reason are rent-seekers. There's absolutely no reason why the client software can't do the calculations that the server is doing to "optimize" cutting, other than for the purpose of turning something into a subscription that most assuredly should not be as such.
> There's absolutely no reason why the client software can't do the calculations that the server is doing to "optimize" cutting...
Well, there is one reason: the cloud is more powerful. A computationally heavy task can run locally, but if uploading to the cloud and sending the results back is 10x faster, most users would probably prefer that. However, the best way to solve that (IMO) is to by default do local computation and have a subscription for cloud access.
Given how much compute is available locally today (especially if your task is amenable to leveraging a GPU) there aren't a lot of consumer-level applications that can't run locally in an acceptable amount of time.
Nonsense. It doesn't take anything more than an old netbook to "optimize" a set of floats that were already arranged as a series of linked coordinates in a couple of seconds. The typical desktop can easily handle several thousands of points in less than the time it takes to punt them across the internet and back.
A full page PDF of text with a few thousand letters specified as TTF outlines prints in realtime on pretty much everything while being rasterized into far more data than the cutting instructions for a plotter with a knife, and Adobe isn't grabbing at wallets for the privilege of doing so.
The other reason is that “the cloud” is a big dongle in this case. It makes sure you have a subscription, pay your fees, and you can’t run away with software you never have.
Also, it’s much easier for the vendor to manage the cloud-based software than on installed packages on your local matching.
"Own." This has been going on for a long time. A hacker space I belonged to in early 2011 had a Cricut and were using third party software for it (Make The Cut?). There was a big warning on the machine to not upgrade the software because Cricut had forced the publisher to drop support in a subsequent version. (ETA: details are hazy, but this is broadly correct as I understood the situation as a non-user)
Nowadays, it looks like you can use MTC with "your" Cricut, but you have to pay Cricut for the privilege.
I say fuck 'em. This isn't new, and it's not going to stop if people keep buying the machines.
What I don't understand is why a company like this doesn't embrace maker culture. They're already selling some seriously expensive hardware, so raise the price a bit if necessary to ensure a safe profit margin, while making all the software free and open source. The community would design an ecosystem of software around the Cricut for free and they wouldn't need to maintain a garbage web app that can't even parse SVGs correctly.
Their business model should be closer to 3d printers than to inkjet.
90% of the people I know are not what most hackers would qualify as makers. Think of like teachers, who use it at home after work to make something cute for their classroom or a friend.
By going this route, they almost certainly make more money.
Yes, it's like an informal representative democracy. Those who specialize in something should consider they are part of the minority capable of representing the interests of those who do not specialize in it - tech or otherwise.
The nice thing about tech is that it's possible for us to push back by hacking on stuff and opening it up rather than resorting to legislative tools, and this can have the same effect of forcing those manufacturers hand but without the artificiality of law.
Many of us really smart geeks thinks Stallman is the way. If we can't see the source code of every single thing we have, we don't have it. Free or die!
Many others of us think that it's more important privacy is respected. Smooth user experiences are more important than perfect freedom of code. So Apple is the way. You may not know the code on your device, but at least it isn't being sold to the world.
And still others think the Google/Facebook way is right. They provide great services to users! Yes they make money selling private data, but their free tools are invaluable to our life.
With such a divided view among the "tech elite", how could we really stop anything?
Agree that federal law is really the only hope for this kind of stuff, but that is rather hard to do for many reasons.
The path to solidarity is when we realize all of those ways have a time, place, manner where they are right, or good, or can be tolerated.
This is not about "the one, right way" at all.
It is all about what makes good sense for humans and that it continues over a longer period of time.
And many of these things are not exclusive.
Smooth does not have to mean closed.
Free with ADS does not have to also mean no privacy.
Etc...
Open, in the Stallman sense, is not always important. Open data vs open code, and machines, who owns, what is actually a rental, etc... can be resolved to something more livable without being draconian, or useless.
Our most esteemed economic mind wrote that businesses exist solely to maximize profit for shareholders. So that is the right business model for our economic system.
And it is not "the" right model, just a possible and I would argue short sighted one.
What they did was model up a rental business and seeded it as if it were an ownership type one.
That is predatory, depending on what experience level people are buying. They run a very real risk of not understanding what they are buying.
And that, along with better ways to value externalities, would render that model higher cost and risk, as it should be.
Anyone with sufficient experience sees those costs, risks and also sees them as external to the enterprise, and that it all comes at their own expense.
That expense renders the value proposition far less compelling.
Exactly why this bait and switch happened too.
Just because it is legal, does not make it right or ethical.
Given the rise in these trends, yeah. Time to revisit what is legal.
Yup. The current economic model encourages the path that maximises profit, ethical or otherwise. That might mean predatory behaviour and then blame shifting or just moving on to the next brand and dumping the company with the rotten reputation and its workers.
Until enough people are willing to adopt a different value system, we're stuck with this.
Because maker culture represents a very small niche within the broader category of people who enjoy making things, and the things that maker culture wants run counter to the company's own business interests.
For example, Cricut probably has a very strong interest in not opening up their devices, because, while they're the most popular consumer device in this space right now, they don't have much of a natural moat. Keeping things closed makes it harder for current users to switch, which, in turn makes it harder for a competitor to compete. Even if they have a technically superior product. This artificial moat is probably much more valuable to them than the lost profits from being less attractive to people who are into both scrapbooking and Hacker News.
This is unfortunately the current state of consumer hardware: "monthly recurring revenue" is the number everyone chases, subscriptions are the hotness, and you sell hardware as a loss leader to get people hooked on the subscription. Customers aren't a community you're creating, nor people you serve, they're a natural resource from which you extract dollars.
It's hard to compete against this. If you try to sell hardware at an honest cost, you'll likely be the more expensive option (or you can price-match but you'll have to reduce your quality) and the vast majority of consumer decision making is driven by the immediate price tag.
It's even worse if you're in the venture-funded world. Money is cheap and you're rewarded in the short run by how many "customers" you have, not whether they can be turned into customers whe pay you more than it costs to acquire them.
The machines are expensive but durable. Their main revenue streams outside of software are materials (which obviously have stiff 3rd party competition) and accessories (most of which are durable, even those that aren't have 3rd party substitutes). They have no other reliable way to extract additional value out of customers. It's not right but it also isn't exactly surprising they'd choose to go down this path.
> it's not going to stop if people keep buying the machines.
Reducing citizen's power to mere consumes, limited only to buy or not buy, is exactly what allows corporations to get away with these practices. It starts with one, and soon they all collude and you have no choice but to suffer their abuse or go without an entire category of products (spying smart TVs displacing dumb TVs, telecoms selling traffic data, etc.).
It's not going to stop until they're forced to stop, with legislation.
> Why should they be forced to stop making a product at a price customers enjoy?
When you ignore all the objectionable parts, it sure makes consumer protection look unreasonable, doesn't it?
Besides, the ultimate price consumers pay isn't any lower - it's just hidden, delayed, and probably higher.
Let me ask you - why shouldn't citizens be allowed to collectively bargain, expressing their terms in the form of legislation? If companies don't like the terms, they're free to sell their products elsewhere.
Before we jump to legislation, perhaps we can try to collectively not purchase products with such issues? A marked drop in sales figures immediately following a business decision would seem to me to be a pretty strong incentive to reverse it pronto.
We literally can't. Boycotts rarely work, because keeping up with what should be boycotted and why is a full time job, and people simply don't commit to it.
Printer ink still comes with DRM, as do tractors, and smart TVs still spy on us. If it were as simple as collectively not purchasing these products (without using legislation as a means of organizing this not-purchasing), these issues would have been resolved already, instead of getting worse.
Not that I disagree especially with the examples you have provided. Maybe I'm not talking about an 'organized' boycott in that sense. I'm more talking about individual purchasing decisions. It seems somewhat Kafkaesque that I can call my congressperson to request legislation to stop a business practice relating to a product that is voluntary, non-essential and crucially, that I am still willingly purchasing!
My wife and I are so irritated about this. She bought a Cricut Maker last year to make masks for friends and family. Custom images were cut for every person she made a mask for. Now, nine months after we bought the machine, we will have to start paying $10/mo for the same privileges we enjoyed when we first got it.
I bought a Cricut Maker just a week ago to see if I can save on buying a full-on laser cutter for some thin acrylic sheets. The machine and software are incredibly locked down. Can’t use anything to work with the Cricut other than the jank desktop app it forces you to use. You have to be a bit creative with custom cuts by uploading an image to the design software and having it threshold the image to identify cut lines. It’s workable but seriously it’s just a toy for scrapbooking.
It’s not surprising though. The machine is probably sold at breakeven like printers [0]. It’s a shame. The machine is decently built and can do a lot more.
Not sure what you mean, SideQuest (sideloading apps and mods, like custom beatsaber songs) has been working for the last 2-3 years. I haven't seen any of this hostility you refer to.
They have released at least two auto-updates which have broken sidequest functionality. First time I had to reinstall sidequest, second time they removed the way to access BMBF and now quest is collecting dust because I'm not faithful that they wont keep automatically installing breaking changes.
I guess I'll just turn off autoupdates once I get it working again so they don't break it a third time.
If they are pricing their hardware based on expectation of being able to rent seek, I wonder if someone could make a little side business buying their hardware, replacing or flashing firmware or control board, and reselling a open version of the same hardware.
This is just an instance of a whole class of problems which I doubt will be solved by movements like "right to repair". A higher level of approach is required to eliminate all of these issues in a generic manner. "right to repair" is an attempt to solve a whole class of problems but is fundamentally incoherent and will be easily circumvented. New ideas are required in this space otherwise the cycle will repeat indefinitely.
Isn't the traditional approach a class-action lawsuit? As long as the damages were high enough to cause other companies that might engage in equally nasty tactics to think twice.
Is that even legal? Cricut does not own those machines any more, the people who bought them do. So by what right can they restrict the owners access to their own property?
This is what I have never understood about 'clickwrap' on hardware (like my car).
I have already bought it...shopped, signed a contract, paid for it, agreed with a bank in some cases on financing it...before I encoutner or have access the the licensing agreement.
If I disagree with licensing can I juts take it back? Am I just precluded from using my smart driving features?
I bought it, you don't get to establish rules after the fact...
There used to be (possibly apocryphal but seemingly true) stories about people who manage to get the OEM cost of Windows refunded on a new computer purchase by telling Microsoft they did not agree with the terms. They were going to install Linux on it anyway so didn’t need it.
I’m not sure if it was official policy (out of fear that clickwrap isn’t enforceable if you can’t opt out) or if it was just worth it to pay off people who went to that much effort, but either way good for them.
The restriction is not on the machine, it's on the cloud based software that you have to use to send a design to the machine. (and there's no limit on printing designs that you create within their software, only on images that you upload and convert).
So technically, this isn't a limit on the hardware, but on the software, even if realistically it's the same thing if you print a lot of uploaded designs since you can't use the machine without using their cloud software.
So legally they are probably in the clear to put limits on the "free" software, even if morally it's the equivalent of a hardware restriction.
I can’t see that defence standing up if it is brought before a judge. The law isn’t always about enforcement of smallprint technicalities in favour of the unscrupulous. Equity law exists.
I'm not a lawyer, but I assume Cricut had their own lawyers vet this and that it's well covered by their terms of service. I'd be surprised if a court reverses this. But public opinion might.
I'm not a lawyer either, but I know that putting something in your terms of service doesn't give you legal carte blanche to deceive people. The law understands that most people don't read the whole ToS before clicking "I agree". This doesn't mean a ToS has no legal effect, but it's supposed to be for clarifying details. Any obviously major conditions (like "We might make your device stop working at some point in future and you'll have to pay us to make it work again") usually need to be stated in plain language, not buried in section 8 paragraph 9 of legal waffle. This sort of thing is what equity law is for, and why judges are paid so much - they often have to make rulings on what is 'reasonable'.
I agree Cricut must have had their legal team vet this decision, but that does not mean they necessarily believe they'd have a watertight defence if taken to court over it. It just indicates they made a business calculation and decided it's a good risk/reward ratio. Not many disputes make it to court. For example (pure speculation): maybe their lawyers estimated a 90% chance that they make lots of money out of this scam, just giving a few refunds and apologies to the angriest customers; a 9% chance that a serious lawsuit emerges (in which case they can probably just backtrack on the whole thing at some small cost); and a 1% chance that they somehow end up in serious hot water with a regulator.
Isn't that a key distinction? Users can create unlimited designs of their own and print (or whatever it's called) them as many times as they want. The restriction is on importing external files, but once those are imported, there's no restriction on printing them.
So users have unlimited use of their machines which they paid for and own, but metered use of pattern imports using the cloud software that they license but do not own.
I think it's slimy business move and even unethical to charge for what was once free, but I'd be surprised if it's found to be illegal.
How exactly does one create designs of their own without importing? How do they have others design for them without importing?
Secondly, the data involved in the entire process being open means we don't have to talk about these silly things. And that is what an unlimited looks like.
Actual open machines that take open data, are limited. Ones that are not open, that do not take open data are in fact quite Limited.
And I didn't say anything about legal. It probably is, and I'm sure they're team vetted it too.
I am all for revisiting what is legal and what is not, and or how we value things so Market forces determine that in a better way too. I don't care how it goes.
I care very much about machines being limited by software.
And be really clear, if there is preferred software for use with the machine, and it adds some real value of some kind, that's all fine and good. The perfectly Fair way to compete, and people will benefit from that value.
That isn't what's going on here.
The fact that the operation data stream isn't open, creates artificial value, but they're trading on. That'll ultimately comes at the expense of anyone who bought into this.
The real standard should be a decade from now someone finds one of these in a dumpster fixes it up and can drive it with whatever tools they feel like to make the data that they need.
Meta: I use voice input on this one sorry for the random capitalization typos.
How exactly does one create designs of their own without importing them?
I'm not a Cricut user, but Cricut said:
“Any project created within Design Space with images or fonts found in Design Space can be modified and do not count as a personal image upload. If users want to use images from other applications, such as a .jpg or .png, and upload those images to Design Space, that counts as a personal image upload.”
And I didn't say anything about legal. It probably is, and I'm sure they're team vetted it too.
Then I think we're arguing the same point -- what Cricut did is bad, but probably legal and well within their rights and it is what happens when people embrace closed platforms without understanding the drawbacks.
It's the same thing that leads people to buy $80 inkjet printers that only work with DRM'ed inkjet cartridges that cost $60 for a set of cartridges that contain $3 worth of ink.
Ultimately, work done that way is work done entirely within the scope and limitation of their software.
Ask anyone in design about how good those kinds of solutions are. There's a lot better software out there for doing design work. That makes all of what you put here a very severe limitation on how useful the machine actually is.
Yeah for what it's worth I don't buy those shitty printers either.
My favorite printer of all time with a PostScript printer my tektronix, made later by Xerox. You could literally FTP a PostScript file to it. And it without put a page. Loved it.
Printers pissed me off so much I don't currently own one. And I have a need coming up so I'm shopping around for some open basic printer that I can get used, or even pay a little more for new, that doesn't hassle me in these ways, and that can be driven with relatively open data.
Otherwise, it's cheaper just by few pages down then, or print where there printers available and deal. Which is exactly what I've done.
Unless things have changed with Cricut, I've always found their machines to be a huge ripoff – even more so than inkjet printers because at least those will allow you to print whatever you want. I remember looking into Cricut and realizing it was made to force you into buying designs from their store rather than giving you the ability to provide an SVG(or even gcode?) of your own. It's possible to use your own designs, but the support for it is terrible since they clearly want a percentage of whatever designs you end up buying. In other words, it's not a useful device to own. If you think you're going to use a Cricut to make things you can sell on Etsy or the like, you will be sorely disappointed.
> looking into Cricut and realizing it was made to force you into buying designs from their store rather than giving you the ability to provide an SVG(or even gcode?) of your own
In ye old days that was the case, then the explore line came out (with them advertising that you could bring your own SVGs), and it worked okay for a while... But now we're back to locked down.
I'm not super surprised by that. They're almost the only company competing at this low of a price range. I looked at laser cutters that could cut acrylic, and I don't think I found a single one cheaper than $2k or maybe $1.4k and that was for offbrand Chinese stuff.
These cutters live in a weird market segment of people that want to work with a complicated device, but who don't want working with it to be complicated. It's, in some ways, an inverse of 3D printing, which has a lot of people who revel in the complexity of the device. I love my 3D printers, and putting them together from scratch so I kind of know how it functions. I can't imagine my girlfriend buying something like a Cricut that she has to assemble herself.
> If you think you're going to use a Cricut to make things you can sell on Etsy or the like, you will be sorely disappointed.
Do people really do that? I always presumed that Cricut's were for one offs or prototypes, and that by the time you had an Etsy store, you would just order printed and cut stickers from China. I may well be wrong, I just figured there would be huge cost savings for doing so because of the factory's economy of scale.
I really wish the CFAA applied here. It's infuriating that if I got into Cricut's network and bricked their rendering farm, I'd go to jail for God knows how long. But they can threaten to brick who knows how many Cricuts and that's all fine and dandy.
All-in-one laser cutter on your desk. Otherwise modifying a 3D printer (e.g. Ender 3/5) with CNC/Laser attachments work as well if your budget is much lower. :)
Please note that Glowforge ALSO requires the obnoxious cloud to actually cut. And being forced to rely on "cloud" is how Cricut is able to bait-n-switch users and effectively demand more money for purchased hardware.
There is absolutely 0 reason why a CNC laser cutter needs commodity internet at all. And I'd argue that an internet controlled fire-causing laser is a Bad Idea.
Because Glowforge requires their server farms online, Glowforge could pull a Cricut at any moment's notice.
Glowforge is cloud-based too though, and doesn't accept gcode (ddingus's criterion from another comment on this post [1]). What evidence is there that Glowforge isn't just at an earlier phase of the same pattern?
One evidence is that glowforge open sourced their stuff, not saying it would be easy, but it does make it possible to avoid their cloud thing https://github.com/Glowforge .
I have extensive experience with a nice Roland at a local Fabian. And I recently bought an MH series for home projects with the kids. I’m pleasantly surprised how good the MH is for the money! Assuming $20/birthday present, the machine will easily pay for itself in a year of gift making. Plus I get the kids to help make their friends gifts unique rather than buying something from a store. That is priceless to me!
Mine does not. I think you would need to step up a level from the MH series with US Cutter. I seem to recollect that was about $100-$150 more for that capability. But check their website.
Though depending upon your tolerance requirements, you could manually align your cuts to a registration mark assuming your material was inserted squarely.
I've got Silhouette Portrait myself (think version 2), and that one prints under GNU/Linux too: it was a bit clunky to get going though (with Robocut).
I've personally been annoyed by this. About six months ago Cricut wouldn't let me open if I didn't update the software but my WiFi was having trouble working to get the connection long enough. As a result - I had to wait an entire day to use it.
the legal remedy goes something like " it is an offense to sell a device then retroactively reduce function or demand further payment beyond the original purchase price "
now we need the legal team and the class action, good thing for me im not a lawyer.
It's depressing to me that strategies like this seem to work for these companies. Any time someone tries to force me into a subscription, I hard cut ties, unless there is literally no alternative to the product and I need it for my livelihood. And in that case, good game.
For those looking for an alternative, Silhouette machines are affordable and can be driven completely offline using an open-source Inkscape plugin. (So you can cut any file type that Inkscape can convert to a path, which is pretty much anything. SVG, DXF, PDF, raster image tracing...)
Silhouette's proprietary software comes with a "store" like Cricut for buying designs, but it's a resource hog and you have to pay for an SVG cutting feature. Inkscape is a little hassle to setup but once you get it working it's great.
Dutch/EU users should probably keep a lookout for a blogpost later this week here[0]. Arnoud is a Dutch legal expert on technology related topics and I've been told he might be looking into this.
In short, the product was sold with the promise of unlimited free uploads. Dutch customers can go to the seller they bought the machine from (not Cricut) and demand to have this functionality restored or get a full refund (the plotter has to returned to the seller) if it cannot be restored by the seller. How this is then resolved between the seller and Cricut is not the customers problem, they have a 'contract' with the seller, not Cricut.
> will now start charging users a monthly subscription for unlimited printing, which prior to now had been free.
This is line is just infuriating to me; phrasing this change as a "we were giving you something for free before, but you should be paying for it".
Of course it was "free"; the thing had already been paid for. This is about as ridiculous as Samsung charging me a subscription fee for unlimited watch-time on my TV, which previously was free, or Apple requiring a subscription for the unlimited use of my Macbook.
Wrapping perfectly-functional-locally devices with a "cloud service" in order to maintain control needs to be reigned in. The cricut argument here of "[the cloud is needed to] optimize the design and the cutting instructions" is a problem of their own making.
The only thing that makes this different is you’re uploading to cricuts servers which do processing so I can see why they’d want recurring revenue for that. But it shouldn’t be forced on customers that have already purchased before the plans were introduced. That’s just scummy.
The servers doing processing are completely unnecessary. There isn't anything happening on those little machine that requires it be done that way.
Just a little food for thought:
Say their servers did a lot of processing to ensure that your designs were cut optimally or were successful along with the time or some other criteria. That's an actual real value-add, and people may be willing to pay for it.
How do we know whether it's a value-add or not?
Open data is how we know. Free tools and do those job perfectly well. We've got a ton of them. None of this is new.
A few apps have done this and they only did it to take a full advantage of the pandemic. Two of my daily driver apps went this route during the pandemic (that is more fuckup when you think about it) and I uninstalled it immediately. One app took really cool features and completely nerfed/degraded it and hide it behind the subscription. Seriously, they put the crippled feature behind a subscription, wat the...
> Wrapping perfectly-functional-locally devices with a "cloud service" in order to maintain control needs to be reigned in. The cricut argument here of "[the cloud is needed to] optimize the design and the cutting instructions" is a problem of their own making.
Yeah, this is why it "prior to now had been free". They were basically packaging unlimited uploads into the hardware (which is almost universally a stupid idea). They did bring this on themselves.
I'm curious why the opted for cloud optimization. Is it too hardware intensive for their target audience? My CAD software doesn't struggle too hard unless there are a ton of polygons, but my desktop is probably specced more than the average consumer.
> Of course it was "free"; the thing had already been paid for. This is about as ridiculous as Samsung charging me a subscription fee for unlimited watch-time on my TV, which previously was free, or Apple requiring a subscription for the unlimited use of my Macbook.
Here's the thing, though. It costs Samsung nothing for you to watch TV (they actually might make money if you watch more ads). Likewise, it costs Apple nothing for you to use your Mac. Updates cost them money, but that's a fixed cost. The amount you use the Mac doesn't make it cost more. Cricut is actually paying for these, so it does cost them money. Not saying what they did was right, but these things aren't the same.
One potentially reasonable answer is that their optimizations are a significant part of their value add, and they weren't comfortable letting people run that software themselves. If that's the case, this doesn't bother me as long as they add the ability for it to use an open format.
We need some kind of a consumer protection law that triggers a return window any time the functionality of a device that you have already purchased substantially changes (for a reasonable period of time after purchase). People who bought a Cricut should be able to return them now, and Cricut should have to eat that cost. If it's no longer viable to provide that cloud service for free, give people a version they can run on their desktop or add the ability to print open formats, or accept that a substantial number of customers are going to demand refunds that Cricut will have to process.
i would be a lot more sympathetic to the "Cricut is actually paying for these, so it does cost them money." argument if they hadn't also sued third-party software that would let you use your cricut locally without involving their cloud at all.
It's interesting that the moment RMS speaks about really crystalizing software freedom in his mind was when he couldn't access the software running a printer so that he could add a feature. It seems like every generation needs their own evil printer (or printer-like) manufacturer to radicalize the next round of user rights advocates.
This article just made me start a no-buy list: A list of companies I need to remember to never buy from. Can't believe I never thought about this until now.
Have you heard of Baumol's cost disease? It's the idea that if a sector of the economy experiences productivity growth, wages in that sector grow; as a consequence, wages in the other sector grow, because otherwise workers would flee to the higher wage sector; but because those sectors have not seen productivity growth, the price of what they produce will go up.
I think we are experiencing a similar problem in the world of new enterprises. Software companies can produce huge growth/profit/market valuations/etc. To attract the capital required to create the company, they have to promise and do everything in their power to achieve the same money-printing results as software ones. But they are not inherently high-potential as software companies, so the price and quality of their products suffer.
Everyone wants to be a tech company because that's the way to survive and thrive in the current capital climate. Banks, airlines, real estate leasing companies, hotels, etc. mimic tech companies, because otherwise, capital looks elsewhere and the company won't get funded.
With the amount of sophisticated open source 3D printers and the amount of outrage at such a change, I have to wonder why there isn't as much of a market for an open source cutting machine in the same price range. Clearly there's a lot of interest, and I was once dependent on a Cricut myself. It sounds like there's more investment being put into hacking Cricut's existing devices to be open.
I think when this is actually looked at that cricut is going to be found to be locally processing the images and the only cloud aspect is data farming.
Farming circuit accounts may amount to a small fortune after 2021.
> A Letter to the Cricut Community, From Ashish Arora CEO
> We will continue to allow an unlimited number of personal image and pattern uploads for members with a Cricut account registered and activated with a cutting machine before December 31, 2021. This benefit will continue for the lifetime of your use of these machines.
Cricut owner here. Immediate work-arounds that come to mind are packing lots of assets into one SVG upload. Once it's in Cricuts cloud you get copy/paste for free. The 20 file upload limit could be expanded that way.
I really wish more people would understand how such locked down hardware from phones to even tractors is infringing on peoples property rights. Software updates like this show with hard kick who really has the keys to the house. Sadly, I wonder how many people will take this lesson of getting burned and apply it to other devices.
Alternative Viewpoint: Speculating a little bit, this might actually the best thing for the end users. This device already depended on software and cloud services to function at all. Probably Cricut is not doing well financially (I have no data in this regard) and is in danger of not staying in business. This at least gives the die-hard users an option, and helps the company pay for ongoing support of the software and running of the service. Keep in mind they're probably losing money on the hardware.
There have been plenty of other companies who were not able to make the business model work, folded, and left their users stranded with hardware that is no longer supported and doesn't work. That's a worse outcome. (Juicero, Picobrew)
I'm not justifying hardware that depends on services like this - I wouldn't design it that way, and I wouldn't buy something like this. But here we are...
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