Cricut is (was) a favorite hobbyist template cutting device for the maker set – give it a SVG-type pattern and it would cut paper, vinyl, etc. to spec.
They’ve recently decided that “fitness for purpose” is not a high priority for their product, by going full IOT crapgadget: Severely limiting its functionality, requiring cloud services for stuff that should be doable locally, actively removing features… and charging people a new monthly fee for using a product they already purchased at retail:
So fing tired of this bullshit greedy path to profits.
3d printing and drone photogrammetry cloud based 3d processing and storage are really pissing me off these days.
I feel your pain.
If Cory were around…
This sucks! I successfully lobbied our shop to get a Cricut cutter a couple years ago. Now I’m regretting it.
Apparently Cricut has slightly relented and is delaying rollout of this behavior until 2022, with vague hand-waving notions that they will not clamp down on non-payers quite so brutally. On the one hand, it is a concession; on the other, it’s a half-measure and it’s clear they’ve just transferred from the express train to crapgadget-ville to the local.
That might be, but this isn’t the first crappy thing Cricut has done. Until now, my biggest complaint was that if you upload an image file to use in a pattern, you can’t share that pattern with other users. Ostensibly it’s so users don’t “steal” copyrighted images to use in their patterns and then share them. But since the Cricut interface is so crappy, mostly I use it to import SVGs that I made myself. So, Cricut doesn’t allow you to share your own creations (if they include an uploaded component)! Completely ridiculous CYA that actually hurts artists rather than helping them.
Make him aware of it. Maybe he’ll write something on Pluralistic. DRM extortion clashing with the maker movement is pretty much the Venn diagram centre of his interests/activism.
You left out IOT vibrators! 
How can a company that sells fancy cutting tools to hobbyist crafters even be worth 100 million dollars? This whole Wall Street thing is insane.
and male “chastity devices”
If we can find people who are using the Cricut to manufacture sex play gear, it’d be Cory catnip.
I mean on the one hand I get it - they are processing your images in the cloud to generate cutting instructions and that probably causing them to lose money. (Cloud computing much like beer both a solution and cause of problems.)
On the other hand the fact they don’t offer any sort of offline way to do this is really shitty. I could imagine saying, “if you want us to process your artwork in the cloud you need to pay for it after a certain threshold, but here’s a local solution” then the community would be far more forgiving.
Makes me wonder how long until some enterprising hackers comes up with a solution for this. (And how long before they get sued.)
mostly 3d printing and ardiunos, though.
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