Cricut's Unfair Lockdown | Hacker News Reader

Cricut's Unfair Lockdown

makezine.com

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That's one way to encourage people to develop a complete replacement firmware, I suppose.

They also sued the third-party design software Sure Cuts-A-Lot and MakeTheCut into not supporting their cutters anymore. I have a license to the old version of SCAL which IMHO is the only way to do anything useful with a cricut.

(The irony is that Cricut gave one of their machines to our hackerspace, perhaps in the hope that we'd immediately spend our entire annual budget on a couple of design cartridges? Nah, instead I spent the price of one cartridge on some third-party software to make the machine into a generic SVG cutter.)

As far as I'm concerned, Cricut was a strong "do not buy" from the moment they filed those lawsuits, but now they've taken the coveted "worse than makerbot" scum prize.

Complete anecdata: the design team at a previous fintech company had a cricut machine. Head of security came down one day along the lines of "has anyone heard of cricut? there appears to be a keylogger on some of your machines". Made the design team run the cricut off an airgapped box.

I wouldn't touch this company or its products with a 10 foot pole.

As of a few years ago, without an active internet connection, any circuit machine is basically a brick.

What's weirdest to me, what's suuuuuuper weird, is they're just crappy little vinyl cutters. Vinyl cutters have existed for decades, they're cheap, reliable, and fairly straightforward to use. They're just not saturation-marketed to the JoAnn Fabrics crowd.

Most vinyl cutters aren't quite as plug and play. Kind of like how Dropbox thrived even though rsync is free and has been around forever.

Also, most vinyl cutters can only handle sheet vinyl on rolls. Cricut machines have a backer board that you can stick materials on in layers or put things like odd shaped fabric and cut it. So it's quite a bit more versatile than a standard plotter cutter.

You can buy the cricut board and shove it through a standard vinyl cutter...

I never thought of that. Though I'm not sure if most of those machines are setup to keep something like those boards lined up. Cricut also has optical sensors to line up the board. I'm sure some of the more expensive vinyl cutters do that as well.

Also, at around $300, you would be hard pressed to find a very good traditional vinyl cutter.

Ehh, the US Cutter MH series starts at $229, and I think that's quite comparable to the Cricut in capability. Calling either one a "very good" machine is straining a bit.

I have the 28-inch version and it's perfectly passable, had to replace a clamp lever after about 5 years and the PSU after 8. No laser locator or anything fancy, but it does the job.

I imagine that remotely disabling customers' previously-working machines for subscription ransom is at the very least grounds for a class action.

I'm not a lawyer but I would be unsurprised if there is a criminal angle to this, as well, as this is really no different from any run-of-the-mill ransomware.

Shockingly, they don't (yet) appear to have added mandatory arbitration or barred class actions in their EULA: https://cricut.com/en_us/legal

I started out thinking the same but doesn't it matter that their devices have always been required to use their cloud service? This seems to be a company pivoting from a free service with an upfront hardware cost to a subscription service with the same upfront hardware cost. At least that's how I imagine they will try to spin it.

They used to work just fine standalone. Have had one for years.

Would join such a class action if it existed, except the machine was a gift so probably don't have standing.

Let's not amuse ourselves by pretend threatening large companies with vague threats of lawsuits. They don't care. Lawsuits don't scare big companies. They have more, and better, attorneys than normal people.

Class actions are a little bit different. They are often undertaken and initiated by the litigating attorneys themselves if the class is sufficiently large enough to warrant it.

Why even bother talking about it? Cricut's PR people aren't going to read this thread and get all scared. They probably won't even get scared if the IS a lawsuit. I'm not trying to defend the Cricut people, but there's just no real reason to threaten them with law suits online, they don't care.

I'm not threatening anybody with anything, I think perhaps you have misunderstood my comment.

I actually think that the thing that can scare a big company the most is lots of little lawsuits. Or even lots of arbitration cases. There was an SV company not too long ago trying to get a judge to convert all their arbitration cases into a single class action. Because they were straining under the cost of so many individual cases.

I think this is great. Hopefully, the market will put them out of business and the industry will see this isn’t a path forward. I’m sure that it could be a valuable business model for Cricut but I think torching their brand might overtake any add-on revenue this will produce. Hopefully, anyway...

I am not a big fan of the Cricut.

I do papercrafts and like the idea of a machine that can cut complex shapes is appealing but I don't like the quality of the work it does. A real matte cutter cuts at a 45 degree angle which looks very different (e.g. no shadow) from the 90 degree cut.

That said I hate the whole "matte and frame" thing particularly when glass is involved and a big goal behind my work is developing a light weight alternative scaled to the economics of ink jet printing.

Have you tried any of the alternatives? My wife has a Silhouette and likes it quite a bit.

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