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Comment by c0nsumer | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's just me and I haven't used it much, but my fairly non-technical wife has a Cricut and the few times I've wanted to use it I had absolutely no problem creating a vector in whatever program (Illustrator or Affinity Designer, IIRC) and getting it to separate the color layers and cut at the desired size.

The Electron app felt a bit weird, but I was able to accomplish the goal of cutting out my design at a desired size, so I didn't think any more about it. <shrug>

It seemed more to me that their app leans hard into getting people to buy vector designs through them, and making it easy for those who might not even understand what a "vector" graphic is, but it didn't seem to preclude me from cutting out my own stuff.

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> but my fairly non-technical wife has a Cricut and the few times I've wanted to use it I had absolutely no problem

This is this is one of those situations of knowing their audience. The machine is nice and does some impressive things for the price. Their software works fine for the people that the hardware was designed.

I too have designed things in Illustrator and imported them into their software. It took a bit of getting used to, but I've designed retail packaging with cuts and scores so I can create custom boxes that I was not able to find premade and having the custom design made was too expensive. Could the design software be better? Of course, but that software would be out of reach for their target audience. So instead, I've stopped holding it wrong, and work within its constraints.

> Their software works fine for the people that the hardware was designed.

HARD disagree. Go look at all the youtube videos of craft people finding insane workarounds to try and get it to do things outside of the narrow lane of accepted uses.

One small example. It has a pen plotter mode. But it has no way to

1) generate single-line text (like a Hershey font) - the only text mode is outlines.

2) fill outlined shapes.

Well, you need a font that is single-line by design. Then it works just fine. There are some single-line default fonts, too. For filling shapes, there is no automated cross-hatch or anything, that's true, but you could create such a pattern in a vector program.

I tend to think this comes from the Cricut being a cutter first, with the pen stuff a sort of also-can-do add-on. I suspect that very, very few of the device owners are expecting it to be a plotter.

> This is this is one of those situations of knowing their audience. The machine is nice and does some impressive things for the price. Their software works fine for the people that the hardware was designed.

Very much so. When she (my wife) was first looking at getting one I went down the whole "maybe you should get an X, Y, or Z instead..." and then began thinking about her having to learn a more complicated design package, seeing how cheap some of the different Cricut tools can be when bought on sale, and I realized that it probably was just fine.

Sure, it's not a pro level device, but it did allow her to easily get shapes cut out of vinyl or cardboard or whatever with very little ease. The software worked for someone without a background in traditional design software. And it really didn't cost that much.

Few years on she still uses it, it works well enough... And that's it.

I sometimes/often think/realize the HN crowd falls hard into the technical perfect-is-the-enemy-of-good, and a number of the replies here clearly illustrate that.

For my purposes, it was the thing that took the PoC to MVP to get physical things into hands of people. It took me from "never gonna happen" because of price to purchase minimum order quantities that I would never use all of in multiple lifetimes, or fiddle with a tool targeted at crafting/hobby world and get it done.

If I sold it today, I'd get enough money where ($purchasePrice - $sellPrice) > $valueToMeForUsing. That seems like a pretty good deal for something that did that job I asked of it.

As I said:

> impossible to use the machine except in a very narrow set of ways.

Congrats, you were using it within that narrow set of ways.

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