Glowforge has enough horsepower to work offline if someone built the custom firmware, albeit without the features that differentiate it from a traditional CNC laser cutter/engraver. We started out the design with a minimal microcontroller but decided to bump up the capabilities of the onboard processor along the way.
Why "the cloud"? Certainly there's more than enough horsepower on my local PC and enough bandwidth in my USB cable to direct it, or even better, allow my PC to queue up the movement instructions and just hold them in a memory buffer in the cutter. Then I can use it without my internet connection being up.
I think that TechCrunch article makes it quite clear: they're using the cloud to make it harder for people to see what their product is actually doing and clone it. Basically, trying to get their laser cutter to work without access to their cloud service should be as hard as building a new one from scratch, by design, since they claim to have put all the hard parts of their system in the cloud.
Glowforge has enough horsepower to work offline if someone built the custom firmware, albeit without the features that differentiate it from a traditional CNC laser cutter/engraver. We started out the design with a minimal microcontroller but decided to bump up the capabilities of the onboard processor along the way.