They are making a critical mistake here by not letting users pre-order the next batch. It says "Sold Out" and you can't do anything else. They could make hundreds or thousands of sales over the next day or two due to their free launch publicity, but they're fucking blocking everyone from paying for it.
Most of the folks like me who would have bought something today while reading about it will just forget about it later. These guys are missing out on a huge opportunity.
> They are making a critical mistake here by not letting users pre-order the next batch.
It's possible that we can thank the FTC for this:
The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) Mail or Telephone Order Rule covers all merchandise ordered by mail, phone, over the internet, or via the fax machine. It stipulates that, if a merchant does not promise a specific delivery time, the merchandise ordered must be delivered within 30 days of the merchant’s receipt of the order (or the date merchandise is charged to your credit card). If the company is unable to ship within the promised time, the company must give the buyer the choice of agreeing to the delay or canceling the order and receiving a prompt refund. However, if you are applying for credit to pay for your purchase and a company doesn't promise a shipping time, the company has 50 days to ship after receiving your order.
In other words, in the United States, it is not legal to take pre-orders, and incur a delay, without offering customers their money back. So 100,000 pre-orders could come in, and in case of a delay -- since they are forced to offer a refund -- they could lose, potentially, all of their funding.
Imagine ordering parts for 100,000 boards and having 50% of your customers take their money and run, in case of a delay. That's a fairly unmanageable risk.
>Imagine ordering parts for 100,000 boards and having 50% of your customers take their money and run, in case of a delay. That's a fairly unmanageable risk.
Well assuming they're planning to produce another batch, they're already incurring some risk anyway. Allocating units out of that batch as pre-orders doesn't cost them anything, and probably improves overall sales.
Consider that the Parallella is not their intended product. The Parallella is a dev platform/proof of concept to get people to design the Epiphany into new products.
They're not likely making money on the Parallella - in fact a lot of the delay for the Kickstarter campaign was due to issues related to cost (e.g. the design is cut to the bone, and they managed to eventually get very good pricing from Xilinx for the Zynq etc.). It looked like they were in trouble for a while until they got a cash injection from Ericsson and Carmel Ventures early this year.
As such, while they'd certainly benefit from more exposure, and getting it in the hands of more people, they also have every reason to manage the process so building boards doesn't get in the way of actually evolving their chip designs etc. too.
I just received the shipping confirmation for my 16-core kickstarter board.
Since they are relatively low volume, it seems to be pretty hard for them to get the necessary parts from suppliers reliably. I think they need a huge customer for just the chip (and hence plenty of working capital), or a large investment infusion to be able to deliver more boards in high volumes. They seem to be focused on finishing out what they have sold so far before committing to any new sales, which is probably a good thing since it's taken them so long to just fill the kickstarter orders.
I would expect to see them on HN again in the future if anything positive happens, it's how I found their kickstarter, after all.
Being one of the backers with a 2x 16 cores on the way I can attest to the fact I wouldn't buy from them again. This is a dishonest company at its heart, its not the delay its the reason why it was delayed and the lies they told about it.
You should go check out the bitcoin mining hardware market if you want to see how well things go for a company that slips a ship date by even a week... charge backs, BBB complaints, mail and wire fraud investigations, lawsuits, bad press...
Most of the folks like me who would have bought something today while reading about it will just forget about it later. These guys are missing out on a huge opportunity.