On the pre-production status

[Rob. S. 1,634]

3 hours ago, Val said:

Eric choose to lock the thread "lies don't travel far". I wonder if the forum and/or the users will be "cleaned" in a future step

I wonder why they didn't close it the minute it was opened. It is their forum, they don't have to take abuse and slander. It's a strong point for them and their honesty that they don't immediately delete (not just close) such threads.

[Erik 1,487]

2 hours ago, Rob. S. said:

I wonder why they didn't close it the minute it was opened. It is their forum, they don't have to take abuse and slander. It's a strong point for them and their honesty that they don't immediately delete (not just close) such threads.

The community is for use by the community - it is unstaffed and it’s ran by the community. I am here out of personal interest only. We keep speech as free as possible.

On a side note, we have a perfectly fine help desk where everyone gets timely and personal answers. The community forums are not a place to reach out to us, or to request official help, even though the forums are under our domain. We mostly monitor it without intervention, unless if something is terribly wrong.

 

 

[sequestris 710]

7 hours ago, PanicBrothers said:

You must have a lot of time to think on your terrace 😄

 

I want a terrace! All I have is a cement block with a giant crack in it pretending to be a patio :(

[sequestris 710]

On 8/3/2019 at 5:44 AM, Erik said:

As for the state tax, we're importing the Pro1 to the US and later shipping it to you from a US fulfilment centre. We don't ship from a different country, so there will be no additional import fees on your side. The price that is listed on your order is the final price including shipping and the state tax for goods sold.

If you have any further concerns, please contact us directly at https://www.fxtec.com/contact/ as we don't provide support over the community forums.

Erik

IS this still valid @Erik

 

[Hook 2,907]

1 hour ago, Erik said:

The community is for use by the community - it is unstaffed and it’s ran by the community. I am here out of personal interest only. We keep speech as free as possible.

On a side note, we have a perfectly fine help desk where everyone gets timely and personal answers. The community forums are not a place to reach out to us, or to request official help, even though the forums are under our domain. We mostly monitor it without intervention, unless if something is terribly wrong.

 

 

@Erik, thank you for stopping in and your interest and for getting us whatever information you can, even if things are changing fast.

[silversolver 849]

13 hours ago, sequestris said:

@PC_

I'm glad @sequestris has a sense of humor 😉

[silversolver 849]

Does anyone know if the phones the worriers at US customs confiscated made it back yet? This represents a device pool which could be deployed to customers as soon as it is received, if it has not yet been.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a small matter, but I would like to know if Uncle Sam gave them back their stuff yet.

[Guest]

10 hours ago, Hook said:

@Erik, thank you for stopping in and your interest and for getting us whatever information you can, even if things are changing fast.

I thought that maybe you would be interested to know that for me it does not work anymore: Unofficial updates by Erik, "tiny updates because everything is going according to plan", "one batch has left the factory" but guess nr and size.. All quotes from Erik posts.. Nope. I do not like to be treated this way. However it is not a drama. There are indeed other problems on this planet.

 

Edited December 21, 2019 by Guest

[SchattengestaIt 557]

8 hours ago, Erik said:

The community is for use by the community - it is unstaffed and it’s ran by the community. I am here out of personal interest only. We keep speech as free as possible.

On a side note, we have a perfectly fine help desk where everyone gets timely and personal answers. The community forums are not a place to reach out to us, or to request official help, even though the forums are under our domain. We mostly monitor it without intervention, unless if something is terribly wrong.

I'm honestly sorry to attack you personally, since you didn't take these decisions. But what you are saying is simply wrong.

The support answers very fast, which is exceptional. However, since they aren't provided with any information, the "official helpdesk" is equally useless as the conspiracy theories in the forum. The support only tries to gain some time.

We even have a separated thread with official information (from Chen or you). Nobody gets their devices on Christmas, but it isn't worth a post? And don't tell me about the e-mail, which repeated what we hear every month.

 

Next is this Liars-thread. The information provided by you doesn't fit with what resellers said nor what you wrote yourself. In my view, this thread was going to get problematic and closing it would reduce the attention given to this problem. And it is a problem.

You will argue that it would have exploded into another spam thread and although you would have been right, I wouldn't agree that this was the reason to close it.

 

You see that I'm really unhappy with FxTec and you already know why. Every month we hear the same "broken promises" (some would call it differently), and every month it is exactly one month of delay. You could even make a long thread out of those and laugh about it, but many of us are not in the mood for laughing.

 

On a personal note I know that you aren't the one to blame. You take the effort to provide us with at least a little information which I am very thankful for. Still I'd wish there would be somebody actually providing ~weekly updates (in the forum) about what happens. This would calm us down a lot and would really reduce anger.

You can't produce devices in time (we both know that January won't work out either), but you can interact with your community.

[kthxbye 71]

1 hour ago, cmar said:

I thought that maybe you would be interested that for me it does not work anymore. Unofficial updates, "tiny updates because everything is according to plan", "one batch has left the factory - guess nr and size".. Nope. I do not like to be treated this way. However it is not a drama. There are indeed other problems on this planet.

 

To be fair you have to recognize that Erik is an utter badass if he is doing this on his own initiative. The alternative (if he was not doing this) is nothing but the update emails and support. That would be terrible!

I think fxtec's communication strategy makes sense given the intent of having actual pre-orders as opposed to crowdfunding. They might have been better off doing actual crowdfunding or recognizing early that the "real consumer order" thing wasn't going to work well without hiccups, but who am I to judge.

 

Edit: honestly imho the entire conflict in the community is due to some of the members feeling like they are crowdfunders, and others feeling like they are regular customers. It's kinda fxtec's fault for having gone with the regular customer thing while the background is more akin to crowdfunding. But if you realize and think about this dichotomy it should be very easy to understand each other and stop being so aggressive!

Edited December 21, 2019 by kthxbye

[Zamasu 258]

13 hours ago, Rob. S. said:

Because neither of the parties would have wanted a deal the fulfillment date of which would have to be as open as pre-order dates necessarily have to be. 

[Citation needed]

13 hours ago, Rob. S. said:

And I already said it – the few devices were what was necessary to get a foot in the door of those retailers. Otherwise the door would have stayed closed for the time being.

[Citation needed]

13 hours ago, Rob. S. said:

I'll cry some tears if I find the time.

Because you were wrong, or what? Just a bunch of baseless arguments, and when confronted with being factually wrong you just dismiss it like that. At least I now know I don't need to take you serious either.

2 hours ago, cmar said:

I thought that maybe you would be interested that for me it does not work anymore. Unofficial updates, "tiny updates because everything is according to plan", "one batch has left the factory - guess nr and size".. Nope. I do not like to be treated this way. However it is not a drama. There are indeed other problems on this planet.

 

Yup, that information is unreliable at best, And personally I mostly just ignore it at this point. And obviously there are bigger problems in this world, but that doesn't need to be mentioned with every mention of a smaller problem.

[rejujacob 77]

11 hours ago, Erik said:

The community is for use by the community - it is unstaffed and it’s ran by the community. I am here out of personal interest only. We keep speech as free as possible.

On a side note, we have a perfectly fine help desk where everyone gets timely and personal answers. The community forums are not a place to reach out to us, or to request official help, even though the forums are under our domain. We mostly monitor it without intervention, unless if something is terribly wrong.

 

 

This forum is the only reason that I have not yet cancelled my order. I wouldn't have been confident to wait for so long without the support of  this community...

Many members here may feel the same way and FxTec is lucky they don't have big cancellations, only because of this forum!

So it's time the company took more interest here and had someone dedicated to this forum.

But again, the way things are handled and delayed, no staff may want to be seen around here. 🙂

[ps555 22]

Sorry. I lost the track about the current status of batches and so on. (many messages to read, many things are happening here 🙂 )

As far as I know there has been a

"batch 1": arrived some time ago. US-part of this patch is lost space at the moment

"batch 2": produced November / shipping week DEC2-6 / replacement for batch 1 US and some others worldwide.

"special batch for retails": see long discussions. arrived retailers, got resend, arrived at lucky customers.

"batch 3": produced DEC2-6 / shipping week DEC9-13 / has been at warehouse on DEC 13, no stock assignment mails, but customers got the devices. Or was the DEC13-batch batch 2?

"batch 4": should have been produced DEC 9-13: nothing heard about?

"batch 5": should habe been produced DEC 6-20: nothing heard about?

 

Some infos somewhere: no more batches, still batches again and so on.

For me it is not important, if a batch is the name for a palette or container (physical thing) or the production output of a week (send in many different boxes or single packages directl to customers etc.)

 

So. As some people seem to be more active here: can you detectives bring a light more light on the batches-enigmas or productions-output-mysteries to get a better overview, what is happening? 😉 

 

Thanks a million!

 

 

[Guest]

42 minutes ago, ps555 said:

Sorry. I lost the track about the current status of batches and so on. (many messages to read, many things are happening here 🙂 )

As far as I know there has been a

"batch 1": arrived some time ago. US-part of this patch is lost space at the moment

"batch 2": produced November / shipping week DEC2-6 / replacement for batch 1 US and some others worldwide.

"special batch for retails": see long discussions. arrived retailers, got resend, arrived at lucky customers.

"batch 3": produced DEC2-6 / shipping week DEC9-13 / has been at warehouse on DEC 13, no stock assignment mails, but customers got the devices. Or was the DEC13-batch batch 2?

"batch 4": should have been produced DEC 9-13: nothing heard about?

"batch 5": should habe been produced DEC 6-20: nothing heard about?

 

Some infos somewhere: no more batches, still batches again and so on.

For me it is not important, if a batch is the name for a palette or container (physical thing) or the production output of a week (send in many different boxes or single packages directl to customers etc.)

 

So. As some people seem to be more active here: can you detectives bring a light more light on the batches-enigmas or productions-output-mysteries to get a better overview, what is happening? 😉 

 

Thanks a million!

 

 

Experience tells us you will not find any answer here. Erik updates are not official. Events do not happen as what he writes in his updates (batch 3 disappeared in the past weeks...). The other posts are just guess and interesting philosophical discussions. The only official info is you get your device by end of January.

Edited December 21, 2019 by Guest

[Raksura 270]

1 hour ago, ps555 said:

"batch 3": produced DEC2-6 / shipping week DEC9-13 / has been at warehouse on DEC 13, no stock assignment mails, but customers got the devices. Or was the DEC13-batch batch 2?

No customer claimed having received anything from batch 3, as far as I know. The one at the warehouse on 2019-12-13 was batch 2.

Batch 3 does seem like it started shipping before the 2019-12-11 [1][2 (3rd paragraph)]. It is also seemingly starting to ship this week [3]. If the combination of the two previous sentences makes no sense to you, don't worry, it does not to me either. Could be that the devices from the first batch 3 were the ones sent to resellers. Hopefully not, because the way this was presented would make that more than a little dishonest.

Whether batches are still going through the UK for the EU customers or are shipped to them directly is still uncertain (contradicted 3 days after the update saying so was sent). I am going to assume the update email made a slight mistake, and meant it was for US customers only.

Edited December 21, 2019 by Raksura

[Swond 120]

OR the batch 3 fullfilled those lucky shop stocks - that would be why all info about that simply dissapeared since Erik has been talking about that. Anyway - we do not know anything clearly 😞

Edited December 21, 2019 by Swond

[Rob. S. 1,634]

2 hours ago, Zamasu said:

[Citation needed]

2 hours ago, Zamasu said:

Just a bunch of baseless arguments

No and no. 

It is, for one, in other words just what F(x)tec wrote here in this forum, and, secondly, it should be obvious for anyone who at least has a bare minimum of basic logic and economic common sense. And it is really too funny that those who are most obnoxiously complaining about F(x)tec's bad communication don't even read what they write (and actually even expect others to read it out to them).

And this is the end of this discussion for me at this point.

 

——————————————————

I never wanted to follow this thread in the first place, especially not since it turned into a hate thread, but – and of course there are communication aspects which do deserve criticism, and this is one of them – even though the "Pro1 Pre-Orders Updates" thread was finally created, nothing much happened there and the few interesting bits of information which did come were still posted here, between two thousand other posts.

This is an awkward role for me, by the way. I never have been someone to defend companies and their spokespeople and bosses against customers (or workers, for that matter, as I'm an active trade unionist...), especially if it is perfectly clear that the company failed to keep central promises. More often than not, I defend critics in forums which are about gear I use. Because open criticism is the only thing that can help make something better.

But this case is different. There's no need to tell F(x)tec that they're shipping late. Or that they've failed to ensure the strict first-in-first-out order people expect, the more so as it was part of the promises, for that matter. And it is just plain stupid to suspect fraudulent activities behind everything, which does not help anyone.

Rather than insisting on our perceived or actual "rights" in the process of getting the product, we should think about what we can do, and what we can refrain from doing, to not only help them getting those phones to us, but also to stay in business. Even when looked at from a strictly selfish perspective. I, for one, wouldn't want to be someone who, in two years, being asked about that wonderful device I'm typing on, has to refer to its manufacturer as that nine-day-wonder that closed shop soon after rolling out their promising first phone. I want to see and possibly be able to buy a Pro2 and a Pro3, too. And I don't want to make that more difficult by complaining about things that can't be changed anymore.

Edited December 21, 2019 by Rob. S.

[kashif 350]

4 minutes ago, Rob. S. said:

I never wanted to follow this thread in the first place, especially not since it turned into a hate thread, but

Yeh maybe you shouldnt follow this thread then

Because you also lack to understand some basic logic and rules of business.

if people received emails, asked to pay right now to ensure their delivery by mid september, and here its already the end of 2019.

 

[Rob. S. 1,634]

5 minutes ago, kashif said:

if people received emails, asked to pay right now to ensure their delivery by mid september, and here its already the end of 2019

Yes, and I'm one of them. We know that already, F(x)tec knows it already. It's nothing to be happy about, but something that can happen with pre-orders, which is why they're called pre-orders in the first place. Especially when a new company sets up production for their first product. They're not delaying it on purpose, just to annoy you and the other loudmouths. Nothing is won, especially not for YOU, by endlessly complaining about it.

Edited December 21, 2019 by Rob. S.

[Raksura 270]

9 minutes ago, Rob. S. said:

Nothing is won, especially not for YOU, by endlessly complaining about it.

Actually, staff from F(x)tec reacting to our complaints is the main way we've been getting information so far.

Edited December 21, 2019 by Raksura

[kashif 350]

1 minute ago, Rob. S. said:

Yes, and so did I. We know that already, F(x)tec knows it already. It's nothing to be happy about, but something that can happen with pre-orders, which ist why they're called pre-orders. Especially when a new company sets up production for their first product. They're not delaying it further and on purpose, just to annoy you and the other loudmouths. Nothing is won, especially not for YOU, by endlessly complaining about it.

and nothing is won by people like you who justify and try to pretend black is white.

by the way you are wrong, i have won anyway

[rejujacob 77]

I think there's no point following it up. Even if they got it back, they may channel it to some retailers etc. At the moment they believe a blackout of detailed info to forum members is the way forward. End of January. That's all you need to know as of now! 🙂

[Zamasu 258]

2 hours ago, Rob. S. said:

no

 

2 hours ago, Rob. S. said:

it should be obvious

Funny joke, I really can't take this seriously.

[Rob. S. 1,634]

2 hours ago, Raksura said:

reacting to our complaints

That's why I said "endlessly complaining", not "complaining". 

[ps555 22]

OK. Thanks for your answers!

So I did not miss too much within almost 100 pages here.

 

The production status we know today is: 

batch 1+2 are out and a retailer-batch, too (maybe this has been batch 3 with the higher percentage of qwertz).
And the serial number thread indicates that there are considerably less than 200 devices out in the wild. (maybe 160, a quarter via retailers?)
Somewhere in the thread were "informed speculations" about preorders:

• maximum 1000 IGG backers (probable much less)
• about 10.000 oreordered devices with a big impreciseness
•  

Concluding: in the first month of real production the output / production status so far has been:

optimistic calculation / speculation

• 50% of the IGG devices delivered (100 devices send out of 200 IGG orders)
• 4% of all preorders delivered (200 devices of 5000 preorders)

pessimistic calc/spec

• 5% of IGG orders (50 IGG devices of 1000 preorders)
• 1% of all preorders delivered (100 devices of 10.000 preorders)

 

Another infos we had somewhere:

• they do not make a (xmas-)holiday-break. (but maybe the logistics, but because they send it directly to us, this should be no problem)
• there will be a chinese new year holiday break (beginning around 20th-25th january)

Open question for future speculations:

• is the output growing and how fast?
• is it plausible, they can

 

Based on this speculatuve range of output and possible growth, I can now think about these questions:

• will I get a Pro1?
• when will I get my Pro1?
• is end of january plausible?

 

disclaimer: this is based on the collected "informations" we have until now. And because these are very vague, I think it is better called speculation than calculation 😉

I posted these calcs/specs/thoughts, because this collection maybe useful to other community members. I hope FXtec will give us some more precise infos on some of these topics so the values can be updated.