Panic’s Playdate handheld will not ship until eventually early 2022 due to battery troubles – TechCrunch
When Worry initially introduced pre-orders of its cute minor retro-influenced handheld gaming gadget, Playdate, it envisioned the to start with 20,000 models to ship by the stop of 2021 — just in time, they hoped, for the holidays. That to start with batch bought out in underneath 20 minutes.
Unfortunately, due to previous-minute battery element concerns, even those to start with orders have now slipped back to 2022.
In an update email despatched to impacted pre-orderers, Panic writes:
As our 1st 5,000 finished Playdate models arrived at our warehouse in California for 2021, we commenced to test a handful of of them. We immediately grew to become involved that some of them weren’t supplying us the battery existence we anticipated. Playdate’s battery is made to previous a pretty lengthy time, and generally be ready for you, even if not made use of for a when. But that was not the circumstance: in simple fact, we located a amount of units with batteries so drained, Playdate wouldn’t energy on at all — and could not be billed. Which is a battery worst-situation scenario.
This promptly turned into a months-very long, all-palms-on-deck research worry-ball, and we halted production at the manufacturing unit.
The summary?
We created the difficult, highly-priced choice to swap all of our existing batteries with brand new ones, from a fully distinctive battery supplier.
Stress goes on to notice that they’ve obtained new batteries and they are now doing work as hoped … but shipping every little thing again to Malaysia, swapping out the batteries and receiving them back again across the ocean is likely to acquire a while.
Meanwhile, the enterprise also found that the CPU it planned to use for all Playdate units transported in 2022 is now backordered for literal several years.
With a lot of pre-orders in put, we straight away positioned an buy at our manufacturing unit for all the parts desired for 2022 units and over and above. The response was … sobering. Numerous of our sections have been delayed significantly. In reality, we just cannot get any more of Playdate’s current CPU for — you are not heading to consider this — two decades. Like, 730 times.
Maybe you have read about the “global chip shortage” everyone’s chatting about? We’re right here to say it is extremely true. Covid-19 brought about an ever-cascading set of all over the world supply chain failures that are primary to many, several electronic parts becoming basically … gone.
To function all-around this, the corporation has redesigned Playdate’s boards to assistance a various CPU — just one they say is additional easily available, but that they really do not hope to effects the way the handheld is effective in any way that the user could recognize.
The complete textual content of Panic’s hold off announcement is accessible below.
The corporation suggests that despite the fact that models 1 by 20,000 have slipped into 2022, they really don’t presently expect orders positioned as a result considerably to slip into 2023.
As constantly, components is tricky. Increase a pandemic to the blend, and, well….
When Worry initially introduced pre-orders of its cute minor retro-influenced handheld gaming gadget, Playdate, it envisioned the to start with 20,000 models to ship by the stop of 2021 — just in time, they hoped, for the holidays. That to start with batch bought out in underneath 20 minutes.
Unfortunately, due to previous-minute battery element concerns, even those to start with orders have now slipped back to 2022.
In an update email despatched to impacted pre-orderers, Panic writes:
As our 1st 5,000 finished Playdate models arrived at our warehouse in California for 2021, we commenced to test a handful of of them. We immediately grew to become involved that some of them weren’t supplying us the battery existence we anticipated. Playdate’s battery is made to previous a pretty lengthy time, and generally be ready for you, even if not made use of for a when. But that was not the circumstance: in simple fact, we located a amount of units with batteries so drained, Playdate wouldn’t energy on at all — and could not be billed. Which is a battery worst-situation scenario.
This promptly turned into a months-very long, all-palms-on-deck research worry-ball, and we halted production at the manufacturing unit.
The summary?
We created the difficult, highly-priced choice to swap all of our existing batteries with brand new ones, from a fully distinctive battery supplier.
Stress goes on to notice that they’ve obtained new batteries and they are now doing work as hoped … but shipping every little thing again to Malaysia, swapping out the batteries and receiving them back again across the ocean is likely to acquire a while.
Meanwhile, the enterprise also found that the CPU it planned to use for all Playdate units transported in 2022 is now backordered for literal several years.
With a lot of pre-orders in put, we straight away positioned an buy at our manufacturing unit for all the parts desired for 2022 units and over and above. The response was … sobering. Numerous of our sections have been delayed significantly. In reality, we just cannot get any more of Playdate’s current CPU for — you are not heading to consider this — two decades. Like, 730 times.
Maybe you have read about the “global chip shortage” everyone’s chatting about? We’re right here to say it is extremely true. Covid-19 brought about an ever-cascading set of all over the world supply chain failures that are primary to many, several electronic parts becoming basically … gone.
To function all-around this, the corporation has redesigned Playdate’s boards to assistance a various CPU — just one they say is additional easily available, but that they really do not hope to effects the way the handheld is effective in any way that the user could recognize.
The complete textual content of Panic’s hold off announcement is accessible below.
The corporation suggests that despite the fact that models 1 by 20,000 have slipped into 2022, they really don’t presently expect orders positioned as a result considerably to slip into 2023.
As constantly, components is tricky. Increase a pandemic to the blend, and, well….