Hi all,
and thank you very much for your patience. I know how disappointing delays are - we all want our ‘toys’ as soon as possible and especially during the holidays.
The current world wide situation with ‘consumer electronics’ is getting worse every day. Now the fallout of the pandemic is trickling down the supply chains, stock is getting super low at distributors, semi conductor manufcaturers have reduced their output and some of them went out of business alltogether. This makes parts sourcing a total nightmare right now, parts brokers fight for the remaining parts and lead times are rising - just as an example NXP just announced that they expect lead times for their parts to rise from about 18 weeks, which is bad enough already, to 26 weeks or more! That’s more than half a year!
For a new product, which the L14 is, we need to build that supply chain and had some hickups on the way, I’m afraid. That’s why it takes yet longer than already announced - and please rest assured that we are at least as disappointed as you are. The other problem we face is that not being able to travel to suppliers and factories makes product development a real pain and takes a lot longer than we are used to. You can not just be on site and talk things through and sit there waiting for execution or guide execution while being on site. Instead you have to wait from remote for intermediate results, try to evaluate them as good as possible and proceed. Where you would have physically touched the product we now often have to judge it from pictures, video conferences or CAD drawings and only see physical samples once shipped to us. All that takes longer, a lot longer.
BUT it’s not all lost, we’re getting there and making progress. The final version of the PCB is finally in production now, we have sourced all parts (most importantly the CPUs but also other hard to get components), the mechanical parts are in production and we have everything lined up. If all works out as planned right now we expect the products to leave the factory by the end of January.
Again, please accept my heartfelt apologies for that. This was not at all our plan, but the global situation forced us into this really very unfortunate situation - which is also not at all nice for us either. Having to deal with ever growing delays is also very very painful for us, this is not the way we want to do business, not at all.
So with that, I hoope you can nevertheless enjoy your holidays, stay safe!
All the best
nicole