tl;dr: We try hard to make estimates accurate, we believe these lead times are accurate. Anyone who was told they needed to wait a couple more months to get a L5USA they ordered months back, was probably told in error.
I’ve elaborated on some past threads on how we approach estimates, since it comes up frequently. In case it’s interesting or helpful to folks I’ll give a longer explanation here. I’m not particularly interested in (or have the spare time for) arguing though, or answering questions posed in bad faith, so if anyone here is starting from a basis of thinking I’m lying about our intentions, and if you think we are intentionally trying to mislead people, feel free to skip the rest of my explanation.
Making lead time estimates are always challenging. We don’t want to mislead anyone. We review those numbers regularly, and whenever our current understanding of our timelines shows them to be inaccurate we update them. We want them to be as accurate as they can be based on our knowledge at a particular time because it’s important to set customer expectation, and it bothers us when a projection ends up being inaccurate. The challenge is always that it’s predicting the future based on current data, without knowing what might change the future. It’s an estimate, not a promise, and when we get the estimate wrong we can’t go back in time and change past estimates.
For instance we’ve reviewed the Librem 5 USA a few times since we’ve started shipping, and each time we’ve believed we’ll reach shipping parity within the stated lead time window, which means that new orders placed today would be fulfilled within that lead time. As we get caught up on the backlog, we’ll review that lead time and start lowering it. If we hit some minor delay, or get a surge in new orders, that ends up meaning we are keeping pace on orders, but not catching up on the new orders coming in, then that lead time tends to remain the same.
The challenge we continue to face though, is that we can’t predict future delays (or future orders), so these estimates are based on our best information at a snapshot in time. I certainly assumed we’d be far past shipping parity on the Librem 5 USA by now, if you had asked me for my best estimate when we started shipping them. Yet often when we hit some kind of delay (say a minor shipping delay on some component), resolve it, and then review our lead times, we still find that the estimate based on the standard of “when will an order placed today ship, based on the best of our knowledge” hasn’t changed, since we are estimating lead times (generally) on “weeks from the date of order” which is a moving target.
If we, instead, set hard dates (like August 2021) on lead time, which we have done sometimes in the past, we’d find ourselves having to review and change those estimates all the time, since they aren’t automatically a moving target. Then, of course, that causes some existing customers to misunderstand the lead time estimate to mean that their old order isn’t shipping until then, when the lead time on the shop is always geared toward a new order.
I don’t believe we are telling any Librem 5 USA customers that they will wait a couple more months, and if someone did get told that, it was a mistake or misunderstanding (possibly a confusion between Librem 5 and Librem 5 USA).