Can Purism provide an accurate estimate on the order page?
Some what like Valve did with the Steam deck. We knew pretty much generally speaking when we are gonna get our Steam Deck. Instead of we have independent people doing the guessing.
Can you not just extrapolate based on the parts you get in when you will be able to complete an order at least generally based on quarter which has a pretty big fudge factor.
From what I have seen, @Kyle_Rankin has basically said that Purism does their best to provide the most accurate estimates possible based on the information they have at the time. I choose to believe they are in fact trying their best and that they are neither malicious nor incompetent when they are wrong but rather that forces outside their control cause things to change. I don’t fault anyone who believes otherwise at this point as there does appear to be a trend of estimates for pre-orders of each product that has had pre-orders not being accurate until it is close to their standard 10 day shipping window.
I’m not sure how reasonable it is to compare Valve and Purism as I don’t know unit counts for either nor financial information for either, though I suspect Valve is working with larger numbers and in turn is able to leverage that in communicating with suppliers. Valve also appears to be using more common parts as compared to Purisms choices implying that they’re likely using two very different supply chains.
Is it possible to estimate accurately with a conservative buffer, yes. Does this mean the current (or any other specific) estimate will be accurate, no, it is an estimate.
I’m not comparing them, but I am just asking for this feature and it is easier to explain it that way.
I’m not sure if the suppliers provide shipping dates, I imagine they do, but you could just calculate the number of people that will get their phone from that shipment and then update the order page with an accurate estimate. You could of course always have the caveat listed that you could potentially have this date altered.
Just seems like a nice and pretty easy thing to do. I’m thinking if you have the orders in the database then you have the number of parts that are coming in. Calculate a percentage of failures % and then provide an estimate on the order page for the users still in the queue.
It has been discussed here before, and one issue that arises is when suppliers miss their shipping dates that results in Purism also missing their dates.
I know it seems like a nice easy and simple thing to provide, but having worked with overseas suppliers I have experienced months long delays that basically boiled down to “we’re taking your order and giving it to a larger company because we value them more” and there’s no real recourse for that small business.
The frequency and duration of these kinds of things is intermittent. So you might go 1000 orders with no issue then 20 in a row with issues and those 20 might have between a 2 week delay and a 60 week delay (I’ve personally seen longer delays pre-covid).
More transparency on this would be nice, to assuage curiosity, however I don’t believe it would actually have a positive impact as the supplier already has enough demand from other customers and this would force Purism to add another reseller between them and the supplier increasing costs and increasing shipping times with no guarantee of resolving this style of intermittent issue.
This is why I pointed to the size difference between Valve and Purism. Valve, while not taking away from Purism, isn’t likely to have other companies take away from Valve.
Goddard, check out this one:
The most correct Time right now is already set: 52 Weeks. And if the end is reached it could be 6 Month or another 52 Weeks.
Not sure if the Librem 5 is before or after a point where the largest pile of Oders are done. If we are after and they got a big piles of that CPU delivered. They know when to ship. Right now its not sure if and when they got that. I am sure the new System is already to send estimations to the next X Phone-Orders when they will have that cpus in stock.
The Chip Shortage could end 2024, but that was just an estimation of some Intel or Economic Folks. Right now nobody can say. Its to hard with Covid (its not done now, as the Shanghai lockdown show) and rising Prices for Energy, Resources. War in Ukrain was another curse for global Economy. And the next could be Environmental and Climate issues or a big Finance issue. Nobody knows.
If i set that time how long other have waited for that… was 3 Years and 10 Month. So that is the time i hope to have my phone! ;D
But right know, if in the next 12 Month Purism got a large pile of cpus delivered i think its more likely that the 12 Month or 52 Weeks are a good estimation right know. Cause the pile of open orders got smaller and smaller in the last 7 Month.
The Forum Post about Chip availability… showed that it got worse in 1 year from April 2021 to April 2022. From some in Stock to 0 in Stock and there a lead time of 52 month too.
Extrapolating based on parts is extremely inaccurate when some parts have a lead time of over a year. The obvious strategy here is to snatch them from wherever they might appear, but that’s unpredictable. You’d end up with a fudge factor of a year.
Add to that the fact that it doesn’t make sense to order parts that will come in a year and at the same time buy the same parts opportunistically, because then you end up with twice the number of part A but you might not have enough of part B to produce more units. If you make the wrong bet, you might have to wait even longer.
Then there’s also the problem of suppliers cancelling orders, which stretches the fudge factor still more.
I wish this was simpler.
It does sound complicated, but it does stink. Are things improving at all? Seems like some providers at least in the cpu/gpu PC market have indicated they have actually slowed their purchasing and manufacturing.
Some particular research should help further to answer your question more precisely, especially if based on the info earlier provided here:
and here, by thanking @Christal for this relevant link provided: