jamesh wrote:W. H. Heydt wrote:We probably won't hear anything until a batch of 10,000 have been made...and then they will sell out in a few minutes and there will be a 3 month wait for production to ramp up.
I do love the RPF, but they seem to have formed a habit of being blindsided by demand for new products. (I understand *why* the caution. At this point the results are mainly amusing rather than distressing.)
Do you know how many people out there want a display?
No, neither does the Foundation...
It's REALLY difficult to predict this sort of thing, and it's better to make too few when you don't have the unlimited cash piles that bigger companies have.
I absolutely agree with you on those points. I *said* I understood the reasons. The RPF doesn't want to have a sunk cost of large amounts of unsellable goods (and certainly not manufacturing contracts to produce vast quantities more with no reasonable way to break the contract. Nor would they want a reputation for breaking contracts). You can take all of that as understood.
The other side is that it is becoming the RPF running gag... New product. How many did you make? 10K, but they're all gone and we're working with the factory to get lots more now that we know people really want them.
Of course, the day will come when a new RPF product comes along and the response is...crickets...and the RPF is stuck with most of the initial 10K. I sincerely hope that day is in the very far future, but I do understand the worry that it will--eventually--happen.
And just for the record...I know one person that will probably buy a display (assuming the sort of reasonable pricing the RPF is good at)...me. But I'm not going to get upset if I miss the initial batch and have to wait a few more months past the launch to actually get one. (Besides, if I have to wait, the software will be in better shape by the time I do get one...though I'll take the risk on that front if I manage a shot at the initial batch.)