Honest questions to Pimax

  1. Whats the new timeline, we know most of us won’t probably get our reward before Christmas?

  2. How many units have you made so far? Even with 20 a day there should be maybe 500 - 800 units made since you went to “mass production”
    Whats the delay about?

  3. Is every backer going to get their headsets ?

@deletedpimaxrep1 @PimaxVR @Sean.Huang

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Yes, we need some information. The hype is big.

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A suggestion: make an update with pics/vids of your facilities and assembly lines like you did some 6 months ago to (re)gain some trust. @deletedpimaxrep1

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Yes and now they have preorder customers wanting accurate timelines for delivery which they are perfectly entitled to. The this is a Kickstarter campaign so you should expect bad communication and endless delays reasoning will not work with preorder customers .

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I don’t understand how they can take pre orders, when they can’t ship to the backers. I am getting frustrated…

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I agree, they really should have delayed the pre-order process until they had their production issues under control. All they are doing is bringing on more customers who will be angry when pre-orders are nowhere in sight for shipping.

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They doing road trips atm

They already said the first pre order batch will be sent AFTER all backers have recieved the pledges. They make pre orders now to get an idea of the actual demand from non-backers.

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How about an M2 giveaway? Subscriber bonus points buddy :wink:

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It’s not only to get an idea of the demand, they are taking money from those pre-orders right now.

This will add A LOT of pressure on them while they even already aren’t able to ramp up the production to simply fullfil the backers rewards.

They also let people pre-order base stations + controllers packs (I dunno if the pre-order process work for this item but it was listed among the products for pre-order) while they can’t even tell us, backers, if we can add this to our pledge and how to do it. On top of that those controllers do not exist yet even as prototype ! And pimax still has not informed us about the result of their discussions with the base station supplier about the possibility to sell them alone, outside of any bundle.

And as if that was not there is now that new contender (again!..), the 5K BE, for which many backers could be interested in, but we cannot make a decision because we know so few about it. And according to pimax this will be a limited production, and they are opening pre-orders for it ! So as a backer who could really be interested in this BE but being at the end of the backers list I could end being f…ed because BE limited stock could go to pre-order while pimax won’t let me switch on it right now (yes I have asked, answer from support was “you will be contacted when we arrive to your backer number”… So yeah there is a risk I could miss this BE, despite being a backer to whom pimax claim they want “to give the priority”, and that BE I could have switched to could just go to someone doing a pre-order…).

With so many crazy things happening from pimax those last few days, and them being on a roadshow again while they should just be focussing at 200% on production, I began to fear again this could still just derail completely and I even never see my pledge and just lose this money I have put in the KS. And if I am getting the HMD I have still no clue at all about how many additional monthes I will have to wait to get the base stations and controllers to go with it (not even the single base station I added to my pledge at the time of the KS).

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I thought they only take the money once they ship the product?

Here someone saying money has gone from paypal account:
http://community.openmr.ai/t/question-about-pre-order-payment/9574/8?u=neelrocker

And before seeing that above post I already had heard the same from someone from my country on a chat dedicated to VR discussions. He pre-ordered a 5K+ using a credit card and said the money was debited less than 1h after his pre-order was placed.

I still have that chat open, here is a translation of what he said:

"I just ordered a 5k+
I paid by credit card
I think they’re going to charge it right now, but I’m not sure of anything. But it seems to me I have read that they are debiting at the pre-order
Well, I have the answer. They’re charging in an hour! With the shipping costs I had for exactly 690.50€. "

Xunshu confirmed payment is upfront. Oculus preorder charged when shipped. This is a big money grab :slight_smile:

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Those pre-orders will put a lot of additionnal pressure on pimax, and we will see a lot of new people coming here to the forum to ask pimax questions about delivery date…

Bad move imho… They could have opened pre-orders but not taking money until shipments.

As they take the money from pre-orders now it makes more sense why they decided to do another roadshow at the exact same time…

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Hum, full prepaid pre-order with a 3-4 months delivery delay not unheard, but not very consumer friendly…

I’ve read Xunshu message on production problems could mean a few weeks of delays ;-(

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I understand your concerns, It might force them to stock up in terms of man power but it’s the only logical move -
better estimate for production, mony to keep the business running… they are a company and I guess the employees are happy also if they get some bucks at the end of the day and they can’t stop now, there is still lots of work todo

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Pimax should be collecting preorders until the production line or lines are at a good capacity. Not even 200 produced and collecting preorders? All the efforts should be aimed to producing enough numbers of HMD before anything else.

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I suspect it is going to be more than a 4 month delay. I just don’t see them being able to ramp up production at the speed they predicted based on current performance. They were supposed to ship out the first 100 almost a month ago now and they still haven’t achieved even that tiny amount with no update as to when even that will happen at this point. This preorder move was just premature. I know they had announced that pre-orders would begin in October earlier but that didn’t mean they had to stick with that considering they weren’t able to meet their other commitments anyway.

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Pimax said at the roadshow to somebody they had a delay on HMD casing parts but hoped that was resolved in a few days (that would be yesterday I think). So production yields/stock will hopefully kick off faster next week.

Pimax have also said that pre-order money will help them boost production for backers. Although that is not something they should have said in public as it gives a bad image (robbing Peter to pay Paul as somebody put it) but it is possible they need proof for their partners or suppliers that they mean business and boost credit, stock and other key resources needed to catch-up with their manufacturing goals.

The only query to all that is why didn’t they spend their own money to meet demand, why spend the pre-order money on backer unit production.

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it’s more a feeling you have because in fact we don’t know the real reasons, could be days, weeks, months every guess has a chance to be right.

Probably from the outside this sound like that, but in businesses even more for a small cie sometime your are force to take action and some path you prefer not to.

And by the way having problem ramp-up production and out sourcing quality is not something exceptional, it’s regrettable and uncontrollable but not unforeseeable

Allocation of parts in timely schedule is one big problem, Here is example of another Kickstarter I’m in :

We have calculated our timeline based on lead times discussed with our
suppliers and contacts. However, the companies we are working with
typically make runs of 300,000 units, not 3000. Because Ora is a small,
young company, our orders are low-priority. For example, we were told
it takes about 10-12 weeks to make a mold and do a run of injection
molding for ~3000 of a custom part. We used this estimate in our
predictions without considering that our suppliers would have to fit our
parts in around other, much larger orders from much bigger companies.

Were are sourcing materials/components from 10 different
suppliers. This allows us to ensure quality by working directly with
specialized suppliers (e.g. injection molders with knowledge of liquid
wood) but it is also a big reason why we are late. Due to our small
order size, some suppliers came back to us with lead times that were
longer than what we had anticipated. Delays on two or three parts
produced further delays on other production steps that rely on those
parts being completed. As we have found, small delays can ripple
through the whole project and incur significantly longer delays. It has
been sad and frustrating watching this happen; minor delays of a few
weeks quickly grew to major delays of a few months. At this point, the
best we can do is try to be more realistic about planning for our target
deadline.

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