Pimax, we are all very excited to get our hands on the consumer version of your products. With January quickly approaching and two more prototype versions of the 8k planned, it seems extremely difficult to be able to manufacture, package, and ship by end of January. Can you please post a running schedule for benchmarks so we can be better informed in the process? Benchmarks that I think are important include: V4 prototype completion and public demonstration, V5 prototype completion and public demonstration, Final consumer edition design completion, consumer edition manufacturing start date, first batch manufacturing completion date, first batch shipping date.
I think I speak for most here when I say that it is more important for the product to be as good as reasonably possible instead of hitting the January first batch ship date, but if you wait to tell us in mid January that they will not be ready to ship, you will make a lot of people mad. Just give us reasonable expectations.
Best of luck! Can’t wait to see what Pimax can do!
…or, we can just let them work on it rather than micromanaging them. Schedules are the kind of things that would make people angry, as then they would have to guess when something would be done and then that would slip, which may not affect the final ship date but would still freak out a certain segment. I also think that a delay is better than shipping a worse product, but I also think that announcing a delay is far better than having to maintain a schedule and be constantly updating its progress and how that affects the rest of the project, when it’s a project due out this soon and a company with this few employees. Announcing one major delay is far better than announcing a dozen missed minor milestones.
Having a timeline doesn’t hurt anything. It was Pimax who gave dates during the KS. Keeping confidence up with information is not hard. I work for a national retailer and we have new product deadlines all the time and the easiest and yet most important thing we (or anyone can do) is continually communicate. So I would not be so quick to bark at someone for asking for communication while we wait. It is not as hard as you claim. Deadlines are already noted (January for 8k) SO a pop in from Pimax weekly is not asking too much… a "Hi. we are working hard on X, expect everything to be on schedule… talk soon ! " would be sufficient. I haven’t dug too much in the posts here but didn’t see at a skim much in way of Pimax posting. You can only expect backers to wish for communication at this point … the 4.2m is in the bank… maybe not the best time to go silent. working hard or not. A forum post takes only a few minutes and would server to keep the community strong and excited… Deep down its about the PR more so than user base caring if there is a delay. Communication helps both sides and keeps people engaged. Their KS campaign is proof of that too.
The kind of updates you seem to ask for takes more then a few minutes.
First the info needs to be collected from the team, then analyzed to see what the weekly progress means for the overall progress, if any problems have been encountered how to show what is made to fix them, and worked through to make sure what is written is properly explained so it isn’t overanalyzed by the community etc.
This I say from experience from work, everything that gets reported in a progress kind of way takes away productive time. Personaly I have to put away about 4 hours weekly to make progress reports that just take 4-5 minutes to go through.
Fine I would like to see some kind of reporting when certain goals have been passed, but that should be on Pimax discretion and not by a strict timed report schedule.
I promise you the team already has this data “collected” and are aware of where they stand for each goal , and would not need to do so specifically for a forum post, besides I never said how specific it should be , I stated clearly an example of what I believe would be good enough communication… did you read my post ? My main point was regarding communication and keeping everyone engaged. Topics like this provide the evidence … our disagreement on this would be a non issue and would not exist in the forum if there were pop ins from the the Pimax team… would not even matter if was a timetable update. Personally I am not sweating it but from a community point of view I agree with the original poster in the sense that communication is important regardless of the details they wish to provide at any given point.
A proof of live every month or so is enough for me. If Pimax feel or needed to do more it’s up to them. I don’t know if many people here have actively participated in developing a product but some time their is no good news to tell to the “investors”. Better in those time to keep a low profile and speak only when you have concrete and solid news to give us. counter example : Hi futurist will be demoing the new V3 prototype at the New York VR fair.
Folks like others have said here. Its only coming up on 1 week since the kickstarter closed. Just being able to refocus the team to advancing the headset instead of resources being used for the roadshows will take a bit of time. Really i beleive we should be patient enough to wait 2weeks to let them have time to make real potenial strides. Instead of wasting resources to report potenially minimal progress. Of which will only serve to delay potenial advances.
Keep in mind its hard to wait on something you haven’t tried; imagine how hard it can be for those of us whom have had a taste.
Thanks for the update, but what order details are you waiting to collect? As far as the headsets are concerned, shouldn’t you have all the details needed to provide a timeline?
I think people are waiting to hear - We plan to have prototype 4 finalized by X date. We then plan to begin mass production by Y date. Etc… (you should have a rough estimate for all these milestones if you’re still aiming to ship in January).
If they collect our details now and the product winds up being delayed, some of us may need to submit for address changes and that would not be convenient.
