Having been 'burned' once in neo900 and having spent hours visiting and asking and emailng just to learn the most basic question a person could have regarding his order and having
read about
@EvilDragon workstress and getting in account the covid-supply crisis chain events and the war that further complicate things i want to say that :
Ok , there is a risk , it was stated in the preorders , more risk was added due to non-controllable factors but it seems very likely that the pyra team made mistakes in how it handles the preorder queue.
I sense a disincentive established in being forthcoming and open about the preorder queue status.
Please prove me wrong . Allow us to the most basic info. In what rank is each order , in what batch it belongs ,and a possibly estimate of delivery.
Hello
@chomwitt
I feel your pain! I had a horrible experience with the predecessor to the neo900 (openmoko). That experience certainly made me more hesitant to buy into this type of thing.
I consider myself lucky that I didn't preorder my pyra, because if I had preordered I would also be pretty frustrated about how long it's taken. It
has been a long time - I remember telling a friend back in 2019 that "the pyra might nearly be ready this year!", lol, how naieve I was!
But I have been following the pandora / pyra project for over a decade now (I got my pandora in early 2013 IIRC but had been following it during production), and I can say that in that decade I have only ever seen good faith and integrity from ED. Here are a couple of things that you might not know:
* ED's original partner on the pandora was basically a scammer* who took a bunch of preorders via a second store, then ran off with the preorder money from that store (<-- this is the short, inaccurate summary of the story, I'm sure you can find more info if you search the forums). This left ED in a bad financial situation where he couldn't afford to simply honour all the preorders. He also wasn't technically required to honour those preorders since they were through the scammer's* store, but he did anyway (I think he sent them all out in the end, someone please correct me if I'm wrong) at considerable financial cost to himself. To me, this is a huge indicator of good faith.
* The pandora also took years longer than I had expected it to (I also didn't preorder the pandora, but I also would have been frustrated and annoyed by that delay).
* Despite the problems, in the end ED worked out all the issues and got the pandora shipped out, and it was *fantastic*. Having owned an Openmoko Neo Freerunner (literally the worst phone ever made), I for one was very glad that ED took the extra time to work out all the issues because by the time I got my pandora, it was a rock solid, awesome little machine. I'd rather wait 10 years and get something good than have another Openmoko situation where I paid $600 for a phone that I was told would be usable and I basically got a paperweight.
* ED works really crazy, silly, long hours that he really shouldn't be working (I would consider working the hours he works and getting that little sleep unhealthy). He has an actual IRL job and a family in addition to all the work he does on the pyra. Seriously, asking him to take an extra 10 minutes to update the current status of preorders more regularly is a bigger imposition on his time (and/or sleep) than you'd think. This is a man who really doesn't have a lot of spare time at all.
I can understand your frustration. I've been waiting for my pyra for years, too, and I don't even have a place in the queue yet! It's going to be aaaaaaaaages!
And you're right - it really would be great to see more updates, they seem to have slowed down lately.
But I have only ever seen ED act in good faith, fulfil the agreements he's made, and act with honesty and integrity. I think that he works hard on the pyra and although I'd like more updates, I'd rather him spend the time assembling pyras than writing updates. And I think that if you can just stay patient, eventually, one day, when it's
fiiiiiiiiinally in your hands, you'll be glad you were. That was certainly my experience with the pandora
Another tip that I have for you is that you can get an RSS feed of the pyra news forum and have your RSS reader let you know when there's an update - that's what I do, saves me coming back onto the forums all the time
HTH!
* allegedly. it's more complicated than I've said, but based on what I've read, he's not a good person.
