Trying to find a fair solution

[EvilDragon]

You might have my post at this thread here  - and if you did, you probably have understood that it's most probably not possible for me, delivering all the remaining preorders for less than production costs (which is about 270 EUR).
And even for production costs, money is tight.
 
In case you want a small summary of what happened, click the spoiler.
 

Spoiler

You probably remember: When I moved the production to Germany, my intention was to fulfill all remaining preorders - both for Craigs and my customers.
What has happened?
Well, according to the money and Pandoras I sent to Craig, he should have 150 remaining preorders.
 
However, as the survey showed, it seems to be more than 500!
And that's a really massive amount of units - a lot more than I can afford.

 
I still want to help you all as good as possible, but I am not god nor have I won the lottery, so there is only so much I can do.
 
My suggestion is the following:

• Everyone from Craigs preorder queue can update his Pandora for 300 EUR (without VAT) to an instantly-delivered 1GHz unit or for 100 EUR (without VAT) to a Classic Pandora (as long as they are available).
  All ordered Pandora items like Carry Case, Battery, Stylus, etc. will be included for free. Additionally, when ordering the Pandora, he can order additional items like SD Cards for a cheaper price (the same as every other Pandora buyer will get).
  If no units are in stock at that time, he does NOT have to pay right away but wait until the units are back in stock.
• In addition to that upgrade, he can also buy a second 1GHz Pandora for 350 EUR (+ VAT), thus getting a huge discount!
• And: He will get a specially printed Pandora Thank You - Postcard signed by EvilDragon. This card will ONLY be available when upgrading, it will NOT be possible to buy them from somewhere else (thus it's limited).

I am well aware, that not everyone can afford to upgrade.
Thus, I'd like to make the following offer:

• The above update is optional and can be done anytime. However, I can't promise you that you will ever get a Pandora without the upgrade. Therefore, if it's possible to update, please do so. You will really help a lot with that.
  
• If you DON'T upgrade, whatever you chose in the survey will be taken into account. There are community members donating into the preorder queue. That money will be used to help people who simply cannot afford to upgrade. However, it could still take years!
• In case a Pandora successor will ever be released (I hope so, but it's unknown right now) and you didn't get your Pandora until then, I'll give you a discounted price for it.

Please keep in mind:
I am here to help you and try to get you your preordered Pandora in a fair way.

I am NOT the one who sold it to you and I am NOT the one you gave your money to years ago.
I have NOT taken over the legal responsibility for all these orders, I am merely trying to help you out.

What do you all think?

Would that be fair? Do you have any better ideas and suggestions?

 

[Timstertoo]

Could you send this also to the complete remaining Craig preorder list?


This has two results :


1. You are sure everyone who should read this does read this.


2. Everyone who gets a mail knows that you have knowledge of their order.


Bonus points for putting their current time survey selection in the mail and providing an easy way to change it so more people might be enticed to move up a bit in their $ amount.

 

[ShleeDragon]

I think that's the best solution for everybody involved.. The best of a horrible situation.

Regardless, Has Craig given any input on his legal responsibility? Has he officially walked away? or willing to offer anything? Is he just assumed missing?

 

[sporkbox]

I'm okay with this idea. However, what order is chosen for the donations-powered preorder payments? Is it by date? Of the 130 of us who want to wait for a Rebirth, are you prioritizing the people (like me) who *would* pay, but can't? Or is it based on order date? Did Craig's information even include that? I still have my original order confirmation if needed to assist in the decision-making process.

Overall, I think the options you've presented are suitable, though I'd rather not risk missing out on a Pandora. At the end of the day, this mess doesn't belong to you and preorderers are lucky to have you to deal with. Less virtuous people would've simply left us hanging. So I guess for us poor folk... perhaps there's a way for us to help get donations!

 

[elwing]

I understand your point of view ED, and I thank you for all the effort you are making for us, but I'm not ready to place more than 150euros for a 1GHz unit as I answered in the survey, nor pay anytrhing for an outdated rebirth unit and I don't have the possibility to get a refund (let's be honest, refunds will never happend...). It's nice from you to help but how that "solution" can be called fair toward people who received their pandora years ago without adding any money or versus the people who just paid 150euros last month?

 

[FaeMinx]

^ There is *no* way Ed can make this completely fair. This is as fair as it can be *now*. It really SUCKS big time, but unfortunately you are one of the people who drew the short straw. Everyone is doing all they can to try and make your straw a little longer, but it is still a short straw no matter how you look at it. So yes, there are people who were lucky enough to get theirs sooner and for less. ..but the luck has just run out. Or perhaps there is just a shred of luck left, and it's appeared in the form ED has proposed.

I would be in the same position as you if I hadn't listened to that nagging worry in my gut about things to come all those years ago and decided to go premium. Going premium could have backfired on me like it did for Craigs 1ghz pre orders, but I just got lucky.

Sent from my GT-N5100 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

 

[moxie]

Agreed. If the wording "finding a fair solution" is troublesome to you, read it as "finding a solution that is as little f*cked up as can possible be imagined, at this stage".

 

[ImmaculateChimp]

Sadly, for the foreseeable future, I can only afford to pay the 100 euro 1GHz upgrade option from the survey. I'd still be willing to wait for that, but if that's not an option any more (and even though a certain someone more or less started insulting me for having this opinion in a previous thread), I would still be willing to wait further still and have, hopefully, a good portion of what I paid, be used as a credit towards the Pandora successor so long as Craig Rothwell has nothing to do with it and it has a similar comittment to stellar audio playback quality.(and possibly 4 shoulder buttons, they maybe could be horizontally aligned )

 

[elwing]

I still cannot understand why a bunch of console were just sent for only 200 and 150euros when all that was already known by ED... how is that fair? it would have been better to send everyone their pandora for 220 or so euros (sorry for the number din't counted the exact value) instead of having people paying 300 euros, 200 euros and 150 euros for the exact same thing when the situation was already known?

edit: it's 300 euros not even 270euros...

 

[milkshake]

My suggestion is the following:

• Everyone from Craigs preorder queue can update his Pandora for 300 EUR (without VAT) to an instantly-delivered 1GHz unit or for 100 EUR (without VAT) to a Classic Pandora (as long as they are available).

Just to clarify for anyone when you say classic Pandora for 100 EUR do you actually mean Classic or do you mean Rebirth? CC or GC? 256/512 ram.

 

[kasp]

I still cannot understand why a bunch of console were just sent for only 200 and 150euros when all that was already known by ED... how is that fair? it would have been better to send everyone their pandora for 210 or so euros (sorry for the number din't counted the exact value) instead of having people paying 300 euros, 200 euros and 150 euros for the exact same thing when the situation was already known?


edit: it's 300 euros not even 270euros...

Well ED thought he was dealing with 150 units and knew he would be struggling to deal with that amount but it was possible. However with current sales and donations he figured he could make the target and hopefully a few people would upgrade.

Craig then revealed that it was more than 500 units which ED knows he could never deliver all the consoles or even come close to it.  The real question is what happened to the 350 consoles.  So basically Craig screwed everyone over and ED is trying to mop up his mess. 

So the questions were designed when there was 150 units and not 500.

 

[elwing]

So the questions were designed when there was 150 units and not 500.

sorry, but that is not a valid excuse, even if ED had no solid number we've been knowing for months that there were around 500 (take or give 100) units in the limbo...

 

[ElPoco]

I'm a Craig pre-orderer, and I think this is fair. Or at least, as fair as it can possibly be due to the circumstances. But I think that those of us who didn't upgrade already are probably unwilling to spend the full upgrade price. Though I know the "second pandora for 350" option could tempt me... 

 

[dreamer]

What a blow to the community and Craigs preorders :/

Thank you so much for trying to deal with this ED. I just wish Craig would let 'something' be known about his situation and why he's dropping people like this.

This makes me so happy that I upgraded nearly a year ago. You still have my infinite regard for this ED!

 

[rohezal]

Basicly ED offers a 430€ (540 - 350 = 190€ and 540 - 300 = 240€) discount on his shop. This a good price. Maybe some people will buy the second Pandora and sell it for 400€ (or 440€). this way they would upgrade for 200 (or 160). ED wont have to sell the Pandoras, the preorders would have to sell them. This means they preorders have the risk at not getting their money. But since they have friends and a lot of new people will here about the Pandora. And getting a ghz Pandora 400€ or 440€ is very good price, if you sell it at ebay (if everything else fails) you will get some money from it. I am sure you can sell it.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Nice, as usual.

 

[_wb_]

So the questions were designed when there was 150 units and not 500.

sorry, but that is not a valid excuse, even if ED had no solid number we've been knowing for months that there were around 500 (take or give 100) units in the limbo...

Not really - Craig has never really given exact numbers, and the "estimates" he occasionally gave on this board or on IRC were wildly fluctuating. As far as I recall, his most recent estimate (months before the survey) was "a few hundred", whatever that means. Meanwhile, ED has kept shipping units to Craig's pre-orderers, so the number should have gone down since that a lot. Of course knowing Craig, one could speculate that "a few hundred" doesn't mean 200 or 300 but rather 600 or so, but you cannot plan things based on wild speculation on how to interpret phrases like "a few hundred".

The only thing ED could work with were the numbers Craig gave him and the numbers he knew himself (number of units he shipped etc.). Based on ED's calculations, there should have been about 150 left in Craig's queue. Only recently has it become absolutely clear that this number is actually more than 3 times bigger.

As it turns out, Craig seems to have lied about his original queue size - or maybe he was just overly optimistic and bad at counting/bookkeeping, the lie was not necessarily intentional. Either way, given that Craig has essentially "left the scene" and doesn't seem to want to explain himself, we'll probably never know exactly what went wrong there. It is clear that Craig has (intentionally or not, I can't tell) given ED false information at several crucial points in time in the story of the Pandora. The initial misinformation was that the Pandora was in fact ready to ship in 2008, which was of course not true at all. ED probably wouldn't even have joined the project if not for this lie by Craig. When ED made his plans to shift production to Germany, these plans were again based on false information by Craig.

The only really fair solution would be that Craig somehow finds money to pay the production cost for the units he still owes his pre-orderers. In my opinion, that would still be the best option. But to be honest, I don't see where Craig would find that money anytime soon: maybe profits from iCP2 sales could be used for this, but I doubt the initial KickStarter sales are going have any significant profits (given all the delays and issues, he'll probably be happy with a break-even) so it will probably take a lot of time before there are enough profits to pay for all those Pandora units. And that is assuming Craig wants to use profits from his iCP2 company to fix his Pandora company - he is not obliged to do that, he can also just let his Pandora company die a slow and agonizing death (or declare bankruptcy). As far as I can tell, he is no longer interested in his Pandora customers or at least not willing to spend more time and money on them. That may seem cold-hearted of him, but I can understand it: the entire thing must have been a very frustrating experience, he has lost a lot of money over this (much more than any pre-orderer or maybe even more than all the remaining pre-orderers together), and his reputation went from "saint" to "satan". So I understand why he wants to have nothing to do anymore with the entire thing - yes, he is "abandoning" his customers, but in a sense he is a victim too. Some of it is certainly his own fault, but not all of it.

So anyway, given that that "actual fair solution" is not going to happen, I think ED's proposal is a good idea. If you're in Craig's queue, you can still wait for some miracle (Craig making lots of money with iCP2 and finally able to buy those units, some huge mystery donation to the pre-order fund, or maybe a Pandora successor happens in a few years and becomes such a big success that ED has so much spare money that he offers free units to Craig's old customers), or you can make use of ED's very generous discount.

In my opinion, the important thing here is that ED should be able to finally stop having to think about how to clean up the past (Craig's mess), so he can think about the future and his own stuff: paying back his debts and investors, designing a Pandora successor, maybe being able to drop the prices a bit in his shop, and so on.

 

[MrConfusion]

It's nice from you to help but how that "solution" can be called fair toward people who received their pandora years ago without adding any money or versus the people who just paid 150euros last month?

ED, have you actually even collected the money for these 200 and 150 queue people?

Have you even emailed them?

Or is your plan to cancel those two queues completely?

I though that so far you've shipped 270 euro upgrades only, because there has been no LCDs?

I'm asking out of curiosity and clarity's sake, not out of envy; what's happened is history and done...

Also, am I correct in assuming that for you the best solution would be for everyone to get the 300 euro upgrade, or do you estimate these two options to be equally good strictly from your point of view in the long term?

What I mean is, yes you need cash now, but: Are you 200 euros worth happy to get rid of a 600 MHz unit so you can eventually concentrate on the 1 GHz ones?

I'm very tempted by the 100 euro upgrade, as I would only be able to use the 400 MHz to pretty much one thing: DOSbox... It's still a 566 MHz upgrade from my Palm And being able to get a discounted 1 GHz if I ever need more CPU sweetens the deal quite a bit.

Hmm...

Of course, if you want to sweeten the deal a bit more for those who opt to upgrade, you could offer a discount for a possible Pandora 2, unless the discount was used on getting a 1 GHZ.

(Now, Schlee Dragon, hold that finger right there and read the rest of my post before the NOOOOOOOOOOOOO )

No, not as large a discount as the guys who ordered nothing!

And not the "practically at production cost" you're offering for a second 1 GHz now.

But something that only cuts a small slice from your profits if a Pandora 2 ever pops up and is in steady production.

This would be especially sweet for 100 euro upgraders, because it could offer a significant upgrade (I am very sorry, but I never saw the 1 GHz as very significant...) after some years of 600 MHzing.

I mean this part in your text:

"In addition to that upgrade, he can also buy a second 1GHz Pandora for 350 EUR (+ VAT), thus getting a huge discount!"

OR

"He can buy a Pandora 2 for a price that cuts xx% of my profits, IF Pandy2 is ever steadily produced (i.e. this cannot be used for early orders), ASSUMING a Pandy 2 ever even gets released."

OK, maybe that is a bit messy. Just a thought.

Well, in any case, I think everyone in this forum wants to see a Pandora 2, so it's a project that needs to be carefully protected from the start. And I also see it this way.

 

[Blimp]

In my opinion, the important thing here is that ED should be able to finally stop having to think about how to clean up the past (Craig's mess)

This is not helping, saying it's craig's mess, because it isn't his fault only. I almost feel sorry for craig, he most be so paranoid by now (beyond even).

If you DON'T upgrade, whatever you chose in the survey will be taken into account. There are community members donating into the preorder queue. That money will be used to help people who simply cannot afford to upgrade. However, it could still take years!

I don't see much difference between what was and what's offered now. Will the survey results still be used and pandoras send for 200/150/100€? I'm willing to pay €200 ex. vat. instead of the €150 I did in the survey but cannot afford €300 ex vat at the moment, maybe later.

 

[EvilDragon]

Could you send this also to the complete remaining Craig preorder list?

This has two results :

1. You are sure everyone who should read this does read this.

2. Everyone who gets a mail knows that you have knowledge of their order.

That's my plan, just wanted to check out opinions here first.

I'm okay with this idea. However, what order is chosen for the donations-powered preorder payments? Is it by date? Of the 130 of us who want to wait for a Rebirth, are you prioritizing the people (like me) who *would* pay, but can't? Or is it based on order date? Did Craig's information even include that? I still have my original order confirmation if needed to assist in the decision-making process.

I don't have any dates, I just have the order of when the survey has been filed out, so there's not much I can do.

Overall, I think the options you've presented are suitable, though I'd rather not risk missing out on a Pandora. At the end of the day, this mess doesn't belong to you and preorderers are lucky to have you to deal with. Less virtuous people would've simply left us hanging. So I guess for us poor folk... perhaps there's a way for us to help get donations!

 The most important thing is that all of you will receive a voucher for the shop right away, and as long as Pandoras are available, you can use it to upgrade.

So it's up to you whether you want to wait until you receive it via donations for a lower price (or no upgrade price) or whether you will buy it right away.

credit towards the Pandora successor so long as Craig Rothwell has nothing to do with it and it has a similar comittment to stellar audio playback quality.

As mentioned multiple times already, I wILL NOT start another project with Craig.

If we wants to release a successor himself, it's up to him, but I will work on my own one. 

Just to clarify for anyone when you say classic Pandora for 100 EUR do you actually mean Classic or do you mean Rebirth? CC or GC? 256/512 ram.

 CC. 256MB RAM.

These will be repaired or refurbished PCBs (from the upgrade), with new case, LCD, battery, packaging, AC Adaptor, LCD Cable, Nubs, etc., which roughly adds up to 100 EUR material costs.

(I will not charge the time I spend to build those).

The production costs for Rebirth units is about 10 EUR less than for 1GHz units, so it won't make sense offering an upgrade here.

So the questions were designed when there was 150 units and not 500.

sorry, but that is not a valid excuse, even if ED had no solid number we've been knowing for months that there were around 500 (take or give 100) units in the limbo...

Not exactly. They have been designed when there SHOULD'VE been 150 units left, but I didn't know HOW MANY exactly.

The survey was a way for me to find that out. I expected about 300, but not over 500...