Pre-ordered an Ergo Pro. Never buying from Matias again. Shell out $200 for a keyboard. It's delayed over and over. Worse still, we barely ever get updates on when it'll come out. Pretty awful customer service experience.
I assume you’ve never pre-ordered a brand new hardware product before. :-) They’re pretty much always late, sometimes very very very late.
Basically, people who are risk-averse and need something today should just buy products from existing inventory. Pre-ordering brand new products from small companies is an inevitably time-risky proposition. Some Kickstarter hardware projects had delays of 2 years or more (!), and 6 months of delay for Kickstarter and similar hardware projects is on the fast side. Pre-ordering not-yet-finished products is for the super-fans and “early adopters”, who can stomach waiting 3x longer than originally expected, or getting a project slightly different than originally anticipated, etc.
The problem with building anything brand new is that there are hundreds of tiny decisions and steps, and the distribution of time the step takes relative to expected time has a long “tail”. Even if every single step time estimate is exactly the perfect average expected time that step should take, because of this distribution, a small handful of (sometimes trivial, sometimes not) steps ends up creating much bigger delays than anyone ever expects starting out. Of course, people usually estimate a little bit on the optimistic side, causing a further mismatch with real-world timings.
You see the same problem in any big coordinated projects: computer software, films, new vehicles, unique construction projects, etc. etc. Even one-man projects like novels or Ph.Ds usually take far longer than originally expected.
Timing in creating things only really starts to get predictable is when everything is well understood in advance, all the steps and relationships between steps are known, there are few decisions to be made along the way, the process has been done many times before, and nothing truly unexpected (like a natural disaster &c.) happens along the way. The more ambitious and new a project is, the more uncertainty there is, and the more the schedule tends to slip.
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Anyway, part of your frustration may be that Matias has been leaving updates in various scattered places. Note that in the past month he was a week at CES and then scurrying around China to check on suppliers &c. His most recent post here on geekhack was two days ago:
[...] BTW, Ergo Pro production will be complete tomorrow. The Mac ones are already done. The PC ones will be ready tomorrow morning. I'll be posting pictures soon after. Thanks to everyone who so patiently waited!