Hi Laforge team, just a quick question on the shipment date before I pre-order. According to the main site, https://laforgeoptical.com/pages/alpha-beta, it advertise SHIP 2017. So, if I pre-order the glasses now, I will definitely get the Alpha by 2017 right? There are a few smart glasses brands in the market now that will be releasing their glasses within this year, if Laforge is releasing the glasses by 2017 as advertise as well, I will pick Laforge as my first choice for pre-ordering. Otherwise I would like to keep my option open.
I've done my research and understood that you guys have been delaying the shipment a few times in the past but my instinct tells me that you guys are serious on delivering it by 2017 as shown on the site and I believe this year will be the year that Alpha will be finally delivered. :)
Based on my understanding, Corey mentioned that production will start in no more than 90 days. In July update http://us3.campaign-archive2.com/?u=fb7885b686c2a1d6696792b91&id=2e123abfe2 , Corey mentioned that "Once commenced, this project should take us about 2 months to complete." and it is advertise "Ship 2017" for Alpha. So from what I gathered, if the production starts on the 90th day and will be completed in 2 months, it should be delivered by November, hence I assume all Alpha will be shipped by 2017. Otherwise, it is kinda misleading to label "Ship 2017" as many new pre-order clients would definitely assume that they will be getting it by 2017.
If it is the latter, hope Corey could at least clarify that by end of 2017, how many units will be shipped out based on the most conservative estimates.
There are 3 different versions of the Alpha, dubbed Rev. 1, Rev. 2, and Rev. 3. As you have not pre-ordered, yet, you will be in the Rev. 3 group (and probably one of the last Rev. 3 customers shipped).
According to the last update, Rev. 1 is scheduled to be ready for shipment sometime in the next ~2 months (they basically said 30-90 days about a month ago). We have to assume that they will want to wait some time to get feedback from the Rev. 1 group before finalizing and shipping Rev. 2, and a similar timeframe between Rev.'s 2 and 3. I have no idea how long they will wait to get this feedback, but I'd assume anywhere from a few weeks after their expected arrival-at-door date to a couple of months (I'd expect closer to the "couple of months" end of the range). I don't work for the company, so as with anything else that hasn't been directly stated by them in an official blog post, I could be very wrong about estimates of times with this.
Therefore, if there are no further unexpected delays* but things take the largest amount of time from my estimates above, then it could be as much as 6 months before they ship out Rev. 3, which would place it sometime in February of next year for you, or perhaps even March depending on how much they can ramp up production of the lenses by the time they ship Rev. 3 and how fast delivery of the shipments occur. The earliest Rev. 3 could come out would be mid-fall of 2017 (say mid-late October), but that seems rather rushed to me and I'd put the probability of that happening at less than 5% (again, an off-the-cuff, nowhere-near-official estimate).
*There could, of course, be things which substantially delay shipment of even the Rev. 1s, making all of my estimates moot.