My point is, to wait 8 weeks for two rig boxes does not bother me in the least because I am not delusional enough to think that BFL should be perfect or that it's a cake walk to get more GPUs running.
If we had faith in their lead times this would all be moot...
Singles are taking 14-16 weeks now. They are saying NOTHING publicly about what has happened and why we SHOULD believe their current claims on delivery. As D&T said, they need a PR person in the worst way.
Rig Box is 12-15 weeks per Sonny (according to e-mail this week). I fear it is closer to 20...
EDIT - Sent e-mail to Sonny on this topic and asking for confirmation on mini-rig. Might as well ask these questions directly...Similar situation with wicked lasers. They released the arctic, people paid, and months went by without delivery. Eventually all were delivered and they're continuing to innovate and deliver great lasers. BFL never went into this saying "in stock ready to ship" they went in with calculated estimations, those estimations were definitely high, but the moment they figured that out, they announced it lowered the price, and made design adjustments to accommodate higher power requirements. Sonny has always been prompt to reply to my questions, my first order was delivered and I've already got my second order in.
OK I'll risk joining this discussion before it turns into a brawl... I was one of the northern Europe customers who ordered a Wicked Lasers Arctic when they announced them. Now Wicked Lasers are rather good at marketing, and the hype was great. The emails reached the right people, the right forums went viral, etc. and WL stood looking at a monstrous number of orders - a hell of a lot of them from the USA.
Of course, the original product was, IIRC, illegal in the USA for virtually any contrived reason. It looked like a light sabre toy but put out 1W of laser light - it was weapons grade and shipping with a nice set of goggles wasn't going to cut it. So a complete design respin was required to follow US weapons regs (which, for lasers, were being thought up on the fly). On top of that, the original production process (rip the diodes out of projectors and rebuild into fancy cases) wasn't scalable to the necessary level and the source of diodes wasn't enough.
Product didn't ship, customers got angry, WL themselves lost control of their own order management system (I received three Arctics for some reason - and yes, I offered to pay in full for all unexpected, unordered product). But product eventually shipped. I still have an Arctic and it works well. Product quality didn't disintegrate (at least in my tiny sample).
The difference with BFL is that time risk isn't a matter of 'I WANT MY PONY!' - this isn't a puerile desire to have the latest cool kit before everyone else has. If BFL were the only players in the market for orders-of-magnitude-superior-to-GPUs mining kit, then everyone would be in the same boat (apart from those leet enough to design their own bitstreams and commission their own FPGA big-boxes). But they're not. And there's a time limit before the block reward halves, and we don't have an historical analogue of *this* event (re: money supply singularity) so we can't easily predict how the BTC economy will respond to it, whether by raising BTC/xxx FX rates or wiping out mining capacity.
So most miners are looking to ensure their investments pay off *before* this event. And I'll admit I've got a dog in this fight, as I'm an FPGA miner too, but not in the USA so not a BFL customer. So call me biased, I don't mind. I like their 'plug and play' approach, but you can be sure that I'm hoping they take their time as *long* as possible to 'get the product right'
After all, if anyone with a few tens of thousands of dollars and a decent electrical supply can buy a box, plug it in and become a 'player' in the mining world, it removes the current technical barrier to entry, which is the only advantage people in high-power-cost locations (like both of mine) have right now. Mass mining centralisation to a few players with free power and unlimited capital is *not* good for the Bitcoin economy.
(and I would normally say, 'BFL - get an EU distributor for your products FFS', and then be polite and say 'please'... but it very much sounds like they're far too overstretched as it is to accept MORE customers and orders. This is a USA thing, and I desperately hope they don't revisit the Wicked Lasers scenario and get quagmired by US customs / export regs - after all, IIRC, the US is touchy about cryptographic equipment being exported without limitations and full disclosure... and will BFL tell the government *exactly* how it works if they're not telling us?)