Ridiculous! If so, how you define "selling chips"? Charity or donation?
Read the article. It answers that question and others.
Have you any idea how much profit they are making on those chips, for guys that 'don't want to be in business'? An ASIC costs between $0.50 and $2 in mass production. Obviously the more volume ordered and less complex, the cheaper. Economies of Scale. That's a tidy little profit of 500-2000% per chip for someone who's so shy about being in a business. Again that's 5-20x cost value to them. They have no more non recurring engineering costs.
Batch 3 has to ship first, they owe it to those that took the leap of faith and have away their funds before the chips were announced. To be fair that's an area of customer service I do feel they excel at. Prioritising those that trusted them earlier. Those guys paid like 4-5 times as much as the inital order cost as well.
Leap of faith? What leap of faith is required to order a proven design, after 2 previous batches? Something tells me you have a batch 3 order, and your wishful thinking is overpowering your common sense.
There's not one single reason to delay filling chip orders, UNLESS doing so would delay filling the miner orders. As I said, if they were to ship out chips that are needed to fill batch 3, that would be unfair. But once the chips are in hand, and assembly is the only delay, sitting on orders that have been bought and paid for, that they have the capability to fill is foolish and bad business.
Full disclosure: I'm in on two group buys for bare chips, so I do have a vested interest in them running their business with some common sense, rather than bending to the pressure of the whiners who think they deserve special treatment, and a head start on mining, by virtue of their "faith" (speculation).
I have no batch three order. But having seen your behaviour on other threads I'm well aware how selfish you are.
Had Avalon stated they were selling bulk chips before Batch 3, those that purchased batch 3 would have probably bought chips. The time between the two announcements was under a month.
And yes leap of faith; as in batch 1 hadn't finished shipping, batch 2 had been delayed by that point, and batch 3 was promised by now at 4-5x cost of either of the previous batches. The price involved was due to the tech being proven. Delivery hadn't been, and still hasn't. And you DO want them to have that sorted before they send out multiple customer orders in the guise of single unit of 10,000 chips a piece...
LOL! Selfish? OK, whatever, as I said, it's glaringly apparent that you have never run a business. Shipping orders that you have the capability to immediately ship (unless it would alter your delivery time on earlier order) is just good business.
Do you expect Amazon to stop shipping all orders, any time somebody places an order for a backordered item? "Sorry folks, we can't ship your orders, because Bubbah here ordered a singing fish, and those are on backorder for the next six weeks, we'd love to keep shipping orders, but we want to be fair to our customers, and Bitcoinorama says that's the only way..."
Get real. You ship orders as quickly as you're able to fill them. You don't accrue a backlog of shippable orders, just because other orders are going to take longer to fill.