As our first 5,000 finished Playdate units arrived at our warehouse in California for 2021, we began to test a few of them. We quickly became concerned that some of them weren't giving us the battery life we expected. Playdate's battery is designed to last a very long time, and always be ready for you, even if not used for a while. But that was not the case: in fact, we found a number of units with batteries so drained, Playdate wouldn't power on at all — and couldn't be charged. That's a battery worst-case scenario.
This quickly turned into a months-long, all-hands-on-deck research stress-ball, and we halted production at the factory.
The conclusion?
We made the difficult, expensive decision to replace all of our existing batteries with brand new ones, from a totally different battery supplier.
It was extra frustrating, because when we built our Developer Preview units, the exact same type of batteries worked just fine — but something, somewhere (we're researching) changed between then and now, and the new ones did not work just fine. We have no time to waste, so we're moving on.
And so, we shipped 5,000 finished Playdates back to Malaysia to be given new batteries. How did that feel? Not great!!!
The good news: we've already received the new batteries from the new supplier, and they're looking really impressive — they're exactly what we're hoping for, if not even better than before. We're extremely confident the new supplier can give Playdate the battery life we designed, and you deserve.
I had to cancel mine last week due to financial reasons... go to play.date, sign in, go to orders, cancel. It was painful but now that it got delayed it doesn't hurt as much.Eh, this was going to be a nice Christmas present for someone. Now that it's 2022 I'll cancel the order if possible.
With lots of pre-orders in place, we immediately placed an order at our factory for all the parts needed for 2022 units and beyond. The response was… sobering. Many of our parts have been delayed significantly. In fact, we can't get any more of Playdate's current CPU for — you're not going to believe this — two years. Like, 730 days.
Here's one way we're working to beat the chip shortage: we've just finished a revision of Playdate's main board (for units made later next year) so that we can use a similar, but more widely available, CPU.
Yeah, I just brought up the cancel page. I was getting two units with two covers for $450 total. I'll wait for an official word about the delay before hitting the eject button.I had to cancel mine last week due to financial reasons... go to play.date, sign in, go to orders, cancel. It was painful but now that it got delayed it doesn't hurt as much.
Yeah, I'm in the industry and we've been quoted 60 weeks for some of the parts we need, 2 years feels like it's coming. I laughed when people were upset when the Steam Deck was only delayed by 2 months, that means that they're doing great!
Please no.
At least I got confirmed I'm in the first group.
There's also the news that they had to switch to a different CPU because the original one isn't available anymore until 2023.