Tråden om Playdate: en liten bärbar konsol med vev från Panic och svenska Teenage Engineering: förhandsbokning börjar 29 juli

Pre-orders starting Thursday July 29th 10:00AM PDT

Notes:
• Pre-orders will not 'sell out'.
• The first batch of ~20,000 Playdates should ship in Late 2021. Additional orders will ship in 2022.
• We'll adjust 2022 production based on demand.
• Pre-orders require full payment but can be cancelled anytime for a full refund.Units are limited to two per person.
• Playdate and Playdate Cover will be available. Playdate Stereo Dock is coming later.
• We're initially shipping to the following countries: https://help.play.date/shipping/countries/ and if yours isn't included, make sure to take the survey in there.

Some good news: we just got our IOSS ("Import One-Stop Shop") number, which allows us to properly sell Playdate to EU countries while collecting VAT up-front. For a stressful bit it was looking like it wasn't going to make it in time. One more item off our pre-orders checklist.

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.

And there’s one huge silver lining: we’re extremely glad that we found this potential issue before shipping you a Playdate.

In just a few weeks, factory production will ramp up to full speed again, with new batteries in place. They’ll be put in all units, even those we’ve already made. But, it does mean “Late 2021” units are now “Early 2022”. More on this below.
Then, Preparing for 2022 Challenges

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.

Maybe you’ve heard about the “global chip shortage” everyone’s talking about? We’re here to say it is very real. Covid-19 caused an ever-cascading set of worldwide supply chain failures that are leading to many, many electronic parts being simply… gone.

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.

Board revisions are complex and costly. But this other CPU can, for whatever reason, be obtained much sooner. And you won’t notice anything different about this new board revision when it comes to playing games — functionally it will be the same. But it’ll give us the best chance at getting you a Playdate next year, which we both want.

There are a number of other part shortages we’re trying to outsmart right now, and while it’s stressful and frustrating, rest assured we will do everything we can to make as many Playdates as we can for you.