Raspberry Pi Production Delayed By Factory's Assembly Flub 132
nk497 writes "The first shipment of Raspberry Pi devices has been delayed, after the factory manufacturing the cheap educational computer used non-magnetic jacks instead of ones with integrated magnetics. The problem is already nearly fixed, but new jacks need to be sourced for subsequent shipments, so those could be delayed slightly. 'It's inevitable, isn't it — you're freewheeling along perfectly happily and then you get a puncture,' said spokeswoman Liz Upton, apologizing for the delay."
Why the magnetics? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Seems reasonable enough (Score:4, Interesting)
Someone in China (the same guys that did the mistake in the first place, which most mentions have assumed to be a deliberate cost-saving measure rather than a true accident) has to receive those units back, hand-unsolder 10,000 connectors and hand-solder 10,000 correct connectors back into place before then packaging them up and sending them back to the UK.
Where, still, as far as we know, there's been no tests of functionality other than networking (i.e. they haven't seen if similar issues affect the other ports like the display, etc.). And then someone has to test a good portion of them again before sending them onto the suppliers.
Meanwhile, they have to source a supply of 100,000's of the proper connectors for future runs, which they are just starting now. And hope that the network WAS the only problem.
In effect, they did no actual testing of the actual device functionality ("it'll all just work if the factory did their job") until the entire first batch was opened in the UK. The testing in the manufacturing facility was purely electronic and COMPLETELY missed this problem (surprise, surprise). And immediately upon opening them here, they spotted a problem, which took FOUR DAYS to isolate (and was isolated only because they were baffled and broke one of the connectors open and happened to spot the difference) and now it all has to be sent back for more work.
That's a mite more than a "minor bump". Not irreconcilable, but certainly not a bump. More like a hard jolt with metal grinding. I sincerely hope it doesn't turn into another OP, but given that we've gone from "No preorders" to well, pre-orders, and a full launch to, well, we'll tell you when we have a working device in the same country as our distributors, the slippery slope has certainly started. Of course they can recover the situation. The question is, what other mistakes have they made in their supply chain of making 10,000 bare PCB's with components (something that happens thousand-fold times every day).