Hi
@maxklchau ,
Welcome to the forum and thank you for your business!
I completely understand the confusion surrounding the information you have digged up so far. Let me address those one by one to clarify:
1) About the queue numbers.
The queue number idea was introduced by the new GM we hired early in 2024 to be able to improve clarity in communication. The idea was to have a webpage on which we could publish which numbers were under construction and which had shipped. He spend considerable time compiling a list in an as fair as possible manner. Although this seems easy enough, it actually wasn't, as up till then all of the Taiko team members were directly approachable by different means. A lot of customers have the personal phone numbers of our team members. With a large volume of orders / enquiries pooring in on whatsapp, by text messages, by e-mails, to different persons, this turned chaotic pretty quick, it took him a lot of time to sort through many thousands of messages and rank those fairly. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, he missed a bunch, which he had to add later while those queue numbers had already been communicated. He decided to insert those as .1 or .2 queue numbers. So you could have been order number #42 in time, but get #41.1 as your queue number. So there have been more orders then assigned queue numbers, and therefor more orders shipped then the current queue number.
Next while trying to go down the queue and ship in chronological order, this turned out not to work very well due to the varying yield of anodised server chassis and/or I/Os. Rejection rates on black were lower, and the I/O yield was low. Having 4 types of orders, silver Olympus, silver Olympus + I/O, black Olympus, black Olympus + I/O, we ran into a situation where we had orders finished and ready to ship, but couldn't ship as the queue was holding for for example a silver Olympus + I/O, where we didn't have a silver I/O. We then decided to abandon that strict queue order and just ship anything finished straight away, increasing shipping numbers but the irregularities of the numbers listed on that webpage led to so much anger and confusion we had no choice but to take it down. Since then we've only been listing queue numbers under construction and shipped on this forum enabling us to add context or explanations when needed. So this can cause you seeing for example #65 shipped and #50 arriving way later.
All together, these queue numbers may perhaps been a mistake, have created a lot of confusion and anger, but here we are, and you have one.
2) The last announced batch of numbers under construction are still under construction, at least some of the black ones. The hold up on those is those have been anodised by a new anodising company we've started working with, the quality is good, superb even, BUT the top to bottom colour matching is not perfect. The top is a deeper black then the bottom. Something you don't even notice until you put the top on the bottom, and then only in certain angles / different kinds of exposure to light. The anodising company is 100% confident they can fix this, in fact our new GM,
@JulienVermeiren , is at their facility right now to work on this with them.
@JulienVermeiren has been spending a lot of time visiting anodising / coating companies in western Europe for a while already btw trying to find additional suppliers. If they get this right, it will make a huge difference as they have at least twice the capacity as our current and only anodiser. This is also a dutch company which doesn't immediately close down for 2 weeks if someone has been infected with corona or a flu.
3) I will try to get an accurate status on that last under construction batch and revert back to that,
@JulienVermeiren is out of office now and we send Ton/Ted on a 3 week holiday, they have been working 16/7 for over a year now and absolutely need the break.
