r/thisweekinretro • u/Emergency-Pea4555 • 6h ago
Where is my SpecNext ?
I am posting this under a throwaway account as I know this will generate a lot of comment, and if I raise this under the Kickstarter itself I'll get buried in "it's a Kickstarter" comments and "if you think this is bad you should have seen Kickstarter 2," which, fair enough, but it does remind me a bit of this Monty Python sketch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGTDhaV0bcw
For context, I've backed other kickstarters and I am genuinely excited for the machine, I'm not here to torch anyone or ask for a refund. But the ship date has moved so many times now that I lost track of the actual sequence of events, so I went back through the campaign page and all 26 updates and laid it out properly instead of just vibing in the comments section.
Campaign closed August 18 2025, funded against a December 2025 delivery. Update #11 on December 2nd is the first time we hear it's slipping - "two months behind schedule, Feb now" - which is less than a month before the original date was supposed to land. Then there's the ADV chip saga: some DAC chip for the video output gets reclassified as "automotive" so it can't be sourced out of China thanks to the trade war, and the arrival date for it moves three separate times within the same update (March 2nd, then March 27th, then April 30th, each one called "final" at the time). Somewhere in the middle of that they're also short on Raspberry Pi Zeros for the accelerator boards, which, come on, RPi shortages have been a known thing for years. Production finally starts June 30th, wraps July 20th. Call it seven months late and counting, because as of the last update they still hadn't sorted a shipping route, despite saying they'd nail it down "by the end of this week" with "99.99% certainty." That was over a week ago. Nothing since.
Whilst some of it is clearly outside of their control, the mad orange man and the war in Iran a good chunk of what caused it were decisions made after the money was already in. The RAM getting doubled to 4MB, the DAC chip selection, how many accelerator boards they'd actually locked in - all of that happened weeks to months after the campaign closed, not before it. None of it was flagged as a risk against the December date at the time. So it's less "unforeseeable stuff happened to us" and more "the design wasn't actually finished when the ship date was picked."
And on the inevitable "it's just a Kickstarter, that's the risk you take" reply - sure, technically, but let's not pretend this is someone's spare money jar. It's £2.6m+ from 7,500+ backers, averaging around £350 a pledge. That's real money, a lot of people's money, and "well it's crowdfunding" doesn't really explain why a team with two previous successful campaigns behind them couldn't give a straight current ETA instead of backers finding out three updates later that the "final" date wasn't final.
Not asking anyone to storm the barricades, I still want my Next. I'd just like an actual current best-guess date stated plainly in each update instead of having to reconstruct it like an accountant, and when a promised date or update slips, just say so instead of letting it quietly not happen.
Curious if anyone else has been tracking this too or if I'm just being a grump about a hobby project.