July Community Update discussion

[matosys]

Oh, I know shipping parts back and forth takes time. I would've been fine with waiting if Pine responded a week or two after the ticket was filed. If that were the case, the broken part might've already reached them, get tested, and be half-way back by now. Or at least reached them, even that would've saved us several weeks of waiting.
But instead, Pine chose to ignore all those tickets until now. So now, we've already spent more than a month waiting, and it's going to be another 2-3 weeks until parts reach them, god knows how long it'll take them to "test" these parts, then another 2-3 weeks until the fixed/replaced parts reach customers.
So no, my expectations are not "warped", they're perfectly reasonable.

"pine chose to ignore all those tickets" - that's exactly what i mean. there are a few guys trying to make ends meet and issues need to get prioritized. this is not a service business where you can freely scale your support staff up when something goes wrong and kick people out when you don't need them. there is nobody turning their head away from you, it's just that there are too many things to do currently due to many external factors, so support tickets are stacking up until there's time to work on them. pine64 is not some huge business, mate. trained workers don't fall from the sky either. you being unsatisfied with the support and angry is reasonable, and i'm repeating myself in stating that. you think it's reasonable for a small company during a pandemic with unexpected things going wrong and factories not fulfilling their contractual obligations and the resulting increased amount of damaged units to service your support ticket.

What i'm expecting is, that the business gets kept running first, before servicing your support ticket. I would not be surprised if there aren't even enough spare parts since producing lots of spare parts in advance is unreasonable. So, the required spare parts would have to be manufactured together with the next PBP batch, being in like 1 or 2 months (my estimate). That's why I'm saying your expectations are warped. If so many things go wrong, I would expect to have a working part in like 2-3, maybe even 4 months. I ordered a RockPro64 and was surprised to receive it after about a month, and that's a board which was in stock.

And I never suggested they should've changed factories in the middle of the production run, so I'm not sure who or what are you trying to argue here.

I am not talking about in the middle of a production run. I am talking in general. Part costs are calculated on volume of orders. PBPs have to be considered rather low volume and if you want to produce economically, your only choice is to pick a manufacturer, based on price quotes and confidence into the production process, and go with this manufacturer for the batch. you were asking for a plan b - a fallback plan, if something goes wrong. I was pointing out, that redundant production methods are outside of the realm of possibility due to the limited volume. i was trying to make sense of your call for a plan b and what you were calling for as a plan b.

I was talking about raising prices to hire more staff and support agents, you're arguing about import/export and shipping. This whole argument starts to remind me of a Straw Man fallacy.

--> "It's not that simple" <-- I was pointing out some parts of the business process, where buerocracy gets in the way. Doing things in batches helps when applicable, but support is on a case-by-case basis. Essentially, with this part, i want to point out my doubts, that hiring more staff will improve support even close as much as you imagine it would. I'm sorry, I made the assumptions that you would be mentally capable of connecting the dots.



Keep in mind that English isn't my native language, so a lot will be lost in translation.