July Community Update discussion

[Jazzband]

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.

You can outsource the 1st line of support, and scale it up and down as needed. Yes, you can't scale it instantaneously, but that's another thing that can and should be planned ahead if, for example, you know you're going to have two separate production runs at the same time, and they're much bigger than any of your previous runs. And it seems Pine already outsourced their support, just without the scaling (which could've helped mitigate many issues).



As I said before, a lot of those "unexpected" things could've been easily predicted and, with a little bit of planning, mitigated at least to some extent.



Pine64 had some reasonable expectations for a contracted factory: that they have enough experienced staff to fulfill the contract during the pandemic, they have the production line set up, they have the tools, they have the spares, they can complete the production run on schedule, etc.).

But the same goes for customers' expectations of Pine64: that Pine has enough staff to fulfill their obligations to their customers, that they can provide warranty service for the devices they're selling, that they have shipping figured out, that they have a plan in case something goes wrong, etc. And now we're seeing that Pine are complaining that the factory betrayed their trust and expectations. Yet somehow we, the customers, are not allowed to have the same level of expectations of Pine64. No, we're just "impatient", "unreasonable" and "entitled".



Finally, the fact that your expectations of Pine64 are lower than mine doesn't automatically mean that my expectations are somehow unreasonable or "warped".

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.

Changing factories AFTER they messed up is not a "Plan B". That's being reactive, whereas I'm saying Pine64 could and should have been proactive. For example, knowing they won't have access to the factory to test the devices before shipment, they should've planned to test them somewhere else instead. Basically, do what Pine64 eventually did, but for the whole production run and not just the second half of it.

Or have a smaller production run. And before you say anything about manufacturing cost, somehow Pine's previous production runs were smaller than the last one, and they still managed to make the ends meet. Or, failing that, raise the prices, maybe even make a little bit of profit and use it to rent a warehouse to perform an independent QA, or hire more support agents...

Or, you know, do the responsible thing: analyze the risks involved, see how many things could go wrong, and postpone the production run altogether. Somehow everyone keeps forgetting that's also an option.

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.

Pine's excuse for lack of support is their lack of staff to provide said support. They knew their production run is going to be much bigger, they could've planned for this and hired more staff. To hire more staff they could've raised prices. Yet they did nothing.

I'm sorry, I made the assumptions that you would be mentally capable of connecting the dots.

The fact that you're crossing the line and making this personal by implying that I disagree with your position because my mental capabilities are somehow inferior to yours doesn't make you look good, or make me want to continue this discussion with you. So this will be my last response to your comments.

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

Neither is it native for me, so I'd say we were on even ground here.