How does that work?
I pay money asked for the product; I wait for the product.
Which is different from getting a product from a mickey mouse that bought a batch of 50 of them and sell it on ali express or ebay or what not, at 200% markup, without even being authorized reseller.
What would you suggest? To not buy? Yes, that is an option, but I paid already. Ask for a refund? That would work too but I don’t need money spent for that item so waiting in a queue that is totally bogus versus waiting for a queue that is totally bogus via email notification (“the preorders for this item are ready, come and reserve yours at 7 AM on this day!”) seems to be more or less the same in the end to me.
I am not supporting any bad behavior; as matter of facts I am here bringing up the problem, so other people can read about it and decide to not buy it unless it is actually available, instead of waiting for “3 months”. Educate others, that is the mantra here… Then anyone is free to do what they want; I just hope they don’t feed the scalpers.Or maybe you support scalpers as you are one of them ? LOL
If you cancelled your order why you still here? Clockwork is a tiny bespoke company, they didn’t just show up overnight from some viral a.i. image to scam people. They’ve been around for a while and have released 3 products, I’ve had all 3 a various times and were all of good quality. Yes the shipping times suck, but I’d like to see you do better. $119 for a uConsole w/o Core, that’s a steal! I’d bet you’d have problem just with the case at that price, not to mention screen, mainboard, keyboard, battery tray. Clockwork is obviously not trying to nickel and dime their customers, the uConsole would still easily sell for 2x the price. To help costs you need to order 2500 cases, 1000 mainboards, 5000 panels. They probably don’t have the capital to order 2-3000 orders of parts for future orders that haven’t happened. You can do the research and see how long it takes to ship and if you cant handle that, then go buy something from Dell that will get to you in a week.
It isn’t that they take a long time to ship. I saw the 90 business days shipping time when I ordered. The problem is they took way longer than 90 days, didn’t ship it, don’t have a credible plan to ship it, aren’t being transparent, and haven’t refunded the money when asked.
I don’t know why you feel the need to be an evangelist. I’m glad you got what you paid for, but plenty of folk haven’t and trying to sweep it under the rug or pretend this is normal is very odd.
(Edited because although it took an extremely long time, much longer than would normally be acceptable, they did finally process the refund)
1.5 years ago I ordered a power transformer for a radio tower installation, that transformer won’t be delivered for another 2 years from what they say but were not expecting it for another 4 years. The lead time on some stuff has skyrocketed, sanctions on stuff like cellular radios cause problems even getting stuff approved to ship to another country. If you ordered a barebones kit you would most likely get it in that 90 day window. Just forget about it till you get the shipping email.
I’m very surprised they haven’t refunded the money when asked. Yours is the first post I’ve seen claiming that. I emailed Alex and got a response within 24hrs and a refund within a few days. And I’ve seen plenty of posts over the years where others have done the same. I’m not sure if the website lists other ways to contact the company, or if they even read or respond to them, and there’s absolutely no guarantee anyone official will read anything posted to the forums or respond, but if you email alex@clockworkpi.com directly you should get a response. (Copied here for convenience, but he’s also posted it around the forums, and probably even in the main post that started this thread.) I have nothing to do with him or the company, but am just a satisfied (if not overly patient) customer.
There have been people who claimed they cancelled their order that included a CM4 (or maybe R01/A06 or switched black to silver, I forget but I know I’ve seen a few posts over time), and then started a new order without a CM4 and it arrived in the expected 90 days or even sooner. There was a time when CM4s were hard to get and it made as much sense to order them with the uConsole as it did trying to find one separately. But now they are more widely available, and it’s pretty clear they add a significant amount of time to shipping, so there’s really no reason to order one with the device. It’s good to see people receiving their devices in under a year now – it took a year for me to get my Devterm and had I not cancelled my uConsole order it would have probably taken a little longer based on where my order number was and comparing to others and when they received theirs. I didn’t cancel because of the wait time – it was because of personal reasons at the time. But I ended up getting lucky and found someone on here a few months ago who had bought an extra and was selling it. Ended up being slightly cheaper (though silver instead of black), and I probably would have only had my original order to use for a few months earlier anyway, if it had arrived when I expected (a year+).
It would be much better if they posted realistic information on the website though. The same is true for the OS release(s). Clockwork Pi seems to just assume everyone will spend time combing through years of posts and noise on the forum to find out everything about the device and how to use it. Makes me wonder how many people buy it expecting it to “just work” with the official OS and then are sorely disappointed when it doesn’t so much beyond the bare minimum (if that). With community provided OS and information all these devices can be quite useful and customizable. But if you rely on the minimally functional stuff it comes with then you’re missing out on most of the benefit of even owning it. It’s also a worry in the future because one day these forums will go away, as everything on the internet does. And with so much incredibly useful information hidden here, I expect most of if will be lost. And it’s the sort of thing many people wouldn’t even expect to look for, even if it was somehow saved and maintained. Hopefully the community will somehow take care of that too, as sometimes happens, but I guess time will tell.
Order No. 24522
uConsole Kit RPI-CM4 Lite
Color: Matte Black
Type: WIFI+4G cellular
Core: Raspberry Pi CM4 104000 lite
Price: $239.00
Qty: 1
I have placed the order on Oct 19, 2023. I have sent many emails to Alex asking about order status, and I got prompt response every time. I got my device today in Hong Kong. Very excited, the device is in premium quality and I think it’s totally worth the wait!!!
I am getting to that point as well. I ordered last November and was told 2 batches in June. Pretty sure he has 4-5 responses that he copies and pastes. Id rather him say he has no idea at this point.
Honestly I feel scammed, I know they have a lot of work to make, but this just makes me angry.
I’ve already waited 219 days, 143% more time than the absolute lie of 90 days. It’s a complete shame.
I thought about buying it for my job, and nowadays I’m on 5 other personal projects that need controlling network data and stuff. I always have to be standing up with a laptop to manage stuff there, always thinking that if I’ve gotten the f*cking device already I could do it ultra fast and more comfortable.
I’m looking for scalper prices, but most of them are no core wifi only 10-15% more expensive than what I already paid clockwork.
I’ll still look for someone willing to sell it with the same configuration I ordered.
I just sent him:
Honestly I feel scammed, I know you have a lot of work to make, but this just makes me angry.
I’ve already waited 219 days, 143% more time than the absolute lie of 90 days. It’s a complete shame.
Every one in a while I send you emails to know what’s the state of the product I already paid and I 97% of the times get an automated response.
Once I get a scalper with a good price I will request a refund.
The cheapest I have seen a uConsole go for on ebay is $250, no core, wifi only. Most sellers want $400+, so if you see one for less than $300, snap it up, you not going to get it any cheaper than that without waiting on Clockworkpi.
I found someone selling them with the CM4 core for only $100 AUD more than clockworkpi. The only thing stopping me pulling the trigger is the reports on here about boards being dead on arrival and such. Not sure how the warranty would go
I actually understand your concerns.
The thing is, as a small company, the fight is constant. We have been fighting for our share of some popular components, the possition of the production line, or even a shipping spot, especially during busy months.
About the answers, I know you might not want to hear, but I wish those answers were automated. In fact, I’ve been organizing the shipping lists manually, that’s where I get the batch info for you.
To start a business is not that easy, I bet you know about it. But in tech business, it’s even worse. When it comes to massive production, it’s war. All the results are based on the money, which we don’t have too much to spend, not like those big companies.
So, again, I understand your concerns, because I am also a customer, and I would definitely been pissed off if I were you. It’s fair.
I said all those above not to sugar coat the situation, but merely to assure you that we’ve been working extremely hard.
Ahhh… it burns, but I guess I’ll give them a little more time, a LITTLE
See, I read stuff like that from the position of someone whose ran a business and had to work under difficult conditions, but at the end of the day we are the customers. We didn’t force them to give unrealistic deadlines. We didn’t force them to say it was three batches away every month. We didn’t force them to say orders were being packed when they weren’t. We didn’t force them to apparently prioritise bulk orders to resellers over their direct customers.
I actually do still want a uconsole (or something very like it) but all I can get out of clockworkpi is excuses, and there’s no credible plan to dig themselves out of the pit they’re in here other than keep giving excuses and hope that’s good enough. When I most recently asked for an update I said give me a shipping date if you can, or tell me what’s the process to get a refund and they cancelled my order right there and then rather than say it was however many more months away; and then whenever anyone complains or talks about their bad experiences here you get dogpiled by the same half a dozen people saying this is perfectly normal and acceptable: it’s not.
