Project Progress Update - LattePanda Alpha & Delta

Project Progress Update #6

--- News from LattePanda Team

Time is passing quickly, one month time passed by in blink of the eye. In the passing of one month’s time, we experienced a few unexpected incidents, our internal and external team organized many meetings to make progress in advancing mass production related activities.

In reality, the conclusion is there is some good news and there is some bad news.The good news: The LattePanda Alpha is still on schedule for mass production. The bad news: The LattePanda Delta encountered some unpredictable problems.

First of all, we come to renew the LattePanda Delta’s progress early.

This generation of product research and development is somewhat new, but the team spent a great amount of time balancing research/development and to polish the design, because we have reason to believe the Delta is positioned at the right price point, the entire scope is at the highest quality to price ratio of a single product, at the same time, the team devotes one efforts to building experience of taking priority of the product.

We repeatedly went back to revise the design to optimize its capability, including Bluetooth 5.0, NVMe SSD expansion support as well as many touch ups to details (Delta CPU is triple the size of the alpha CPU, to create two models with the same form factor was a great challenge).

Right away we are working to complete the Delta design phase to start its formal mass production. The Delta CPU is the Celeron 4100. We received information from Intel that there is 3 months lack of supplies. The primary cause of this situation is Intel’s 10 nm microchip delay. To cause this delay, the microchip manufacturing companies put 10 nm production capacity requirement on top, and will return focus to 14 nm microchip later. Intel’s chip stock has run out, so even manufacturers like Dell and HP are waiting for the Celeron supply as we know. (See related news report)

Our supply chain team communicates with Intel to make progress and to see from our point of view that mass production might start in November and will need the CPU capacity to start. In other words, in order to recover Delta’s mass production will be delayed 3-4 months. We will maintain close communication with Intel to look for an earlier opportunity to receive the CPU and continue the program. And we will keep a monthly update for all our backers via update!

Update on 02/04/2019: Delta CPU - Celeron 4100 will be in stock in Q3 of 2019. Thanks for your understanding.

Next, LattePanda Alphas mass production makes headway

Alpha’s motherboard made mass production smoothly, the factory already has final packages entering the warehouse. We will take these on a weekly schedule to start our second batch of shipments.

The origin to pass on next batch, due to large quantity, the time to return some components still as before to produce middle,

The team will divide into 3 batches shipping one after the other until all goods are in the campaign backer’s hand. The sequence to send out products is as follows:

1. Shipping Alpha 864 Perks - At the end of Sep
2. Shipping Alpha 800 and 864 activated version - At the middle of Oct
3. Shipping Alpha Bundles - Before 10th Nov (Depends on the productions status of accessories)

The reason why we are breaking the shipments into 3 batches, is also because sending the logistics related information to the distribution company consumes a large amount of the team’s manpower time. We hope everyone can understand.

The whole product research and development, and mass production organized events is on track, but we still will find backers that are worried LattePanda will steal money from the project. What we would like to say is: Although the backers are looking after the 80w USD raised from crowdfunding. The fact is LattePanda from R&D, to production, to preparing the final product, to procuring the chip materials, we already invested over 160W USD. When we think to make a product and to allow ourselves to be satisfied with product timing, it is not an easy matter. We also ask everyone to understand and resist confrontation. We never resist because too much money and staff have been put into this. We also hope to have Delta backers understand our situation…

Of course, with our first distribution of goods behind us, we received some feedback:

“Mihail Trifonov：First off, big kudos to the Latte Panda Team for an amazingly executed product. It feels really high quality and I think they can be proud with the 'Designed in China' label on the front :) Let's hope we have similarly great software and customer support going forward.”

The team believes to let entire world again understand “Designed in China” is our greatest assessment. It is also an incentive to motivate us to continue to work hard.

Also there is a review video from a South Korean backer

Finally, attached is a photo of our latest accomplishment of the component part packaging.

We apologize for any inconvenience and here is the form of Customer Information Collection about LattePanda Delta Progress Delay. Please kindly fill in it, we will review it every week and update your orders accordingly. 

Best Regards,

LattePanda Operation Team