Playdate will make you wait.
The global chip shortage had a serious impact on the production of the next portable gaming devices this week. Just a day after Valve announced the postponement of Steam Deck, a postponement was announced for the console as well Playdate, initially planned for the end of 2021.
The manufacturers of the system Panic provided a lengthy explanation of why the console was postponed “early 2022“.
In a newsletter sent to Playdate pre-order customers, Panic details the reason for the postponement: “we found a number of units with batteries so low that Playdate would not turn on at all and could not be recharged“writes Panic.
While investigating the issue, Panic stopped all production of Playdate until a new battery supplier could be obtained. The announcement says the company will change batteries on all existing systems and the consoles will reach customers by “early 2022”. The Panic newsletter suggests that around 20,000 systems were part of this initial production.
Panic ran into another problem with the systems besides this one.
“With many pre-orders in place, we immediately placed an order at our factory for all the necessary parts for units scheduled for 2022 and beyond. The response was … disappointing. Many of our parties have been significantly delayed. In fact, we can no longer get Playdate’s current CPU for – you won’t believe it – two years. 730 days“.
To shorten the wait by two years, Panic decided to overhaul the entire Playdate system motherboard with a different CPU for all orders beyond the first batch of 20,000 systems. The company claims this CPU is “similar but more widely availableThe CPU change will not change the price for existing Playdate orders.
Source: Arstechnica.
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