Dear Backers,

Happy holidays! This will be a relatively brief update, as both xobs and I are currently en route to the 31st Chaos Computer Congress.

We’re happy to report that the first round of Novena main boards have reached the doorsteps of many of our customers. We’ve also sent a pilot shipment to each unique country on our list of backers. With any luck, most of the pilot units will be delivered without any harassment from customs, at which point we will release the balance of our backer units.

For those of you who placed pre-orders for the motherboard after the crowdfunding campaign ended, your units will ship in late January. Similarly, desktop pre-orders will ship after the crowdfunding campaign desktop orders have shipped.

Speaking of the desktop unit, it’s coming along nicely. Production has already started, but instead of rushing units out the door, we’ve elected to do a thorough quality check of the initial production run. As a result, we’re having an initial article mailed to us in Hamburg while we are at 31C3. We’ll review the unit for fitness, and send tweaks as necessary back to the factory. We’ll also take photos of the user assembly process to act as a guide for when backers receive their units.

Remember, each unit is a kit that ships with two bezels, and you get the opportunity to pick which bezel to use with your LCD. However, we do urge you to read the assembly guide, because the LCD panel is very fragile and easily damaged if you flex the circuit board bonded to the glass.

Once we sign off on the initial article, we’ll ship the first round of desktop units to Crowd Supply for fulfillment. Our best guess is this will happen just around the New Year.

This means the delay on the mainboards is having a domino effect on the rest of the schedule. Our best guess at the moment is that the laptop units will also be delayed by a month, so instead of shipping in January, they will most likely start shipping in February; and likewise, the Heirloom units will also most likely be delayed until March. We deeply apologize for the delay, but it’s been hard to make up time given the complexity of the project. We feel uncomfortable cutting corners, and we think our backers will be better served by us taking the time to make sure the quality is where we want it to be, rather than cutting process checks to try to meet the original schedule.

That being said, we’ll send a tweet once the first desktop units depart from our facility for Crowd Supply — hopefully, it will be within the next week or so.

Happy holidays, and thanks again for your continued patience and enthusiasm.

-bunnie & xobs