He must refer to the stock abundance that meant I didn't have to wait a year to get one. Oh, wait...........
That was then, the current situation is this:
If you are in the US, you can go to Fractal's website right away and order a FM3 and probably get it in a few days. If you are in Europe, you go to the G66 website and can only join a mystery waitlist and get the FM3 who knows when.
If I try to order from the US Fractal site, it will just say "Unfortunately one or more items in your cart can't be shipped to your location. Please choose a different delivery address." so ordering directly from Fractal is not an option unless you go around that using a mail forwarding service that gives you a US address. Which is its own can of worms when it comes to things like returns or warranty.
So basically Fractal will not sell to you directly but only through their official European distributor, which would be fine if it wasn't a case of "you will get it someday, not gonna tell you when, you're just going to get an email one day that says you can now buy it".
COVID aside, Fractal should be able to tell how many units per month they can build, how many are allotted to US customers and when they could ship a batch order to a distributor. The distributor would then be able to show an estimate on their website.
By comparison, let's look how NeuralDSP handled the launch of their Quad Cortex. Like the FM3, it also was delayed a lot but when they finally started shipping it, they first fullfilled their direct tier 1 and 2 preorders, then they started shipping US Sweetwater preorders because it takes longer to get them to the US. Now they are shipping to European vendors so the end result is that those who ordered from a dealer will probably get theirs around the same time on both continents, with the assumption that say a US dude and Euro dude bought theirs in the timeframe that gets them into the first batch of units sent to dealers. During this time I always had an estimate of when I might get mine from Thomann, even if that estimate kept slipping it was a better experience than being in the dark.
Fractal should strive to be more transparent about their shipping times. Seeing something as "sold out" and having to check the stock situation regularly in case more becomes available or joining a waitlist where you don't know where you land in the queue is a terrible way to shop online.