Waitlist Email

The FM3 and its waitlist was announced in April 2019. At the time they expected it to start shipping later that summer but it kept getting delayed, supposedly because of firmware bugs that took months to sort out. They did not want to let it out the gate until it was ready. They finally started shipping "non-headphone" units in Feb 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning and supply chains from China were becoming a big question mark. I jumped on a headphone-less one stupidly thinking I'd be gigging with it in the 2020 summer. (LOL) I think it was a few months later they received the first headphone units, just in time for all the gigs everywhere to be canceled.

And yes, there were people who had signed up on a waiting list for an Ax8 who were put at the top of the list for the FM3. It wasn't made clear that the Ax8 was being discontinued until the announcement of the FM3.

FAS made the right call to not announce the FM9 until they had the product in hand. Bravo! And mine's out for delivery today!
 
Thanks all. I didn't mean to start a flame war re: Helix or anything, just bringing up that as a newbie to the modeling game, if this was going to be a year-long process, I probably wouldn't be patient enough to get started and would order something else. But it seems like things are moving along decently, and I can hold off a month or two to see if they tear through the waitlist quicker once they are through the initial wave of day 1 emailers.
 
mikeyg said:
If they can’t do -12, they can’t operate an Axe
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LizzyD said:
The FM3 and its waitlist was announced in April 2019. At the time they expected it to start shipping later that summer but it kept getting delayed, supposedly because of firmware bugs that took months to sort out. They did not want to let it out the gate until it was ready. They finally started shipping "non-headphone" units in Feb 2020, just as the pandemic was beginning and supply chains from China were becoming a big question mark. I jumped on a headphone-less one stupidly thinking I'd be gigging with it in the 2020 summer. (LOL) I think it was a few months later they received the first headphone units, just in time for all the gigs everywhere to be canceled.

And yes, there were people who had signed up on a waiting list for an Ax8 who were put at the top of the list for the FM3. It wasn't made clear that the Ax8 was being discontinued until the announcement of the FM3.

FAS made the right call to not announce the FM9 until they had the product in hand. Bravo! And mine's out for delivery today!
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So people were on the waiting list for ax8 when it got discontinued?
Does that mean ax8 always had a waiting list?
 
I changed the reporting of the chart a bit to something that seems more sensible, at least to me.

X axis values are the time people got on the waitlist. Y axis is the number of days people are waiting for an invitation from that waitlist point.

There's a little hump around the 8/27 1:58p point, which was the result of FAS focusing on the FX3 Turbo processing I think. The regular little bumps are weekends, which are significant because they add two days to the waiting time. Early in the line it's up and down. I think that's when Fractal was processing VIP and influential users so there were some entries that didn't quite fit the trend, but the line and progress evened out as the list moved forward.

The longer flat-line segments are interesting but I'm not sure what to make of them. They are caused by a large number of reports of invitations in a single day, but I don't know if it means Fractal processed more invitations that day, or there just happened to be a larger percentage of invitations received by people who reported them in the thread. In a glass-half-full moment I'm hoping it is the first, that Fractal was processing more.

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Greg Ferguson said:
I wouldn’t hold my breath.

A lot of people wouldn’t like knowing once they found out, plus, that would give away proprietary and company-confidential strategic information when it got into competitor’s hands.
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You know what would be really cool? If the FAS guys would tell me where I am on the list. 😁 I’m not going to cancel. I would pay now and just wait if it would speed things up a bit.
 
brokenvail said:
When there is a waitlist for a product that gets discontinued those ppl are rolled to the top of the list of the product that replaced it
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That statement is vague when taking it in the context @DANLUNATIC 's question of "Does that mean ax8 always had a waitlist?"

The AX8 did not always have a waitlist. Both @LizzyD and I bought the AX8 directly without a waitlist.

I'm not sure of all the particulars, but originally there was a waitlist and then they got enough in stock so no waitlist was necessary. Then, it seems Fractal went out of stock of the AX8, put people on a new AX8 waitlist, announced the FM3, and then put the AX8 people on the FM3 waitlist. I am not sure at what point they discontinued the AX8. It is possible they did not have their supply chain under control, kept accepting orders, and then later discontinued it. I doubt they would keep taking orders for the AX8 when it went out of stock and they already knew they were discontinuing it. I would hope not, as I would have hated waiting for an AX8 and then being offered a FM3, as I prefer the AX8 over the FM3 because of its form factor. They may have not wanted to reveal the FM3 too soon, and the AX8 being discontinued could have hinted at something new, but just leaking a hint of something new without revealing it would not be as bad as misleading customers. Fractal has been classier than that, so I suspect it was supply chain issues. Although, there may have been other reasons.
 
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