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Today, we're going to share a new Production Update and the latest shipping estimates. We were able to get quite close to our prior estimate from the August Production Update, but we are still approximately 1 week behind schedule to complete each of the preorder months.
Production Update
Production speed has improved dramatically since our last Production Update. In August, we've succeeded in shipping nearly 6X more units per week on average than the prior weeks. Our team has been working particularly hard lately. We've been running a day shift, night shift, and weekend shift to try to catch up as much as we can with production. Most of the team took a well deserved long weekend off for the Labor Day holiday in the US, and we're now resuming shipments after the weekend.
Engineering
Our engineering team has spent recent months developing new technology for calibration and quality control automation to improve current bottlenecks. For example, one particular calibration step uses high-resolution cameras that takes several minutes to calibrate each device. Updates to our software, new cameras with more bandwidth, ridiculous CPU compute, and futuristic robot arms will dramatically improve our speed by finishing this calibration step in mere seconds.
This should double our shipment rate and simultaneously improve our ability to catch errors when deployed on the production lines by mid-September.
In parallel, our engineering team has been focused on root causing quality control issues, working directly with customers that have any user experience issues or hardware faults, shipping firmware updates to fix bugs, and ironing out the quirks. We've confidently proven that Beyond 2 can be an excellent device when we nail it, and for the times when the Beyond isn't working quite as intended, the customer support and engineering teams jumps on it to learn what's wrong, fix it for the customer, and improve the product. For example, we've noticed some Link Boxes aren't functioning as well as they should. We've been able to improve some with firmware updates and have changed our automated test systems to reject this specific voltage fault in production. In the meantime, customer support remains fast at shipping replacement parts. We'll share more interesting technical details about faults & fixes for anyone curious with regular updates in Discord.
Customer Support
As we've joked before, our support team is 100% organic human – you get to interact with real people who have hundreds or thousands of hours of VR experience. Everyone on the Bigscreen customer support team was first a Beyond customer before joining the team. Having shipped so many units in the recent past, customer support is overloaded again and it currently takes approximately 1 week to respond to a new ticket (but active tickets get fast responses until resolved). We've successfully achieved 1-3 day response times for much of the past few months but each period of growth causes our team to get overloaded with support requests. We'll continue to invest in our team (including hiring more staff and new processes) to improve response times to our target of 1-3 day response times.
Latest Estimated Schedule
Since we launched Beyond 2 in March, March preorders were our largest batch. And thanks to the increase in production rate in the past couple of weeks, we fully expect to complete April, May, and June preorders much faster than the time it took to complete March preorders. Having ironed out most of the production challenges, things should get easier and faster from here on out.
March 2025 preorders: We last estimated completing all orders through March by August 30. We will have shipped more than 90% of March orders shortly after the publication of this update when the Labor Day holiday ends as shipments resume after the holiday. The last remaining March orders are mostly a couple hundred Beyond 2s and couple hundred Beyond 2e's in the Crystal Clear shell (our most popular choice!) and people who ordered in March but switched to the new VRChat Edition. The last few orders may take up to 2 more weeks as we await specific inventory for those orders (see VRChat Edition update below for more details).
April 2025 preorders: We previously estimated completing April preorders by mid-September. As we wrap up March in the upcoming week, April shipments will automatically begin within the next week. While many April preorders will ship on time with the prior estimates, completing every April shipment will still take some time. We now estimate shipping all April shipments mid-to-late September, a 1-2 week delay from the prior estimate.
May-June 2025 preorders: We previously expected to complete May-June preorders by the end of September. While the first shipments will begin as planned in September, we think we can complete this by the first or second week of October, a 1-2 week delay from the prior estimate.
July 2025 preorders: All July shipments are now expected to complete by late October, a 1-2 week delay from the prior estimate.
August-September 2025 preorders: orders placed in August are on schedule, and are still expected to ship in November as previously planned. New orders placed in September should also ship in November. If demand keeps growing, we will soon update our website to December delivery dates.
VRChat Edition: the first batch of the VRChat Edition is on schedule. It departed last week as planned on August 29 and is in transit. We expect the first VRChat Edition shipments to begin in the next 2 weeks as planned after final assembly, quality control, and fulfillment. The shipment schedule of the VRChat Edition will be the same as the above monthly schedule, starting with the March preorders that changed to the VRChat Edition.
As production speed improves further, the delivery times are expected to shrink from 3 months (today) to 1-3 days by the end of this year once we've caught up on all preorders. We reasonably expect to complete every order to-date by November.
While it's been a stressful journey to ramp up production and ship Beyonds at scale, it has been highly motivating and rewarding to see people blown away with their new Beyond 2s. There is a lot more hard work ahead of us, but we're appreciative of the community's support and excited to get more Beyond 2s into your hands! We'll post more updates in the coming weeks about topics such as the Halo Mount, and new eyetracking features like blink that are coming soon to the Beta channel.