As someone who preordered on hope and has been patiently waiting.... a long, long time.... ...I'm fine with the wait. Phones are _hard_. Harder than laptops by

As someone who preordered on hope and has been patiently waiting.... a long, long time.... ...I'm fine with the wait. Phones are _hard_. Harder than laptops by a lot. RF optimization and certification makes grown engineers cry. I think a lot of people think of cellphones as just smaller versions of laptop components, but it's really not like that at all. Much of the criticism seems to be from folks who either A) think crowdfunding is a store, B) have a personal bone to pick, or C) have no idea how engineering works. I say this because a group at work (adjacent to my group, I work on their team sometimes) has been going through exactly the same struggles on a device that includes cellular data functionality. Many rounds, many thousands of dollars per round, and every time you think there should just be one more round. And going into it, we all thought it would be like the other embedded devices we've designed, plus radios, how hard can that be? The current update is encouraging, and with the world having gone sideways since the last update, the shipping delay is neither surprising nor unwarranted. I'm excited for the RYF certification, because few others seem to be chasing it, and I think it's important to support this work. Maybe I even get a neat phone out of the deal.