2018: An exciting year is ending.
Bad news first: The new Chameleon did not make it in time for Christmas. However, we expect to receive the first units of the new production run tomorrow. If the final tests are successful, pre-orders will open in the evening of december 20th, 2018.
All pre-orders for Indivision ECS V2 and ACA500plus have been shipped during the past days. Despite the high demand, we've managed to ship these three days before the planned delivery date, so even customers outside Europe have the chance to revive their A500 during the Christmas holidays.
During this year, the tight situation on the components market became even worse: Even for standard components, delivery times of up to 40 weeks were quoted. Thanks to our extremely good relations with a number of suppliers, we managed to keep many products available and produce new projects. We could even take advantage of the situation, because other customers of our assembly partners did not get their components in time, so our projects were put on the assembly machines ahead of time. The ongoing boom of the electronics sector has only delayed the production of Chameleon.
We're looking back on a successful year with the highest production rate in company history:
- C64 Reloaded MK2
- C64c cases
- ACA1233n
- ACA1221EC
- Buddha Flash anniversary edition
- ACA500plus
- X-Surf-500
- Micromys V5
- SuperPLA V4
- Indivison ECS V2
- ACE2
- C64c keyboard mount kits
- A604n
- 4-player adapter (C64/C128)
This list contains new and existing products that were kept in production despite the tight market situation. Next year, the sold-out ACA1221EC will be replaced by the ACA122LC, which will be available in two speeds. With the ACA1221LC-20, we will have an accelerator for A1200 and ACA500plus for under 100,- EUR(*) again (**).
We will also be able to serve numerous requests for even faster accelerators next year: A good quantity of 68040 and 68060 CPUs has already arrived in our premises and passed our incoming materials inspection. After a multiple year-long search, we finally have the required quantity of processors to start a design for these fastest members of the M68k processor family.
Indivision AGA MK2cr continues to sell very well, but it was not available these past weeks. We have made a small stock of these flicker fixers with DVI-I output available in our shop today. A new production run is planned for the second quarter of 2019.
With a continued decline in support from our resellers and failed attempts to improve the situation, we further expanded our own infrastructure: Customer support is now bundled in our new support forum, and we have hired more employees who work in our workshop and shipping department. Our team has grown to a total of nine employees, and we're especially happy that our good working conditions have convinced our new employees to witch jobs in favour of iComp GmbH.
The payment method "barzahlen.de" was not so successful. This possibility to pay for online orders in German supermarkets was only chosen by very few customers, despite it being the method with the best data economy and buyer protection. We have therefore cancelled the contract with Cash Payment Solutions GmbH. This payment method will only be active in our shop until march 30th, 2019, 12:00pm. The cooperation with CPS GmbH went smooth and professional, and we'd continue to offer this payment method if the base cost would be in proper relation to the revenues through CPS GmbH.
Our team will process your orders until friday december 21st, 2018. On december 27th, an emergency staff will interrupt the holidays to ship orders that are paid until 12:00pm of that day. The whole team will be back on the job on january 2nd, 2019.
(*)Price includes 19% VAT, does not include shipping. VAT automatically deducted for shipments outside the EU.(**) Update july-2019: Unfortunately, we cannot keep this announced low price.