Einstein: More Delays

The new Paul C. Buff Einstein moonlights are once against delayed according to a recent announcement on the PBC website.

The annoucement reads:

Update From Paul:

We regret to inform customers that our Chief Engineer, Dr. Michael Morgan suffered a totally unexpected grand mal seizure Tuesday, while doing final pre-production testing on Einstein. Fortunately we have a First Responder trained staff member who saved his life and we got him to the hospital in time. Mike is home resting now and begging to finish up his work at home despite a pea size brain mass that is thought to be the cause, and which is yet to be fully diagnosed. For those interested, Mike has been my friend and Chief Engineer in two companies, dating back to the 1970s.

We are reluctant to subject him to any excess at this point in time, so much of this work is going to fall on me and on other members of our staff. This is certain to add a couple of weeks to the Einstein release. We anticipate having our production vendor produce about a dozen Einsteins in, hopefully, full final production form, next week. Following successful evaluation of these units we should be ready to go into production.

My own work schedule is already about 14 hours - 7 days a week. We have been scouring employment agencies for additional highly capable engineering help for a year now. Seems our requirements are higher than the available work force. Fortunately we hired one very capable engineer about three weeks ago, but getting up to speed on this stuff takes time.

With the Einstein pre-order list now over 2500 units, believe me getting this product right and shipping is our number one priority. I have been testing and using a pre production Einstein for about a month now and can safely report that, at least in my opinion, it is a joy in every regard. I hope our customers will bear with us on this.

This isn't the first time the release has been delayed.  The story of the Einsteins goes back several years to another product called the ABMax.  The ABMax had most of the same features as the new Einstein lights as you can see from the picture to the right.

Preorders were taken in June of 2009 with the promise the new lights would ship shortly.  After a couple of months, Paul announced that a supplier couldn't produce the promised digital power system as promised (quality control issue) so they were forced to scrap the entire project and start over.

The ABMax reemerged as the "Einstein" system and was announced earlier this year.

The Einstein has meet with further delays, this most recent one due to an illness with Paul's chief engineer.

I trust that the new light will eventually make it to market, but delays in new products seem to be a way of life with PCB.  He often times over estimates how quickly he can get something to market.  The same thing recently happened with the now for sale CyberCommander.

Regardless, I am on the waiting list for the new Einstein lights.  Once I get my hands on one, you can look forward to a detailed review here.