- Feb 22, 2015
- 1,052
- 1,990
You shouldn't hate to ask that at all! You'd only be asking if you were eager to get the case
Anyways, and more seriously, though, probably in the Q3 timeframe - i.e. July-September. That would be for commercial availability of the final version of the enclosure, if you catch my drift. I'll go that specific but no more, for now. Lots of other details surrounding that... but I personally would consider it a failure if we were later than that. I don't think we will be.
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To be honest, there's a few things we can't share yet because we've actually been sideswiped by a pretty serious setback: geopolitics. Yes, seriously. The US has massively escalated the level of tariffs on the cost of rolled steel imports from China, and this is causing a spike in domestic steel prices that's disrupting pretty much the entire manufacturing sector.
To keep a long story short, US manufacturers have enjoyed a glut of steel for the past few years because Chinese steel mills were flooding the market with cheap steel - in part because they had the support (and a degree of financial backing via subsidies) from the Chinese government, and in part because a slowing Chinese economy and construction bust has encouraged producers there to export heavily. This boosted demand and use of steel by US-based manufacturers, since steel prices had plummeted, but the market is so over-saturated that prices haven't rebounded and domestic steel producers have been quite adversely affected. Nucor and others have lost billions, overall US steel production has plummeted, and US-based steel mills have been struggling financially as of late.
The US has, in response, elected to dramatically increase the cost of importing steel, in order to ensure that domestic steel producers aren't completely devastated by (what they'd argue are) prices that they simply can't compete against. This is great news for the steel companies, and their employees, but it's terrible news for domestic manufacturers for three very important reasons:
- The price of steel is going to spike in a very big way in the US, and stay high for the foreseeable future, or until the tariffs are reduced. That could be a timescale of months or years, it really depends on whether or not China and the US can come to some sort of trade agreement.
- Because manufacturers across the country are now trying to stockpile steel in anticipation of increased prices, the supply of steel is now inconsistent and scarce already.
- Because the low cost of steel incentivized a lot of manufacturers and companies to use lots of steel in their products, there's likely going to be a lot of re-tooling and re-adjusting in order to compensate for everything above - from using less steel, to replacing it with other metals. So market prices for ancillary raw materials and other things are going to be affected by this as well.
Given that Cerberus uses steel, the entire cost structure of manufacturing the enclosure has now changed considerably. To wit, aluminum is now cheaper for us to use, when compared to steel. We're considering what to do to keep the price from being affected, and what materials we should avail ourselves of. We've been looking into using aluminum for the panels, but at this point we may have no choice but to make the entire enclosure in aluminum.
...Ironically, a lot of people may interpret this as a good thing, but we've consistently believed that steel was a better choice for the internal chassis for a few reasons, none of which had to do with cost. Namely, we're able to use a thinner gauge, magnetic dust filters are supported, and the case is able to be more rigid. That said, and for whatever reason, the market perception does tend to be that "aluminum is higher quality than steel", which, although primitive, means such a change may be advantageous from a strictly marketing perspective. Furthermore, a fully aluminum enclosure does have the very nice benefit of significantly reducing the weight of the case as well, and that's pretty great for something that's ostensibly portable.
(We may also be able to reduce shipping costs a little bit, though dimensions factor more into that than weight, and Cerberus may have to increase in size slightly to accommodate the necessarily thicker gauge we need to keep the enclosure solid)
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Anyways, we've been pretty frustrated behind the scenes with this since, if this wasn't going on, we'd probably have made some announcements by now. And to be clear, the magnitude of this is very large: this not only affects us, but practically every customer our manufacturer has! So not only do we have to respond in our own product, but our manufacturer has to help literally everyone they serve refactor their entire product lines to account for this. Hence, work that took us a day or two is now taking a week or longer. There are a lot of losers among us.
Lastly, and just because I know some will think of it, or think to ask: we will not be moving production of Cerberus overseas. That would add monumental delays, marginal cost savings, and compromise a lot of things about the enclosure. There are also some things we're able to do (but can't announce presently) that we simply can't do with an international manufacturer. Once we announce and ship, I promise that you'll see how going with our present manufacturer is highly advantageous and beneficial to you all. Until then, though, you'll just have to trust us.
Sorry for the longwinded post, but this is what's been occupying us for the past two weeks, basically. It's frustrating as hell, but I'll admit that it's pretty neat insofar that I've only really been an observer of these sorts of things in the past. To be an invested participant in economics and geopolitics is actually pretty neat, even if we're on the losing end of things right now.
