Waiting: Waiting: We are still left with jumps being a likely (maybe the only) gating issue.

As I said in the post you responded to, I have yet to see anything that shows it is Jumps that is the actual problem. Connections are for sure.

So, you have two basic situations where someone could lose a connection. One would be it simply doesn’t connect when initially trying to connect (be it first turning on or by jumping to another device). The other is when already connected and then you lose the connection. I don’t know how this all breaks down in WT’s records, but let’s look at the problem with not initially connecting.

If you only measure those, how many times a day are you connecting? Basically only when the TB powers down and, later, you turn it on again.

But what about people who use jumps a lot? They have the same power on situations, but they also have a chance of an issue every time they jump. So, to give a hypothetical, someone using one jump slot may turn the device on 5 times a day. The person doing the jumps would also turn it on 5 times, but maybe jump to other devices 5 times as well. So just from that, you have double the chances of seeing a connection issue - even if Jumps itself works fine.

It doesn’t stop there. A person doing jumps is using multiple devices. Each device may create its own problems, not to mention the same device but different OS or other stuff individuals have than another does not. So the possibilities go much higher. Yet it still may have nothing to do with Jumps creating the problem. That is, if you only have one connection, anyone who happens to have that one combination that doesn’t work would still have it. It would just be harder to find.

Heck, jumps, besides making it easier to find problems, can also help narrow it down. If I only use one device and something goes wrong, I have very limited information about the cause. But if I have 4 devices (in my case), I would see that it works on some and not on others - which helps track down the problem. And that is what I’ve experienced. I can’t remember every single thing I’ve reported, but I know that pretty much the old issues involving connections that I reported, they were on the iMac, not the iPad Pro, or iPad mini, or on the iPhone 6s (or the 6 before I upgraded).

I can’t guarantee that Jumps don’t CAUSE a problem, but I still haven’t seen anything that shows they do. I wish WT would elaborate on this, just to be sure.

Waiting: Waiting: It seems that jumps is now seen as integral to the product.

I think WT has said something about this and it ties in with their statement about things changing when they found most testers were abandoning their regular keyboards. Suddenly it wasn’t primarily about occasionally typing on a tablet or phone, it was going to be the go-to keyboard, even without jumps because it works so well and has such a nice typing feel. So it had to be even better. And with Jumps they added in, as you point out, that it would be one keyboard for everything.

I didn’t think Jumps was that big a deal, until I started using it. Wouldn’t want to be without it now and I probably jump less than most do.

Waiting: Waiting: We have the promise of a “better” reward, but no way to evaluate that or even know if those late comers get the exact same reward.

True, none of us knows what the cutoff point is for each reward level for early adopters. We only know (treggers) what the top award is. Not any others or a timeline.

Waiting: Waiting: we lost our place in line too

I don’t agree with that, though I understand the perspective: Some who ordered later than others were selected for Treg.

However, WT was going to do testing with real people (already were, but they expanded it). If they expanded their workers to include people who would just type all day, looking for problems, no one would say the line was jumped, because they wouldn’t have been customers.

But that would also mean that you would hear nothing about the device except what WT told you. Instead they chose some of their new testers from the forum membership. Very tiny percentage of orders. Even just of orders from the first day you could order! And as a result, you get lots of reports from non-WT people giving their real world experiences. That strikes me as a net win. Nothing to do with me being chosen. I felt the same way when MacRumors got a sample so we’d finally hear stuff from a third party.