Something I hope WT will keep in mind, now that they’ve done a quick Friday update with the possibility of more details on Monday. This applies to any timeframe, btw:

On bad timeframes, but one where things aren’t delay for very long periods, we have what we saw last week. A wait until the last minute for an update, but that post simply gave a new time for the actual update. And then there was another post delaying it until the next day - and it didn’t happen until late that day! Now, consider the customers. They get understandably worried as we approach Sunday night (the original deadline), and then get even more frustrated as follow-up deadlines are missed.

Now, compare that to this past week. Once again the update deadline was on a Sunday, but WT gave a very brief update on Friday instead of waiting for the last minute. So before the worry would begin that a deadline may be missed, we already got one.

Yes, it was short. It was also useful. After all, while I had reported here about what a pretty small number of treg testers had reported on Slack, I had no way to know if that was representative of all testing. With WT’s post, we now know it was.

So, just with that, they fulfilled the announced update before the deadline with useful info. But because they weren’t ready with more detail (this did not surprise me as I had a rough idea of when testers got the latest firmware and figured they want more reports first), they announce yet another update for, hopefully, late Monday night. This probably means sometime after midnight, Tuesday morning.

Thus we get two updates. The total info would probably be exactly the same. But that would be true if updates were given every week instead of, say, once a month - the total info at the end of each month would be the same whether divided up or done all at once.

But people will be far happier to see new info more often. So I really hope they will continue to consider that as we wait for general shipping.

Of course, it isn’t going to make people happy who only care about an actual shipping announcement. That will happen when it happens. In the meantime, this approach to updates at least reduces frustration for most.