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Comment by jhferris3 | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression that they refunded most (all?) pre-order money?

They did. And even before they did, it was just $1 or $5 depending on when you preordered.

Interesting. The bitterness makes no sense to me. Hardware hacking is hard. Hackers are overly optimistic with deadlines. So WakeMate "is late"? So what?

Personally, I'm pretty happy with the Zeo, but I really respect the difficulty of task that the Wakemate folks took on. There is a little more intrinsic difficulty than making a website.

I was a little disappointed about how they strung us along. First the ship date was "Q1 2010". Then in January they said that that wasn't going to happen. A few months later they said that they shipped to super-early preorderers and:

"The next batch of units will ship no later July 30th, 2010. Based on your pre-order date (01/19/2010), you should expect your WakeMate no later than 07/30/2010, but probably significantly sooner."

Coincidentally, that was April 1st.

Then in August they said we'd be getting them in September.

In the end, it took overnight shipping to get them to some people by Christmas.

I understand and accepted that it would be ready when it was ready, but I can definitely see how hearing "Soon" for a year would disappoint people.

They certainly did not refund all preorders -- WakeMate have held onto my $5 and claim to no longer have access to their PayPal account.

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