Unfortunately some more bad news for early adopters who pre-ordered the Rift and expected it to arrive on or around the March 28th launch date. The delay has now pushed expected shipping dates of some day-one pre-orders into late May and even June.
Citing an “unexpected component shortage”, Oculus confirmed in the days following the March 28th launch of the Rift that there would be delays in shipping for some orders, and that customers could expect an update to their order status by April 12th. Today the company began updating the estimated ship dates of some orders, revealing the extent of the delay.
One U.S. customer who pre-ordered the Oculus Rift 33 minutes after pre-orders became available back on January 6th has an estimated shipping date between May 23rd and June 2nd, roughly two months from the headset’s launch date.
Another customer, who pre-ordered 1 hour and 40 minutes after Rift pre-orders went live, says their estimated shipping date is between June 13th and 23rd.
In an earlier update about the delay, Oculus refunded shipping charges for all orders up through April 2nd. The company maintains that “many Rifts will be arriving on schedule and in line with original estimates…”
At this point it isn’t clear if the delay is impacting the entire queue of orders and pre-orders, or just certain batches and shipping regions. However, this week we did see that the Rift backorder date (for those placing a brand new order) was pushed back another month, from July to August.
An Oculus customer support rep confirmed on Reddit that the Kickstarter Rifts are “from a different allocation,” than pre-orders and orders, though the delay appears to have impacted some of those shipments as well. A somewhat confusingly worded statement from the same customer support rep says that shipping estimates formerly shown to Kickstarter backers were in error:
Kickstarter Backers, we’re changing your Order History to show “TBD” instead of the date as that date was applicable to the time in which we imported the orders. We’ve already fulfilled a large number of the orders and more are being fulfilled on a regular cadence.
We’ll continue to keep our eye on the shipping situation and bring you the latest as we hear more from Oculus and those waiting on Rift arrivals.