Final SX Supply -- what to expect and how to get chips
Ken Gracey
Posts: 7,417
Dear Customers,
Friday (September 18, 2009) was the last day to purchase your End of Life (EOL) SX supply and guarantee delivery.
So, where to go from here?
A. If you placed an order on or prior to September 18, 2009 then you will receive the chips.
We have booked your orders in our business software and chips have been allocated to you. You will receive your SX chips in December or January, as soon as they are ready from fab, packaging and testing. In some cases you may be contacted by our sales staff to take early delivery.
B. If you didn't order chips and have been caught by surprise with all this EOL stuff, we should still be able to meet your needs with our overstock..
We have ordered 500,000 SX chips above and beyond our booked customer orders. You can view our current inventory levels of each chip on our web site where the chip is sold. An excerpt from the SX EOL notice shows how the web site displays quantity in-stock:
At this time (September 2009) you will see that most of the chips are shown on the web site as "Out of Stock". This will change at least twice before we receive the overstock of 500,000 units in December or January. The first time it will change is in the next couple of days when we move inventory from our internal lockup to a sellable warehouse. These chips will sell out too but you'll see more appear in October. Then these will sell out and you'll see our final inventory levels show up in December/January when the 500,000 overstock units arrive.
= = = =
Therefore, you will still have a few opportunities to buy SX chips between now and the time they are gone. We have no way of guessing how long our overstock supply will last. It could be a few months or five years - it all depends on who we were unable to contact with our notice. We know from the SX52 EOL several years ago that all chips were eventually sold and many customers were still caught short-handed.
You could order chips on-line or place a Purchase Order. We recommend you get this done to guarantee your delivery.
Parallax products that use the SX in their design are not subject to this EOL notice.
We've stored a 15-year supply of SX chips for these products (BASIC Stamps, for example).
As usual, please contact me if you are further confused or need some special assistance. The EOL process is frustrating for us, too.
Sincerely,
Ken Gracey
Post Edited (Ken Gracey (Parallax)) : 9/22/2009 3:22:37 AM GMT
Friday (September 18, 2009) was the last day to purchase your End of Life (EOL) SX supply and guarantee delivery.
So, where to go from here?
A. If you placed an order on or prior to September 18, 2009 then you will receive the chips.
We have booked your orders in our business software and chips have been allocated to you. You will receive your SX chips in December or January, as soon as they are ready from fab, packaging and testing. In some cases you may be contacted by our sales staff to take early delivery.
B. If you didn't order chips and have been caught by surprise with all this EOL stuff, we should still be able to meet your needs with our overstock..
We have ordered 500,000 SX chips above and beyond our booked customer orders. You can view our current inventory levels of each chip on our web site where the chip is sold. An excerpt from the SX EOL notice shows how the web site displays quantity in-stock:
At this time (September 2009) you will see that most of the chips are shown on the web site as "Out of Stock". This will change at least twice before we receive the overstock of 500,000 units in December or January. The first time it will change is in the next couple of days when we move inventory from our internal lockup to a sellable warehouse. These chips will sell out too but you'll see more appear in October. Then these will sell out and you'll see our final inventory levels show up in December/January when the 500,000 overstock units arrive.
= = = =
Therefore, you will still have a few opportunities to buy SX chips between now and the time they are gone. We have no way of guessing how long our overstock supply will last. It could be a few months or five years - it all depends on who we were unable to contact with our notice. We know from the SX52 EOL several years ago that all chips were eventually sold and many customers were still caught short-handed.
You could order chips on-line or place a Purchase Order. We recommend you get this done to guarantee your delivery.
Parallax products that use the SX in their design are not subject to this EOL notice.
We've stored a 15-year supply of SX chips for these products (BASIC Stamps, for example).
As usual, please contact me if you are further confused or need some special assistance. The EOL process is frustrating for us, too.
Sincerely,
Ken Gracey
Post Edited (Ken Gracey (Parallax)) : 9/22/2009 3:22:37 AM GMT
Comments
I notice the SX protoboards are showing end-of-life on the website. Is this true, are you stopping them - just selling the IC?
James
Good question.
When to list something as end-of-life is a subject of much discussion in Parallax. In this case, our supply of SX Proto Boards will likely deplete to zero at the same time that we sell out of SX chips. Our goal is to run out of the "tools" products (SX Proto Boards, SX programming tools) at the same time we run out of SX chips. The BASIC Stamps that use the SX is an exception, however due to our internal locked-up manufacturing supply. Marketing is taking a guess that for all practical purposes we will not be ordering more SX Proto Boards, so we might as well tell our customers today even though the supply could last for months or years. Listing these boards as EOL is opposite to the statement I made that "SX-based products are not being EOL'd at this time". It's one of the products that doesn't fit well in our black/white filter of EOL/no EOL.
So, it appears the SX Proto Boards are indeed EOL since we will not be building more of them.
Ken Gracey
Parallax Inc.
Thanks for the response.
I am a little confused. Are you saying that they will be around as long as you have SX chips, or just until the current stock runs out? In which case - how many protoboards are in stock, lots or just a few?
James
····www.parallax.com/tabid/768/txtSearch/sx+proto/List/0/SortField/4/Default.aspx
There may or may not be additional inventory in reserve elsewhere, but you can be certain that the total is at least as much as that reported online.
-Phil
Sorry. Sometimes I'm not even clear to myself, maybe because of the nature of unpleasant issues related to this EOL. Truth is I overlooked these boards, but they are indeed EOL. We'll have these boards until we run out of stock.
And, Phil pointed out that you can view our inventory levels on-line where the product appears for sale. In this case, the total reported on-line is everything we can sell. No additional SX Proto Boards are tucked away in a special warehouse so that their quantity doesn't appear on-line. Whatever number you are seeing is what we are able to sell.
Sincerely,
Ken Gracey
Thanks for the clarification
Doh.
James