I re-read that faq page. It wasn't on THEIR faq but the forum faq and that's why it was a guess. The real faq is where I had seen the thing about July:
Q
When will you start shipping machines?
A
We plan on shipping the ASIC versions of our products by the end of April. We have orders that date back to June of 2012. Those are the orders that will be delivered first. Orders placed now will not ship until the month of July.
And this one which I don't completely understand:
Q
Where am I in line and when will my order ship?
A
We cannot disclose the number of orders we currently have. Shipping of new units is still anticipated to begin by the end of April, 2013. We are unable to predict accurate wait times until shipping begins.
Q
Where am I in line and when will my order ship?
A
We currently do not have the ability to easily disclose the number of orders we currently have. Shipping of new units is expected to begin soon. It is unknown at this time when we will complete the shipping of our pre-orders. Even though we should start shipping soon, orders placed now will be shipped at a later time. Our orders date back to June, 2012. All of those orders and those placed since then will be shipped before new orders.
I don't get why they can't "easily" disclose this. This information is critical to knowing what the mining capability of these boxes are.
Taking them at their word for a minute (which is probably highly optimistic on their part). Maybe we can reverse engineer how many unit orders they really have. If they think they're going to produce 400 units a day - that's 2000 a week. So if they are expecting to be able to ship today's orders by (the end of) July. Starting 2 weeks from now. That would be about 8 week to do all the orders. So 16,000 orders.
That's a lot but it's also not near as many as I had feared when my order number was close to 40000.
I'm not saying they're going to make this schedule. That's not my point. But if they were using math to come up with those dates (which people like that do) maybe we can come close to guessing what the numbers in the math were.