Re: Don't buy into pre-orders for Apple II products

[Erik Holter <erikbholter@hotmail.com>]

Conrad, just to make one thing clear: You should NOT pay me back at this point in time, and you should certainly NOT sell off any parts of your computer collection for my sake!

When I did the pre-order for the TWGS clone, I did something it seems like more people maybe should have done. I actually thought through the risks of the project and my motivation for still supporting it.

Conrad did at an early stage provide some very useful information:
- The boards were to be made by a “no-name” Chinese manufacturer, and the name of this manufacturer would not be shared with any of us for further quality assurance
- No prototype was made and received to verify the skills and trust of the vendor in question. The production process was described, but no pictures of the product were shared
- The only financial backing was Conrad himself and his “one man business”, requiring pre-funding from the rest of us to move on.

All these are clear red lights!

I therefore considered it to be a very risky project, at best resulting in a working TWGS board, but not unlikely in a non-working board or nothing at all. Worst case it also could be a scam (although I didn’t think so at that time and still doesn’t think it is).

So why did I still chose to pre-order? For two simple reasons:
1. The hope, or dream, of getting an accelerator board at a non-ebay price :-)
2. The interest in supporting these kind of initiatives through sharing of risk

Regarding #2: Making a TWGS clone has a limited business potential due to the size of the Apple II community. As someone mentioned Conrad is a rather young man without a regular job, and still (unless it is a scam) he very optimistically and enthusiastically decided to take on the challenge. Me at the other hand is a man in my "best age", having a regular job, dreaming of getting a new TWGS. Does it sound familiar?

Was it then really fair that Conrad should carry all the risk? Would a project like this come to life if no-one shared that risk? My personal answer to these questions was clearly no. I therefore did make a pre-order, and it sure was a pleasure. Stupid or not :-)
 
Looking at the messages that has been posted I must admit I find some of them rather unpleasant to read. Yes, Conrad has certainly failed big time in providing sufficient information. But starting to encourage people to contact his wife, call the police, or other similar actions is certainly something I would not do.

For now I therefore chose just to relax and see what happens. Heck, if the only thing Conrad gets from his supplier is a box full of bricks, I will ask him to write TWGS on “my” brick and send it to me!! I will keep it on my shelf to remind me of the cost of every now and then being brave taking on some well deserved risk :-) That being said, until that brick safely is located on my shelf, I still chose to fully support Conrad and to be optimistic on behalf of this project.
 
For the future there are a lot of things to learn for everyone, not at least for Conrad. But for the buyers I would encourage everyone to think through the risk of putting money into pre-ordering, instead of getting too angry if the money later on is lost.

Hmm, thinking about it it actually would be a bit cool to have a TWGS brick on my Apple II shelf… :-)

Regards,
Erik Holter