Neil Young’s Toberlone-shaped Pono high-resolution music player, which was supposed to be released in the fall, has been delayed until the first quarter of 2015. This product earned $6.25 million on Kickstarter, then $7 million on Crowdfunder, which is a crowd-funding investment site, so the company has around $13 million (though they don’t have all of the Crowdfunder money yet). That will earn a lot of interest between now and delivery date.
This is another setback for Pono, which has seen its CEO leave (or be fired), and those fans who ponied up money may start getting antsy. Oh, and Neil Young’s getting divorced; it’s not clear if that has anything to do with the delay…
Update: Pono has posted an update on their Kickstarter page saying:
“An article recently came out with unfounded claims suggesting PonoPlayers pre-ordered though Kickstarter would not ship until 2015.
Our team wants to reiterate our commitment to all of you: Delivery of the PonoPlayer still stands as originally expected–October 2014 or December 2014 depending on your specific player.”
The website does say Q1 2015, but perhaps that’s for people ordering now; perhaps they’ll be shipping the Kickstarter orders sooner.
If that’s the case, however, they might have made it clear in their statement…