I preordered a Rift on January 6th this year, the day preorders opened, sitting at my desk hitting refresh every few seconds like it was 2011 and I was trying to get concert tickets. $599, plus shipping, plus a sales tax hit that made me wince a little. The confirmation page said my estimated ship window was "late March." I did the math and figured I'd have it in my hands before April, maybe even in time for a weekend where I had nothing else going on.
Well. This week Oculus sent out an email, and posted the same thing on their forums (where a good chunk of the internet's Rift preorder holders now seem to live full time), saying a bunch of orders are getting pushed back. A component shortage, they said - some resistor or capacitor that didn't get ordered in high enough quantity, so batches are getting held up on the assembly line. Some people are now looking at April. Some are looking at May. Nobody seems to know exactly where their own order lands until the actual shipping email shows up, which is its own special kind of maddening when you've already paid.
I'm not actually mad about the delay itself, not really. Hardware slips, especially brand new consumer hardware from a company that's never shipped a mass consumer product before. What gets me is the "estimated ship date" language in the first place. It reads like a promise and functions like a guess, and companies know that, and use it anyway, because "we genuinely don't know yet, could be March, could be June" doesn't sell many preorders. I've been burned by this exact pattern before, and not even with VR - with a mechanical keyboard of all things, from a small outfit I backed that quoted me six weeks and delivered in five months. You'd think I'd have learned to stop trusting shipping estimates from anyone smaller than Amazon.
The forums are a mess right now, in the specific way tech forums get a mess when a few thousand people who each spent $599 on a promise all show up in the same thread within an hour of each other. Half the posts are people posting screenshots of their order confirmation like it's evidence in a trial. The other half are people telling those people to calm down, it's a video game headset, not a kidney. Both sides have a bit of a point, honestly.
What actually bugs me more than the wait itself is that the Touch controllers, the hand controllers that are supposed to make the whole thing feel less like "expensive monitor strapped to your face" and more like an actual interactive thing, aren't even part of this first shipment. Those are a separate release, later in the year. So even once my Rift eventually shows up, I'm looking at months of using it with a plain Xbox controller before I get the part that everyone who's actually demoed the thing says is the interesting half of it. That's the detail I keep forgetting to be annoyed about, then remembering again a few days later.
I did try a Rift dev kit at a friend's apartment back in 2014, the DK2, wires everywhere, tethered to a desktop with a graphics card that cost more than the headset itself. It was janky, the screen-door effect (that faint pixel grid you can see once someone points it out to you) was obvious the second I noticed it, and I still walked away thinking this is going to be a real thing eventually. Two years later, "eventually" keeps getting pushed a few more weeks down the calendar, which is probably just what happens with anything genuinely new and genuinely hard to manufacture at scale. Doesn't make refreshing my order status page any less of a bad habit, though.
If your Rift got pushed back too, I'd be curious what window you're seeing now. Mine still just says "processing," which after three months of waiting has stopped meaning anything to me at all.