The 9.8 actually began shipping 13 months ago. They estimated demand would be equal to the previous flagship units.

Unfortunately, they failed to consider they were essentially first to market with the feature set and the new codecs, and they nearly immediately got as many preorders on the unit as they were expecting to sell over its year plus lifetime. Since the unit has one board which is handbuilt in Japan amongst its parts, they were rather behind the curve on shipping to meet demand, which is why it appears these things have only been delivering for 10 months or so. There was also a period of a few weeks last September where they stopped shipping to retool some firmware issues.

So really, the 9.9 is coming out about when it was supposed to.

BB