No if it was just the battery, they’d be on easy street. It’s hard to get much specifically from the very short updates, which have even been slipping lately. The latest said the firmware engineer had quit ( no reason given ). And with the new design and the new microcontroller – ( I had talked about the redesign up thread. Note it was a redesign, not a tweaking on the design. ) – they now have no one that knows the code to port it to the new hardware design, likely a different hardware interface, etc. I’m guessing this must be a fair amount of work. Without that you can’t completely test the new design, and shouldn’t commit to any production, hence can’t commit to an order of parts. Plus they’ll need to get a mostly working hardware prototype to do international agency testing, which they should complete before they order production component parts to manufacture boards.
It was fairly recent too they were dealing with mechanical problems with the keyboard and aluminum case. You can’t be creating the world’s slimmest keyboard and expect things like this to be easy to do.
They had 4 months or so after they were Kickstarted before Covid. They had planned to ship in 8 months. Instead they end up doing a redesign, and were poorly prepared to deal with mechanical issues. It’s very hard to design and develop a new electronic product from scratch. My read though, is they had not done enough to be prepared before they Kickstarted.