After two and a half weeks of waiting my laptop has finally moved into the build phase, where Dell will begin to assemble the laptop for shipping. This delay and the fact that next to no one online has received their M1330 yet, it makes you wonder if Dell ever intended to start shipping systems on the launch date.

Over on notebookreview.com some people have theorized that the delay can not really be due to unexpected demand, because we have not heard of any units shipping at all.

If it was a parts supply problem due to unexpected demand then they would at least have been able to ship several thousand initial units before they started running short. So I agree with them, that it’s more likely that Dell did a “paper launch” (as chuck said) where they begin taking orders early with long lead times.

If this is true it’s not all that surprising, just a little disappointing.