This is the best summary I could come up with:
The big one was AMD/Xilinx stopping the shipment of Spartan 6 FPGAs without proper notice and no end in sight for the resuming of production, forcing us to redesign the entire board to operate with the Artix-7 FPGA instead.
This was a serious undertaking which could only be met by utterly dedicated and capable people like Alvin Albrecht, who quickly familiarized himself with the new platform and managed to successfully redevelop and test the firmware in time for shipping.
The silver lining is that, with the extra capabilities of the Artix-7, we managed to expand the ZX Spectrum Next functionalities a bit more while maintaining retrocompatibility throughout.
We still need to ship the Spectrum Next to Asia, Americas, Africa and Oceania, an unforeseen delay thanks to couriers classifying the watch coin-cell (running the real time clock) as a dangerous battery, presenting a fire risk.
Watching people putting their computers under Christmas trees, creating new games, getting kids to learn about coding on it … It makes it all worth it.
The Reg: But for those who missed out, and want to get a real Next, with its case designed by the late great Rick Dickinson rather than one of the compatibles – there is going to be a third production run?
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