Wii Takes 3-4 Months to Ship

[largedarryl]

I'm going to say that a date code on a PCB is not really a good indication of when the Wii was shipped, IMO.

I work in an electronic company, and large scale PCB orders can very easily take 1 month. There is nothing requiring a PCB manufacturer to date stamp a PCB the day it ships. So lets assume they are going for volume and it takes 4 weeks to ship the PCB to the board stuffer. The board stuffer is practicing a FIFO stock of PCB boards and may receive several million at a time. The board stuffer ships stuffed boards every 2 weeks (going by shipment sizes I would say 0.5 million). This means that there are several board stuffing locations for Wii's, and they may receive 2-3 months worth of PCB boards at a time. Not to mention that now the stuffed PCB boards will need to be assembled in a Wii chassis, have all the non-board stuffed connectors installed (USB ports, SD card, etc.). Then Nintendo needs to test these Wii's to make sure they work. It is more than likely that Nintendo will have a failure rate of ~1% during testing. These failed systems will be repaired and sent back through testing. Then the finished product is shipped to stores.

I stopped using numbers half way through, but I wouldn't be surprised to see a PCB date code way older than 4 months, IMO.