I thought this information would be particularly interesting for those who try to track Nintendo's production and analyze the supply disruption they faced last holiday season (I'm looking at you, TWRoO and sqrl). The linked site also contains all kinds of hacker information, if you're the type of person who likes to void warranties.

http://hackmii.com/2008/07/factory2/

Last week, I bought two brand-new Wiis (the first new ones I’ve ever owned!) and dumped their NAND Flash filesystems before powering them on for the first time.  I was able to recover some interesting info (although nothing earth-shattering).

The two Wiis:

LU5757004xx (id 0×047854xx): This unit was purchased Jun 27th from a major “big box” electronics retailer (Best Buy) here in California.  The PCB has a datecode of “1208″, meaning the 12th week of 2008 — I bought it in the 26th week, so it’s taking them 14 weeks to get the units from the factory to the store shelf, which seems rather slow to me.  (Wiis are still very hard to find here; all stores sell out of Wiis on the same day they receive the shipment.)  The drive PCB has a datecode of “1008″, and is presumably a D2C2.

LU3477336xx (id 0×046d2b5a): This unit was purchased July 1st from a specialty game retailer (GameStop).  The PCB has a datecode of 0808, as does the drive PCB — so it’s taking them even longer to ship units to the smaller retailers.  I’m guessing that these two consoles came from different factories (hence LU5x vs LU3x).

That seems way too long. How were they able to strategically flood Wiis for GTA week then? Send huge shipments out 3-4 months ahead?

3-4 months? Do they just put them in a box, throw em in the ocean, and pray they make it?

eesh that is a long time.

Shipping by sea.... it's possible.  When taking into account other factors.

14 weeks??? sorry but that can't be right.

in sail boats? I didn't take IPhone that long to ship over. Heck, same goes for every other products sold in Walmart and pretty much every other retailer

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.

@largedarryl

I was thinking that myself, but with no industry know how on the PCB dates, I wasn't certain. Thanks for clearing that up.

If anyone needs me to clarify any of the info in my jumbled post, I'll be more than happy too, but I am going to be one of the last people that this article is going to convince that a PCB date indicates Wii's take 3-4 months to ship.