If you're still waiting for your Apple Watch order to arrive, the Wall Street Journal has someone for you to blame: Taptic Engine components manufactured by AAC Technologies Holdings Inc. "started to break down over time," a manufacturing defect that "people familiar with the matter" say caused Apple to throw out some watches that had already been built.
Components from another supplier, Nidec Corp., haven't been faulty, but it will apparently take time for Nidec to ramp up production and catch up with demand. Neither AAC nor Nidec provided a comment for the Journal's story.
The Taptic Engine is a key part of the Apple Watch—it's what makes it vibrate when the watch wants your attention. Though many phones and tablets from other companies have used similar haptic feedback for a while now, Apple has only started to deploy it in the Watch and in some new MacBook models, where it's used in trackpads to simulate physical clicks.
Apple products are usually supply-limited in their first weeks or months of availability. There's always a mad rush for iPhones on launch day, the 2013 Mac Pros took months to get to some of their early adopters, and new Retina MacBooks ordered today won't be shipped until four to six weeks from now. Especially when a design is new or uses a new component, it takes Apple some time to catch up with demand, and the Apple Watch is a new design packed with plenty of new components.
Though Apple mentioned on its earnings call Monday that it was shipping watches out to customers more quickly than it expected to, wait times for current orders still stretch into June. And while a handful of boutique brick-and-mortar stores will sell you an Apple Watch now, Apple's own retail stores apparently won't begin to stock them until June, either.
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