I was able to duplicate your experiment by overloading the cart...

I was able to duplicate your experiment by overloading the cart with a large number of orders. I would do this using the following steps:

1. Add one item to the shopping cart (in this case the mini PCIe board).
2. Click on the car to open the cart.
3. Click inside the quantity box and change to a large number (in this case 10000).
4. Click outside the quantity box to give focus elsewhere.

At this point, the value in the quantity box would change (you can't read all digits) and you would get a pop-up dialog telling you that you cannot place the order because the max order size for the product quantity is 10.

After dismissing the dialog, the text "1974 items left" appears in bold to the right of the quantity box.

Now, something still seems odd with the numbering. I believe that I ordered within the first two hours of the product becoming available. My order number was #1118. As you noted, the highest order number we have seen posted was #1144.

If we assume that they started with 2000 units, and 1974 were left, then 26 would have been sold. If the order numbers are sequential then the exact number of units sold between the highest we've seen posted and my order number is exactly 26. That's a very odd coincidence. This would tell me that the numbering could not have started at 1000, or even still, at 1100, it would have started at exactly 1118 and my order would have been the first.

There is the possibility that they seeded the number higher (say around 1100) and then did some test transactions. Interestingly enough, performing the same experiment as above would lead one to conclude that there were 45/50 Pi units, 50/50 PC shuttles, and 1974/2000 PCIe units remaining.

It is possible that they started the order numbers at 1000, reserved 50 for the PC shuttle and Pi devices, then the next 50 for the Pi devices, etc. This could put the order range of 1000-1049 for PC, 1050-1099 for Pi, and 1100-3099 for the remaining shuttle devices.

However, the one thing that does not sit well is the discrepancy between the number of items remaining, my order number, and the highest order number we've seen posted in the forums. They would have had to seed the start of the PCIe boards at 1118 and I would have to have purchased the first for that to work out the way it did.

Furthermore, there could be some things going on behind the scenes we don't yet know without the full picture. This leaves me with several questions:

1. Are all the hardware orders coming from the same sequence of order numbers?
2. Are all order numbers seeded from a specific base order number?
3. Are they incrementing the order numbers by any value other than one?
4. Are they running any test transactions on the store that are increasing the order number without sales?
5. Do the "items left" numbers coincide with the actual quantity on hand?
6. Are they choosing specific quantities to throttle the number of orders they can handle?

Given the eight-week lead time for the pre-order, it looks like they may be taking those and handing them off to a 3rd party that will be packaging and shipping the boards. Maybe they have a limit on the amount that they can process at a time?

Everything doesn't perfectly line up at this point to make a solid conclusion. However, if other members of the forum are indeed ordering, it would be interesting to see the highest order number that is assigned and then use the "quantity reveal" trick to see if those numbers stay in sync.

If they don't, then I would tend to think that the actual number sold is indeterminate until we see the sales figures.