Meanwhile, no movement at all on my Ultra order, other then being charged good money a few days ago. I was hoping that meant that shipping was imminent, but apparently not. Just curious, how long was your wait once you got charged for real?
My timeline, which I think is fairly typical except for the May 3rd change in delivery window:
Studio Max (U.S. Delivery)
Max Options: 32 graphics cores, 64GB memory, 2TB storage
April 1: order with delivery June 27 - July 11
May 3: delivery changed to June 22 - 29
May 10: credit card payment to Apple "pending" (funds reserved)
May 14: "Preparing to Ship"
May 16: “Shipped”, Max delivered from Shenzhen to Hong Kong airport; UPS schedules delivery for May 18
May 17: credit card payment to Apple "posted" (card charged, Apple paid)
May 19: UPS flies my order Hong Kong > Taiwan > Anchorage > Louisville > New York
May 20: Delivered in New York at 10 AM local time
My Max arrived with macOS Monterey 12.3.1 installed (released March 31) and I've updated it to 12.4 (released May 16), which is the first update since 12.3.1. As usual, the update took awhile.
As you can see, Hong Kong is a bottleneck. That has been the case for a few weeks. The problem may not be easy to fix. Even if Hong Kong is at 100% productivity, UPS has a limited number of planes and there is a safety limit to how many planes can take off from Hong Kong per day. It is already the world's busiest cargo airport.