Common as in the whole SSD/electronics industry. I can't even remember how many times an NDA was pushed during my time at AnandTech.
As for this being confusing to consumers,
the official press release only mentions "available in October 2015" and this is also the information that all media outlets published. It all started when Chris Ramseyer disclosed the initial embargo date, which was technically a breach of NDA in the first place i.e. he shouldn't have done it. Without his comment and my updates, you would all be patiently waiting knowing that October still has plenty of days left.
EDIT: For what it's worth, the wait for reviews is now over.
while i concede the breach in the NDA started the confusion, vendors rescheduling their release dats, and some vendors like amazon, even though they were only collecting "pre-orders", pulling their listing altogether added some foundation to the confusion. (Edit -
amazon has relisted the 950 PRO, indicating a release date of Oct 29th ) Plus, while I'm too lazy to go back and read thru all the posts on this forum or others, i do recall release dates of Oct 15th for W Europe, Oct 27th for australia/new zealand and early november for north america.
As established and experienced a company as samsung is, this wasn't their first rodeo, so to speak - this release was poorly managed, and until that's recognized it's going to happen again.
I'm in metal - some years back we brought in a brilliant casting engineer for a new product. He designed the tooling to incorporate more detail than a few well respected casting houses thought could be captured in the casting. We found a casting house willing to attempt it, and our engineer was proven correct. But the tooling has been "resized" or adjusted a number of times (in casting, the finished dimensions can be predicted to within 3% +/- but never totally 100%, so samples are cast and checked and the tooling adjusted. ie hogged out if the object is too small in whatever dimension, or welded to build up, and then re-machined to bring a dimension down. Each time tooling is adjusted, it is first normalized to reduce the hardness, then after machining, it is re-heat treated. When we had tooling dialed in, we cast 100 units on a sampling basis - at the same time, marketing had started the media campaign, working up the demand for the new product. Just as we were about to start production, one of the pcs of the cavity mold fractured (having been normalized, welded to build up, re-machined and then new heat treat, had left the mold pcs too brittle. So market release was delayed 14 weeks or 3.5 months.
Meantime the market developed the same confusion I see here - and vendors dropped or reduced their initial order quantities out of concern. It was six to eight months after our actual release date that sales actually took off.
The lesson i learned from that episode was not to rush marketing so early relative to production - for all the benefits, it's explosive and easily counter-productive. Now our marketing doesn't release a whisper until after pre-production evaluation/testing has proven successful, and even then no release date even intimated until we're in full production.
But that's just the business model of a small mfgr. I would think on the scale that samsung operates on, that same model would be even more applicable, but i could be wrong.