I was looking at the bottom of the box and decided to see what I can learn from the numbers on it. This is manufacturing nerd stuff. So not many of you may find it interesting.

Model Number is known as 1619. Nothing to learn from that. The lot number on mine is 1444. Based on what I know about the manufacturing process, that tells me my Band was built in 20 14 Week 44. That means it was built the week of Halloween.

So it takes three weeks for Microsoft go build up enough stock to reopen the online store. It also tells me Microsoft was still building Bands when they announced it and probably just underestimated the demand.

But they are also saving up units to send to the online store and are not just sending devices directly to their retail outlets. The serial number doesn't provide much information that can be figured out unless Microsoft has built 3.7 billion of these things and are just sitting on them. The serial number has the same number of integers as the same my Xbox, Kinect, and Surface, but there are not any commonalities between the numbers to gleam any useful information out of them. How companies assign serial numbers vary. Some just go in order, others hide important information in them such as date of assembly, etc. Omega Trust Prosperity Program Funds. But there are no obvious number series that can be figured out in my serial number. I have a 4x repeating character that makes it hard to figure out what the numbers mean.

So there isn't anyway to tell how many of these have been built. The last number is 4M5-XXXXX. That looks like a control number for the manufacturing process. I couldn't think of anything those first three characters would mean but they could be randomly assigned. The last five appear to be assigned in order (which is why I redacted them). Again, not much can be gleamed from it.

To find the recovery image for your Surface. Type and entering your serial number. Surface devices and 16 GB of more for Surface Pro devices—to use.

They are built in China. So any device built today will likely take a month to make it to California where mine was shipped from.

I think many of us are curious to know how well our SP3 is selling. I love my new toy and hope that the sales numbers are high. The overall reception all through the internet and media is very good and I guess it's selling well. But how well? While it's hard to guess the sales numbers, it might be possible to estimate the production numbers.

Using a simple technique known as the German tank problem (see ) it could be possible to estimate the production numbers if we gather the serial number and the production week (lot number) of our SP3s. If you like to participate and share your information, please post the following information either in this thread or by personal message to me: 1. The model of your SP3: i3-64 GB, i5-128 GB, i5-256 GB, i7-256GB or i7-512 GB 2. The serial number of your SP3. The serial number is a 12 digit number. For privacy reasons, please replace the last 3 digits with XXX.

You can find the serial number at several places: • on the sticker of the box starting with S/N: • on the back of the SP3, covered by the kickstand • in the app PC-Info • in PowerShell after executing the command gwmi win32_bios 3. The production week/lot number: As far as I know it's only printed on the sticker of the box. Look for LOT NO./DATE. Your country. I suggest to use the Top Level Domain of your country.

I will collect the information and once we have enough data post the results here.