Sandbar’s store still lists Stream Ring batches one through four as sold out, with batch five “Shipping Mid-Dec, Limited Quantities” (Sandbar). None of that is a unit on a finger. The November announcement had pointed to summer 2026 shipping (The Verge, 5 November 2025). Late August is past that window.
The Verge already demonstrated whisper dictation in July, in Sandbar’s office, on hardware that was not the customer SKU in the mail (The Verge, 28 July 2026). A good demo does not rank. Methodology is blunt: only shipping devices take a position. Preorder pages with unpublished weight, battery hours, storage and microphone count are tracked so the day a unit lands, the empty fields are obvious.
Pricing as of this filing is still $249 plus a $10-a-month Data Plan after three included months for unlimited dictation, chat and memory. “No Subscription Required” remains on the same page as that plan. Weekly allowance is not unlimited.
The Stream Ring stays in the roster as the clearest anti-always-on design in the category — touchpad held, mic on; released, mic off — and as a reminder that a ranking of products you cannot buy is a press list. When a batch actually ships, the missing hours figure is the first thing to fill or to keep as “not published.”