For a $300 investment in april, lets pretend you can simply buy a jalapeno right now and get it tomorrow ... you gain .006 bitcoins a day with a 6.5-7gh/s jalapeno.
Converting that to bitcoins now if you paid cash then, that's .5 bitcoins needed to "break even."
That's 83 days IF there are 0 difficulty increases or changes in the rate assuming yours plows along at 6.5-7Gh/s and has a decent hardware error rate (2-3%). Obviously that is pure fantasy, free electricity may be attainable for you so I won't factor that in but without drastic difficulty changes zero profit for 6 months with a breakeven of maybe 140ish days?
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/The build quality on it has been discussed, you will have to "maintain" it. there is pretty much zero chance that the stock supply, fan, and internals will last as long as you need to mine with it to break even I'm gathering.
On the flipside, you could spend that $300 right now on .5 coins and not be in a hole for 6 months.
The reality is the simple math behind BFL is that the extent to which difficulty and valuation would change, the preorder concept gives them "timing preference" and wait when they clearly had product in hand was grossly underestimated by people who didn't think things through all the way. We're seeing this with other services that appear to decide when buy orders "count" and when sell orders "should go through"...
if at pricepoint $60 in april = 5 coins for 1 jalapeno, think of all of the mining done with these devices in the interim, all of the orders that came first. Yes, it is not accurate to claim hashing power correlation to price point, there are other factors. but you can find graphs that will point out it its nature and make those decisions on your own.
One way of thinking of it is your miner already exists in the total hash power for some time, making whoever feels like making it some cash. if they're getting rid of it it is because its no longer a good investment to actually use it.
That was the enigma behind an "asic company." Why sell something that generates profit? Answer: you can do both, use and sell.
If there was ever a scenario where these devices really made money without some sort of greater slow play long con going on, you simply wouldn't sell them. There has to be a healthy mount of "sharing the devices with the masses" or else the sentiment about bitcoin is again the ponzi "early adopter" trickle down on the new fish to buy the old fish's shit as essential food, to "keep up." if it felt like nobody but a few with the investment to produce the hardware existed, that wouldn't fly. take the shady pre-order "foot the bill for us to use this first" route or even angel venture / investment to hoard the devices...
