Looks like Moore's law kicks in
I hope I'll just be able to ROI and them make a little bit of profit from my late-ordered KnC Saturn before it's time to move onto these guys.
A pro tip: don't take preorders, the community here is pretty much tired of the preorder game and wants back to the predictable time of over-the-counter purchase of hardware (like it was with GPUs). So, please, make a certain buffer of ready-to-hash devices before starting selling them, so that deliveries can be made next day after placing an order.
+1 on the tired of the preorder game.
no more preorders please
Unfortunately pre-orders have been a necessary evil at this point in time. Non-recurring engineering costs are very large, especially at 28nm. The risks are compounded by the speed at which products can be created for the market that demands their use as soon as feasibly possible due to a finite window of opportunity by which they can realise a return on investment. It's one thing for you, and many other crowd sourced parties to risk your investment, as that risk is evenly distributed (within reason), but for one entity to bare the brunt of all the risk on a make or break endeavour is huge. Which is why venture capital is unlikely unless they get to use the technology for themselves, otherwise their return earned from a cut of the profit between covering NRE and manufacturing, Hashfast's own profit, and the retail price leaves their hands tied as to how effectively they can compete on price in the future. This is aside from whether such VC would be comfortable tolerating such risk, when there are far better and certain returns to be made on other endeavours when we talk of investment of several million dollars. It obviously requires less than that for 40nm+. In any case it's very unlikely Hashfast, or Uniquify will stomach such funding themselves. I don't know their personal circumstances, but such risk requires sharing, I'd imagine pre-orders are a prerequisite, then again they appear to have made some headway, and have afforded staffing already. In any case I don't believe this is a scam, Simon's clearly a smart guy and Uniquify are a legitimate ASIC design team, but everyone owes it to themselves and the companies they choose to support by accepting the role their investment makes in these circumstances, and acknowledge that they are sharing the risk in developing these products at this point in time...
You forgot to include why this NRE has not been absorbed by VC, crowdsourcing, or privateers - this type of business is still VERY new and has not shown proven consistent track records for the above mentioned mechanisms for securing capital. The same question can be posed differently: Why is it that no big box retailers or mfg such as Dell, Sony, Alienware, are doing their own first to market, heavily advertised, asics mining hardware? I think it would help some of the above mentioned stagant companies - I'm sure some would agree with me, but the fact of the matter is that this industry is still in its infancy and there will likely be no "non preorder" machines until the market is oversaturated