Whoa, finally, exactly what I've been waiting for! A competitor in the ASIC market! I'm so excited! 1 year warranty, open source, good price point and estimated speed. I'm glad I stayed away from that other company with their poor business practices of demanding the full price of the product months in advance of delivery with no guarantee how the finished product will perform. Now I can place an order for a bunch of these... oh. You want all my money now? For delivery in Nov/Dec? Hmm, nothing different here after all.
All sarcasm aside, can we please not make this the norm for bitcoin hardware? I could completely understand a 10-20% deposit fee to make sure your customers are serious. Requiring full payment in advance to me screams one of two things:
1) You're not confident in your ability to design a working product, so you'd rather risk customer's money than your own. I don't like other people gambling with my money.
2) You're greedy, and want to take my money now so you can sit on the interest and milk everything you can from your customers.
To be honest I don't know which of these options I find more repulsive, but I can't think of another legitimate reason to require full payment in advance. I just wish someone would get a company going that I can actually respect, so that I can get into the ASIC game. But I will quit mining before I hand my money off to someone for something that they haven't made yet. I just wish more people weren't blinded by greed, throwing money at anyone who promises them a magic money box sometime in the future.
Because of development costs I can understand the need to progress bill full payment in order to keep liquidity flowing. This way they can focus on getting the product out rather then dealing with the administration
costs (TIME) of collecting from potential customers.
Lets continue the spirit of speculation, say you pay 20% of the cost with BTC at $10 Later your ordered "product" ships however the market rate for BTC drops to lets say $6.4. That BTC you set aside to pay is not adequate to fill the order.