I'll post photos and a review when my unit arrives.
I was surprised that I was the only core developer who paid for a unit. Followed the shotgun approach: ordered units from all the people working on ASICs.
Good for you!
Most developers seem to be waiting for freebies simply because they are coders.
In most industries people pay for expensive Developer Kits (including a computer system).
Yes and those developer kits include software developed by the company producing it.
In this case the software is created by the developers ... and modified by the companies (or even modified by the developers themselves ...)
They save way more money by using free software already written by the developers than the cost of sending out a few boards.
Your comparison fails.
But it fails on an even higher level - Avalon have not sent any hardware to myself or ckolivas and have never said they would.
... though they have used cgminer ...