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In a year or so asics will be todays gpus. The excitement will be over and incremental asic upgrades will not matter much. The early birds will do well and even the some what late comers will make some money... But the mad rush will be satisfied and the asic companies will be yesterdays news. What then? Right back where we started with the most clever coming up with a good business model that just happens to accept bitcoins. The same type of people who do well with or without btc.
I am not sure i will even buy asics now. I have been turned off from it by these companies who think they can treat customers like dirt. It is probably time to shift gears to a different area of bitcoin and sink or swim. Or maybe just fade away to something else. Who knows?
All i know is that sending your money to anyone without solid proof they have a product is silly. So far we have seen teases and that would have been ok months ago but not today. So consider buying an asic product like gambling at this point and not as an investment. Because as an investment you are in super high risk land and it is very foolish.
It always made more sense to me to simply buy Bitcoin vs. trying to mine competitively over a reasonable period of time. The only argument that might change my mind at this point would be if Avalon ships a working product, nobody else does for some time, and Avalon keeps a pretty modest delivery schedule. All big ifs, and even if it does turn out that way, it'll be pretty hard to get one's hands on the gear. I don't think the risk is probably worth it unless the USD/BTC rate really skyrockets...and as always it would also work well to be sitting on a full wallet.dat in that case anyway.
The time to 'shift gears' would have been in early 2011, or during the 2011 crash despair. For someone with balls, the ability to hit a jackpot may still exist at $20/BTC, but obviously not to the same degree as earlier. Of course we may get another crash-like-thing, but if I were wishing to get in at the present time, I'd not wish to wait for it and risk being left behind. I'd just dollar-cost average from here to get my possition I suppose.
My only interest in ASIC gear is to locate it strategically to capitalize on state sponsored interference (and support the Bitcoin network in such an eventuality) so I'll be interested both in proof of a working product and more importantly in a flexible and well documented product (aka, 'open'.) Avalon hints that they have no interest in being any more open than they have to which leads me to believe that it'll be someone else who ultimately stirs my interest in mining enough to throw money at it.