Only a fool pays full price at 2+ BTC for the next batch, with halving in the next 5 days. Bitmain will have to drop S9 price by 50% right after the halving. But stupidity and greedy go hand in hand.
Why would they drop the price? The halving? Nah. They'll drop the price when there is competition from another company. Welcome to monopoly pricing power. If you want to mine with the latest generation of chips, then the S9 is the only publicly available option right now. There are rumors of other current gen chips, but not generally available.
Cheers,
- zed
edit: added available