Sick to death of these pre-order gimmicks to gather up 0% interest financing all the time. Don't these guys have enough funding YET to produce a product and THEN offer it for sale? They could instantly distinguish themselves by simply behaving like a retailer instead of a vapor peddler.
Of course they do BUT there is two reasons why pre-orders (by all companies) will continue:
a) A seller which waits 30-90 days to make the sale when the unit is ready risks having the sales lost to OTHER competitors who offer preorders. Simple version only so much capital will be thrown into hardware this generation and waiting gives the seller absolutely no advantage. How much hardware will be sold? I have no clue but obviously that number is finite (in the near term) and every sale counts towards that total.
b) you probably won't like the available to ship tomorrow prices. Say you (personally) owned a bitfury 400 GH/s rig and your estimate (based on difficulty growth) is that it will net 120 BTC over the next year. Would you sell it for less than 120 BTC? You might discount it to account for the risk (120 BTC in hand is worth more than projected 120 BTC) but the discount likely will be small. Maybe you would sell 120 BTC future revenue for 100 BTC today but you certainly wouldn't sell it for 50 BTC or 30 BTC. The same thing will happen with hardware companies. They can do their own projection. So say HF has a 100 Sierras lying around in Dec, and they have some smart people run some projections on future earnings, lets say hypothetically they estimate it will net 200 BTC before falling below break even. Now they probably aren't going to sell it for 200 BTC. Buyers can do the same projections and likely will pass so they will need to discount it "some" but the idea that they (or anyone) would discount it so much that it would be massively profitable (i.e. pay 20 BTC, get 200 BTC over next 18 months) is illogical. They could just use them to mine for themselves.