Shush you silly person! Being rational is not welcomed here during the "Bitmain is a scam" parade! Just because Bitmain consistently delivers what they advertise on time and to spec (albeit sometimes low quality) doesn't mean that we shouldn't be righteously upset about their success! After all, they are forcing us to buy these things after all.

/s

In all seriousness though, I wonder if there could ever be a business model in which the mining manufacturer allowed customers to 'finance' a mining device by taking a portion of the mining profits as a fee during mining. It would incentivize the manufacturer to release the best and most reliable hardware possible while also allowing a much larger customer base. The manufacturer ends up with a great recurring revenue stream with zero hardware maintenance while the customer gets a subsidized miner that earns a bit less than it would have without the fees. One obvious challenge would be how to secure the miner from being tampered with. It would also probably need to VPN back to the manufacturer's pool so that the fees couldn't easily be hijacked with a simple mining pool proxy.