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The options would be.
1. I ship customers the spares they will need In advance. basically the in field failure rate is 1%. so I can just ship units with the order.
2. Stock parts at Distributors.
3. Stock parts at Certified technicians. ( hey I stole your idea!)
The Key of course was explaining to people that its not optimal to send a whole unit back IF you design a machine to be in field repairable.
Bitmain is less forthcoming about it, and at the time did not want it known publicly as they had already decided among their customer base who would benefit most from the training. When I send RMAs to bitmain, its usually at least 250-300 units and I am one of their top large scale customers so im pretty sure thats why I was targeted. They even took us out on a yacht!
I know this isnt a really good description of what im trying to say, but from the pictures posted Avalon looks alot more "first world" in their manufacturing and build process than what I saw at bitmain. Much cleaner, nicer facility, much more attention to detail.
The key is designing for reliability. If you design for reliability then the hardest problem is solved. Marketwise we ship about 25% of the hash rate last year. Every Bitmain customer that comes to me complains about the same thing: reliability. They report failure rates from 5-30%, so i dont know about the "attention to detail". They key is making a device that is so robust that you cant screw up the manufacturing. They also complained about the downtime from shipping back products. I guess the kind of untold story is that our product is designed to be easily assembled and disassambled with no specialized training. That means I can ramp production 10X with minimal investment and time. The other untold story is that its easy to repair. When matti and Sky are done with the guide, I hope folks will understand. If not I can always send matti to your farms to train you. No yacht, sorry, all business here.