I am actually excited. 1 A9 will free up my 70 1080 Tis so they can mine Lyra2 on NH and 4 batch 1 Z9s will free up my 1070 army for mining something more profitable. These Nvidias were bought last year and they have paid themselves off several times already.
Kinda weird but I also purchased 4 batch 1 z9's and 1 A9 ZMaster. Great minds must think alike (I hope)? I'm feeling more confident about my A9 purchase and less so about the batch 1 z9's. Bitmain got caught completely flatfooted by the A9 announcement. I think their strategy with only shipping 77 units was so they could get those early customers to hype it up via forums/youtube/blogs so more people buy into batch #2 thinking they're going to be earning as much as the first 77 customers.
Their strategy completely backfired. I think they're rethinking things right now, after all the complaints, and A9 announcement. It also doesn't help when a lot of those first 77 units got into coin devs hands. I doubt they will give more coupons or double miners for batch #1 customers. I'm guessing firmware update or faster shipping schedule is their only viable option.
You're probably forgetting about the price difference. Not many people are willing to shell out $10k for a single A9 that could be rendered useless instantly if devs decide to fork. Many people will still pick the Z9 because at $1.8k it is a more acceptable risk. It is not as efficient than the A9 but it is still better than buying a GPU rig. It seems like it's for more casual miners.
Besides, buying any of these outside of batch 1 is already a bad idea. Innosilicon is probably selling it now because they've mined enough to know profitability will soon tank.
I think Inno is basically hedging that fact. After Bitmain released their Equihash ASIC into the wild they knew that eventually some algos might fork.
Sure it would of been better just mining themselves but with a potential fork, they can sell some units and mine with other units.
Because after ZEC and BTG and other coins fork... who will buy their ASICS? Nobody.