You can buy a bitmain device to ship in two months or an innosilicon one to ship immediately. So right this minute, bitmain is losing sales to a competitor. If they have parts to build and ship miners now, then they probably would prefer to be doing so. Very likely they still have time to get parts and build miners in time for the promised batch two sales no matter what, so not shipping anything now when they could be costs them money and supports their competitor.
The flip side of course is that flooding the market like they did with the D3s would seriously piss off the people who bought the Z9s. But then again, pissing off their customers has never seemed like a concern for them.
Shipping batch #2 too early would virtually guarantee that batch #1 customers would need to be compensated further than the $250 coupon. Batch #1 customers are already angry. I agree bitmain doesn't really care how mad their customers are, that is until it starts affecting their bottom line. If they ship batch #2 too early there will be absolutely no incentive in the future to be an early adopter of their products. Aside from the greedy folks, people will just start waiting for the discounts, and it will become hard for bitmain to gauge demand. Bitmain and innosilicon are targeting 2 different types of miners as well. Bitmain is targeting hobbyist/home miners/first time miners, whereas innosilicon is going after the "big fish". Not everyone is willing to take a $10k+ gamble, whereas $850 is a more acceptable risk/reward for most people.
I also doubt they've had time to assemble all the units. My guess a few weeks ago was 10k units in batch #1. My guess for batch #2 is a bare minimum of 25k units, possibly a lot more.
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An order from six days ago. Paid $850 or less. Getting it now. What. The. Shitmain.
I've been wondering what happened here as well. There is probably an explanation considering they skipped over weeks worth of orders. Still wouldn't doubt that some people got lucky though.