1) Free shipping is a Black Friday deal only, to the best of my knowledge.
Shipping fees are likely to return.
Even though they should definitely not.
Very bad business move cutting that service, as I have no doubts that it has cost them considerable business.
*free shipping is ONLY available for the Black Friday Bundle of sixteen S4 units.

2) Coupons have been extended. Again.
December 15th now I believe.
Still being sold. Still being given away. And now Bitmain offers to give them to anybody for free, regardless of past purchases.
Maybe it is about time Bitmain gives up on coupons.
Talk about an exercise in futility, and a perfect way to alienate and piss off customers.
ADVERTISE THE AFTER COUPON PRICE, AND BE DONE WITH IT.

3) PSU's are not going up in flames 33%+ of the time anymore. It is rare when it happens, and Bitmain is well practiced at replacing PSU quickly now.
I wouldn't let that hold you back anymore.

BEFORE SHIPPING:
16 individual units -        34.081 BTC ( 12800 USD )
Brack Friday Bunduru -    33.834 BTC ( 12688 USD )

$122 somehow works out to 30%  of $12,800??


SHIPPING INCLUDED
16 individual units -        40.234 BTC ( 15109.95 USD )
Brack Friday Bunduru -    33.834 BTC ( 12688 USD )

so you do end up saving significant shipping costs..... if you live on the opposite side of the world. Not so much if you live in China.



Being forced to purchase 16 units, just to save on shipping costs, is not a "sale" IMHO.
Especially when shipping was included on everything, up until not so long ago.
Buyer beware.

Hold on champ.
Shipping is NOT free.
That is another one of their lies

After you work out the price difference, shipping is CHEAPER. It would be incorrect to describe it as free.

My bad.
It is more retarded than that.

You CAN use coupons. 1 coupon per 16 units.


Again, allow us to buy individually at the 30% discount..... because this is not a sale, it is a wholesale liquidation at best.
Failing that (as I expect you will) you should at least follow your own policy that you have force fed down my throat for so long..... ONE COUPON PER UNIT, AS PER BITMAIN POLICY.





EDIT* otherwise, please announce that S4 are "ON SALE" for $18 more than usual price, BUT the catch is you have to buy 16 units to pay more for them.

Might want to mention that you are forced to buy SIXTEEN units of S4.
Also that coupons are not applicable.
And finally that without coupons being accepted, that the price per unit works out to being $818. Which is $18 MORE than buying a single unit with a coupon.

Shipping appears to be included. For a change.
Customs fees I highly doubt are included. As usual.

Unless you are in the market to buy 16 units, this is not an actual sale. And even then you save very very very little. Basically cheaper shipping.



How about actually giving 30% off the price of a single S4, and still allow the coupons..... so it is not completely and utterly useless to everyone, as this so-called "sale" currently is.

With the S4, they have changed the location of where the Frequency settings are stored.
The file in question from the S2 remains on the S4 firmware SD, but is obsolete and useless.
Perhaps with this latest firmware they have done the same with S2.
Changed the location of the Frequency settings.

If it is not obvious already, we are waiting for November 15 to get details

I would settle for "hints".
Even the form would be enough knowledge for now.
Is the design based on S1/S3? or S2/S4?
Liquid cooled?

We do know "new chips" and "extreme density" so it is safe to say the specs will be beefy.

Question is, with so much secrecy, and being rushed to market under the radar.... the chances of another S4 disaster repeating itself are not low.
Best of luck to the Beta Batch.

C1, S3, SP20, and many, many other models & manufacturers have all had their prices reduced in the month since S4 was last corrected.
Difficulty has risen a few times over since then.

Regardless of which model costs less, or any comparison, the S4 is loooooong overdue for a price cut.

yeah I know.
More of a rhetorical question, considering it hasn't dropped in price for a month now..... while the difficulty continues to climb. While other models do drop in price.

S5 might be a rocketship that will finally get us all to the moon we keep hearing about
Doesn't look like we will know until it is too late.
Hard to make any informed decisions without any solid information whatsoever.
If all it is, is a water-cooled S4 with a few tweaks.... then why not say at least that much? Don't need every detail right now, but some hints about form factor and features might be nice.
**I like your theory, except that would be called a C2? would it not?

An S4 price drop right about now, to match the S3 drop, might be nice also. Before the S5 is released and revealed on the same day to keep everyone in the dark

How much is S4 dropped by?

+1
QFT

Definitely the weakness in an otherwise excellent company.
They do seem to be getting better.
Maybe they are learning from this most recent disaster as they go. I would like to think so.
I have personally seen improvement already.

One can only hope they do not ignore this very obvious weakpoint.

They have done alot right recently, by delivering the long awaited firmwares for all units, and trying their best to remedy this S4 disaster. You can tell they are trying!
However, I have to agree with you on what they have done poorly up until now also. Specifically communication and customer service.
Some things certainly could have been handled better.
Communication being number one.

Compensation should be paid where it is due.
10 days given to everyone before an imaginary line in the sand, is not exactly fair.
Some were affected beyond that line.
Others were affected much longer than 10 days.

Obviously it is a very long line of people affected by this issue (so I can see how defaulting 10 for everyone is easiest), but obviously some exceptions should be made to arbitrary guidelines and criteria.

ar·bi·trar·y
adjective
    based on random choice or personal whim, rather than any reason or system.


Best of luck to you Mr.Greenhat I suspect they will pull through for you eventually.

I have S4 ($200 off) coupons available. Expire Nov15. PM an offer.

If you haven't yet, try this.
Changes won't stick across power cycle, but it does make a noticeable difference.
Combined with setting pool difficulty to 2048 it should get you to advertised speeds.

  of course, a proper firmware should eventually be made available so that nobody has to do any of this
Oh well, maybe for Christmas 2015.

Thank you for summarizing
I think I might be sick.

I cut most of the quote for length, but left the donation address for ckolivas. Bitmain should be ashamed that you are not on their payroll.

Use the link previously posted several times in this thread for the latest firmware without the "SD omitting error"
this one:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24462711/initramfs.bin.SD-20141003-1.tar.gz

It will update cgminer from 3.12.0 to cgminer 4.6.1
It does NOT fix the difficulty issue.
Setting your difficulty manually at the pool you are using to 2048 is still recommended strongly.

You have to set it at the pool, BTCguild and Ghash have the option for sure.

Looks like you may have nailed it though
Hopefully with that information Bitmain can push another firmware relatively quickly

Use BTCguild for best results I am finding. Ghash works too.

Whatever pool that you choose, be sure to set difficulty manually to 2048  

Might be a reading thing

This link has only been posted about a dozen times in the past day in this thread.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/24462711/initramfs.bin.SD-20141003-1.tar.gz

5 of 33 units not functioning is no laughing matter, but if you missed that link easily enough then maybe you should RTFM and see if you are doing something wrong

Contact the user BitmainWarranty via PM, and try calling their support line too.
They will help you.

Can't help but imagine you must be doing something terribly wrong to get those results. Still not sure how you missed nearly 3 pages of instruction in this thread regarding the firmware upgrade.

Happy Yom Kippur! 

Thank you to everyone at Bitmain for tackling this during the holidays (Jewish or otherwise lol)

Not so much that.

We have been rushing them for weeks to get the updated cgminer firmware (for all of the Antminers).
The fix they were expected to push, seems to be running perfectly fine. So far.

The hiccup involved, was uploading a firmware package with the wrong file path.
Caused the upgrade to fail before it started.
The "fixed" firmware package (link posted above, and will be on the Bitmain website "soon") does flash properly now.

This difficulty issue seems to be unexpected, and probably unknown by Bitmain up until now.
Completely unrelated to this firmware, as it happened before with the older firmware too.
It can be fixed manually easily enough if you know to be on the lookout for it, and I would assume that Bitmain can eventually push a fix so that manually setting difficulty is not essentially necessary.
Only recommended.

I would say they tested the firmware well enough. Just goofed on the deployment, due to the holidays. All is well now. (so far)




Whoa!! hold on now... you are trying to tell me there are not entirely 100% Jewish Chinese people running Bitmain??? INCONCEIVABLE!!! hahaha