They have...

I think you will find that some of the most vocal opponents to your supposition have either already received a N900 or expect to receive one shortly for free or at a reduced "developer" discount.

I am of the "build it and they will come" school of thought. I was attracted by the hardware and paid full price for a new N800 and market price for a used N810. I have had no regrets with regard to the hardware I purchased.

I too was disappointed in the past developer discount programs in that they did not appear to reap much benefit for the average user. Early on I tried to convince some of these "developers" that a small change in the input method used for the DUN dial up string would give 17 million subscribers in the US and perhaps Canada, Mexico, and parts of South America the ability to connect to their network via Bluetooth for free!
In the end though I had to join maemo.org and then Bugzilla in order to report and track this bug. It took 11 months to implement and by then most of the market I envisioned moved on.

Later when I read that only 163 (or some such) votes were recorded in the first council elections I realized that almost 20% of the 200 who received discounted devices hadn't even bothered to vote. (That btw, is assuming all voters received a discounted device. If some hadn't, the % would be even greater )

So... using that information I would have to agree with you. I would have much rather the initial cost of the device be reduced to all, instead of an MSRP that reflects the cost of the developer device program...

That is until I looked at the home screen of my devices and saw OMWeather, Personal Menu, and Personal Launcher, CairoClock along with launcher icons for other programs like Maemo Mapper. I remembered that my total cost of ownership for these devices has been just my original purchase price.


If only one of these^ programs benefitted from the developer program… any added cost I may have paid for my device to provide for the developer program, would then be well worth it.

When I look back at the Internet Tablet Ownership Poll that you posted back in February of 2007 (pro’ly the first poll I voted in, on this site.) I was shocked to see that almost 43% of the respondents owned a N800 and had never owned a 770...

If history for you repeats itself, after a short while at least 40% of these forums members will own an N900 without any previous NIT experience.

If history for me repeats itself, after a long while a good many of these new members will not have had to buy another thing in order to enjoy the benefits of their N900.