Also, I personally get nervous when asked to buy a crap hardware+drivers combo on the promise that the drivers will be fixed later and the hardware's full power will be released... what guarantee do I have that there won't be a fundamental hardware issue that drivers can't hack around?
I've got a machine that has a wireless card with the draft version of the wireless N standard, and presumably some promise that updates could fix it when the real thing came out. The real thing came out, and the card's N support has never worked. Fortunately there's a somewhat-deeply-buried setting for both Linux and Windows that lets you turn it off entirely and have the card degrade into a perfectly-functional b/g card, because once real N networks came out it tries really hard to connect to them. And it almost works. You can get about a megabyte or so over the N network before the connection somehow fails. Then another couple hundred kilobytes about 10 seconds later, and so on. Terrible.
How much more concerned about that I would be if I intended to ship a few million such units out. The "fixed drivers in the future" promise isn't that reliable.
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Also, I personally get nervous when asked to buy a crap hardware+drivers combo on the promise that the drivers will be fixed later and the hardware's full power will be released... what guarantee do I have that there won't be a fundamental hardware issue that drivers can't hack around?
I've got a machine that has a wireless card with the draft version of the wireless N standard, and presumably some promise that updates could fix it when the real thing came out. The real thing came out, and the card's N support has never worked. Fortunately there's a somewhat-deeply-buried setting for both Linux and Windows that lets you turn it off entirely and have the card degrade into a perfectly-functional b/g card, because once real N networks came out it tries really hard to connect to them. And it almost works. You can get about a megabyte or so over the N network before the connection somehow fails. Then another couple hundred kilobytes about 10 seconds later, and so on. Terrible.
How much more concerned about that I would be if I intended to ship a few million such units out. The "fixed drivers in the future" promise isn't that reliable.