CasablancaForum.us

Folks,

There is nothing to worry about.

It's just that after about one year of production, several parts of the S
4000 have been getting very difficult to find (in larger volumes) on the
market. We had to switch to different main boards and CPUs for that reason.

Now that we are using standard Intel mainboards, this will always be the
case. A specific mainboard is available for a certain period of time, then
it is replaced with a new one. The old one is available in small quantities,
enough for repairs, but not for production runs.

We did not like the fact that we had to change, but the alternative would
have been to not have anything to sell from now on. You know, that's bad for
revenues. We decided to not let it come that far.

We originally planned to just change the parts in question and continue to
call the unit S 4000, like we did in the past with Avio, Prestige etc.. But
then again, this is getting tough for our guys in support and repair. So you
got an Avio - but which one? We had at least five different incarnations of
that model, with huge differences. A very confusing situation.

This time, we decided we click the mighty number up one notch and call the
changed version S 4100. After all, that is the sole advantage of boring
names like XYZ 1234. You can update a name without paying for expensive
marketing agencies.

The product is not shipping yet and won't be shipping before a couple months
or so. But here in Germany, we are totally sold out with S 4000 units, so we
did the announcement.We had nothing to loose. Then we realized that at MS US
in Boulder, there still is a handful of S 4000 machines left in stock. So we
pulled the English information, as it was wrong (it said the S 4000s are
sold out).

The S 4000 and the S 4100 are running the same software, so there is no
reason to believe we won't update the S 4000 anymore. We realize we still
have a few bugs and glitches, and we are working hard to fix those.

Regards
Jörg Sprave