[CUBE] Slot Load DVD-RW Drives From MCE

[Todd Masco]

> You don't think they will take your $499 and ship you a drive? There
> must be close to $300 in profit in those drives.

Shrug.  Don't know, don't care.  I posted the pointer not because I was 
suggesting buying from MCE, but, as the subject stated, because it 
means that they are coming into the OEM channels now!  Which means that 
we can expect vendors who are more "cube-friendly" to have them 
available to them.

As a tangentially-related (this isn't a Cube product, so it's only 
tangential) aside though, I would ask that people stop complaining 
about the pricing of new products for the Cube.  As much as it pains us 
here, the Cube is a dead platform.  That means that it has a shrinking 
user base for cube-specific products, which means that vendors have to 
recoup their investment from a shrinking pool of sales.

The price per unit per product over wholesale that vendors will have to 
charge for customization is only going to go up from here, that's just 
life.  It's just the cost of staying with a platform that has been 
OELed.