I know I do. If I pay for the hardware I should be able to use it. I'm sure the base $1200 covers the hardware and some R&D. I imagine everyone would flock to their scopes if they offered such an amazing deal. Easily recoup the costs.
That's the thing though. The $1200 pricepoint alone won't allow them to make a (satisfactory) profit. The higher end sales are the ones that cover the real bulk of the R&D costs. The whole point of the lower end upgradeable models is they can extract extra revenue from the market while at the same time building a larger userbase and brand loyalty.
Say an education department has $12,000 to spend on 10 scopes for a student lab. Their minimum requirement is say 50mhz of bandwidth and 2ch. The ability to later on upgrade these models is a singular feature that would sway me towards buying the Agilent scopes. If they only did 100Mhz models at say $2k with whatever features enabled, its out of my pricerange and won't even be considered.
Say it costs Agilent $800 to make the scopes. That means they've just acquired an extra $4000 of profit, they would not have otherwise received at all. And there is no increase in R&D costs, so the R&D cost per machine drops, increasing their profit per unit sold.
Oh and currently Education buyers get the wave generator included for free
![Wink ;)](https://www.eevblog.com/forum/Smileys/default/wink.gif)
InfiniiVision 2000 & 3000 X-Series Education Promotion
Start date: February 15, 2011 End date: August 31, 2011
Promotion code: 5.831
Availability: All countries for education customers only
For a limited time, education customers who purchase one or more new InfiniiVision 2000 or 3000 X-Series oscilloscopes, receive a complimentary industry-exclusive WaveGen built-in 20 MHz function generator (DSOX2WAVEGEN or DSOX3WAVEGEN) AND a complimentary Education Oscilloscope Training Kit (DSOXEDK) per oscilloscope.