Software Upgrades

[Lance]

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.

Ah, and therein lies the rub, I think. You've paid for the hardware, and indeed you can do whatever you like it (except that you might void your warranty). That's absolutely your right. What you haven't paid for, and thus cannot use, is the Agilent software than operates that hardware.

When you put it that way, that's some expensive firmware!

Oh, I also added a poll to answer Psi's question.

[metalphreak]

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

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.