[ekiara]

Honest question (I have no actual ASIC experience, I'm just curious)

Where are you getting the USD1500 price tag, I've just done a quick search and I only found a bunch of S9 Miners (Bitmain Antminer S9) advertised for over USD6000 on Amazon.

[mrb]

The batches sold and shipped in Nov were priced $1500. That was the price when buying directly from bitmain.com. Since then Bitmain hiked the price: the latest batch released yesterday (now sold out) was priced $2300. But yeah, since Bitmain's batches sell out in minutes, S9s often reach ~$5k in unofficial resale channels.