| However, since Peter says he is "totally engaged with another | project and does not have any available time to work on the Alpha4", | that pretty much tells me that the Alpha4 is set in stone and no | further improvements will be made.
To be fair, I think many came to that conclusion a long time ago.
| To be honest, I've been sort of expecting, or at least hoping, that | the A4's I now own would at some time be able to be upgraded. Since | Peter says any change would also require a label change (expensive | considering that the label is integral to the keypad), the door is | definitely closed on any possibility of ANY upgrade for current | A4's.
Ultimately, the upgrade would probably take the form of a new PROM/EEPROM/whatever and a new label (to stick on the existing label) and some new documentation. The cost to produce these would probably be under $10 each -- the real work is in actually writing the new firmware, which he isn't going to do. (If the PROM is soldered in, then that would make upgrades harder, of course.)
The lottery system by itself suggests that he doesn't want to sell a lot of these -- usually when there's too large of a demand to fulfil yourself, people get help and make as many as are needed. I don't know what his motivation is for not doing this ...
| It's nice that Peter is being candid about the future of the Alpha4,
I don't know if he intended for that email to be posted to the world or not (though it seems reasonable for Red to do so either way.)
| but it certainly did cost him at least one sale (mine).
Yes, but your sale was replaced with somebody else's. It cost him nothing. If he's only going to make X units/month, and the actual demand is 3x that, there's no (economic) need to do anything to increase demand by improving the product.
| At the moment, it looks like the Miniron or the Hughes are the way to go | because I will NOT consider any charger that has less than 4 ports. I have | just too many batteries to consider a single or even double port charger | like the Triton.
For the record, the Triton is a single port charger. I don't know if this was your intent, but your sentence suggests that it's a double port charger, which it is not.