As someone who was interested in projecting that back in like 2013 and watched the $1k arrive, I got the impression that it never became headlines in part becau

As someone who was interested in projecting that back in like 2013 and watched the $1k arrive, I got the impression that it never became headlines in part because there was never a crystal-clear moment for the "$1k genome". Someone spends $1k and gets back a DVD of data ~2017. Well, is that $1k just the cost of the reagents? What about storage/assembly/analysis? How many samples did you run in that batch? Are you including the amortized cost of the sequencer (what utilization, discount rate, and upfront cost)? Are these long reads or short reads? To what depth? (There being energetic advocates for low depth / few passes + imputation.) Is this list price or institutional bulk price? Did Illumina give you a special deal (everyone knows they have hefty margins)? Are you even allowed to talk about the cost by Illumina? And so on. If the genome were $100k, or $10k, these could be rounded off, but as the cost drops, these nuisance factors become ever more of the price. There just was never a specific moment where you could write a headline "$1k Genome Arrives At Long Last!", and by the time you get Dante Labs doing consumer sales for $500 or whatever (as long as you don't mind waiting half a year for the results), it's a bit late to write any articles as it is no longer 'news', now is it? So, people just stopped talking about the $1k genome because it had arrived quietly in the night, and switched to the $0.1k genome. And then you get similar issues, like that '$100 genome' BGI announced the other year - yes, there's a '$100' number there, kinda sorta, but there are so many caveats and questions that it discourages anyone from saying 'the $100 whole genome is here at long last!'