I thought this was the idea all along... the announcements were all using as new sticker prices +r&d for the first manufacturing run on 20 year old hardware, it

I thought this was the idea all along... the announcements were all using as new sticker prices +r&d for the first manufacturing run on 20 year old hardware, it was a feature not a bug. Cynically this "accounting error" is either an excuse to send more hardware to achive the same absolute $$ cost, or a method of communicating that the "cost" to the taxpayer was much (much much) lower than it really was.