Rumored to have less than 1,000 pre-orders, then they just gave them to all those people for free and called it a dev product. So it cost them a couple hundred

Rumored to have less than 1,000 pre-orders, then they just gave them to all those people for free and called it a dev product. So it cost them a couple hundred thousand and saved a good amount of future support of the device. Plus it was an unusual decision which got them some good press and might encourage people to preorder in the future just in case something like this happens again.