Just keep in mind that "worth" is a very personal thing. Far too many factors outside even whimsical fancy weigh in as well - geography, income, career/job, etc.

If you want to break it down to statistics and numbers then you can do that as well, but then you're looking at the "worth" to SONICblue. Figure how much it costs them to produce the hardware, stock it, move it, etc. How much they pay to the people that are involved with stocking and moving it. How much they had to pay to acquire empeg. The salaries of the empeg employees (we'll ignore the rest of SB for now) and their benefits packages. Then packaging costs, insurance (most people forget about insurance - I'm not talking about shipping insurance), operational costs for the electronic ordering system... Now how many players have been sold? Care to take guesses how much the players are actually "worth" now?

Since the product has been EOL'd, it is safe to say that the empeg retail business was NOT "worth" it to SONICblue.

When the empeg was selling at $999 for a 10GB model there were other solutions available at a lesser price. Each with their own trade-offs and amount of aftermarket modification and work that needed to be done. Some with development work needed by the consumer (DIY things like the PJRC). At the empeg price drop to $699 I can honestly say that it wasn't "worth" it to get a PJRC for $150 considering all the work I'd still have to do with it.

There's no question to that a $1500 product will not fly in mobile car audio. Not at the consumer level anyway (and that just happens to be the only market to move this type of product into - I don't know how many military contracts you're going to get for an in-dash MP3 product for example, or airline deals, or any other niche, etc..) But this goes beyond a simple question of "worth" - so this whole thread is pretty much based on material that ends up being inflammatory simply because of the way it's written and because some people aren't looking at the much larger picture.

Now, can we all just make sure SB sell out of all their magically re-appearing stock? Send a message to them and everyone else, that in-car mobile jukeboxes are a very hot ticket. Let the marketing people figure out how they want to position their future products.

Bruno