While it makes for good fun watching them try and rationalize their fraud why are you guys wasting your time arguing with them.  You should start a collection to hire a private investigator to get to the bottom of what is really going on.  I mean they had to think the price of BTC would either be stable or increase over time otherwise their whole business would have been sunk.  I'd be willing to bet this whole charade is just them trying to keep what is now $100 Million+ in BTC they collected.

Wow, I've been following Hashfast hoping to buy from them after they worked the kinks out of their first batches but after reading the stories in the various threads on here I gotta say I wouldn't go near them.

You contradict yourself and change your story so much it is hard to take you seriously.  It's also pretty incredible that you are here disparaging your customers for asking you to hold up your end of the bargain.

A check isn't legal tender, cash and coin is. You were also apparently forcing people to agree to additional terms and conditions if they accepted that check.  That isn't a refund that is hush money and it appears that no one is buying your crap so now you are on here calling them names!

Hashfast seems to be the one wanting to hold onto ill gotten windfall profits.  You guys look to have been totally incompetent in your execution and when you realized you were sitting on $100 Million+ is USD gains because of Bitcoins price increase you decided to hire a lawyer to try and keep it even though you failed in every respect to provide the products your customers paid you for in a timely fashion even by your own changing definition of on time.  In the mean time you put on a good show of trying your hardest to fix your issues while you fend off the lawsuits from the customers you defrauded and end up with a nice pile of cash/Bitcoin if it all works out in your favor in a few years when all the lawsuits are resolved.  Incredible.

Anyone want to make a BTC bet that someone from Hashfast ends up in prison for fraud before this is all over because I gotta say it's looking more and more like a straight up con.

It's not a problem if they deliver on time.  The only reason so called "pre-mining" is a problem is when manufactures fraudulently advertise and early delivery date and then delay the delivery date in order to charge a higher price and still use the equipment to mine for their own account.

No, PhotonicMining is way to well done to be related to HashFast their website scrolls for starters and it is a creative scam.  HashFast is just a BFL scam clone ripoff.

The dead give away is the supposed pricing.  If you actually had a miner that powerful that you could manufacture for such a low cost you would be a complete idiot to undercut yourself by that much on the pricing compared to all the other offerings out there right now.

You must mean the $15 Million they stole from customers and then wrecked their car when trying to get away by gunning it into a brick wall.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-09/bitcoin-mining-chips-gear-computing-groups-competition-heats-up#p3

Bitmain has hinted that a follow on to their popular Antminer S1 is coming in the next few months if I were you I'd hold out for that. 

There seem to be a ton of Chinese 1Th/s clones coming out as well as some companies out of Europe that are making custom boards based on BitFury, Bitmine or Avalon chips but none of them are being sold at a price that is attractive even for immediate delivery and most of these aren't expected for another 30 days at least.  ASICMiner was also soliciting interest in their next generation stuff a few weeks back but no word on when they will accept orders or pricing.

If you want to take a huge gamble you could put in an order for "second gen" Hashfast or CoinTerra equipment which is really just their first gen chips with the bugs worked out of the PCB.  Hashfast is essentially a soft scam though and CoinTerra while they have been more honest in their dealings haven't exactly lived up to their predictions.

Because Bitmain still needs to turn a profit and adding more chips would increase their production costs.

Seems to me regardless of what process node they use they will need to use a chip with improved power consumption in the S2.  In the original U1 the chip was always under clocked.  The U2+ just took the same chip added a bigger heat sink and changed the default clock rate.  Since the S1 was already operating at close to the maximum clock rate they will almost certainly have to use an improved chip in the S2.

In one of the threads that hit Reddit last week when gmaxwell called them out one of the comments said they were overdue on paying their bills to suppliers.  Granted it's reddit so who knows what the truth is but makes you wonder what the heck is going on over there.  The profit margin on these things should have been huge and based on the info in the response from their lawyer to ninjarobot's consumer complaint they have only refunded 30k of customer orders which is like a total of 5 BabyJets.  They still have the vast majority of customer's Bitcoins.  Sounds like they are the ones trying to hang onto "windfall" profits, what a bunch of dirt bags.    We need to spread the word outside the bitcoin community so these clowns are blackballed in the wider valley as well for their sleazy behavior.

It's hard to believe that their Evo batch one sold out instantly when the Hashfast website wasn't even usable for a good chunk of time after the announcement and beginning of sales.  It's also perplexing why Hashfast_CL or anyone from that company would continue to try and market and sell their "products" through bitcointalk given the staggeringly horrible reputation they've managed to build for themselves here.  Their continued aggravation of forum members has spilled over onto reddit to the extent that a "Hashfast is a scam" thread has been stickied to the top of /r/bitcoinmining.  Their continued belligerence only serves to motivate people to spread the word that Hashfast is a scam company as there is near zero evidence that they intend to make mends with the large number of customers who they defrauded through their trickery and lies and more and more of their customers are realizing just how badly they have been screwed by these clowns.