The megabucks are only necessary when one wants to mass-produce chips by filling entire wafers with them. The quantification of possible market is also completely different story from the R&D costs.

Hello EH/s! Thank you Bitfury!

As for Apple accepting 40% yield per wafer, for initial runs - yes. That is between them and the foundries. I guarantee that with their clout they are only paying for the good chips and forcing the foundries to eat the scrap.Their only compensation is that Apple and other customers know that initial pricing will be very high to finance the R&D needed and capital equipment costs. Worse for the foundries is pricing is based on a mandatory rapidly downward sliding price per-chip giving foundries great incentive to get better.

The (QFN?) package should be about $0.20 .
This means, if your assumption is right, they would spend about $2.80 for the pure die.

How much is a 16nm wafer? Maybe about $9k if they make a good deal with TSMC?

This would result in about 3200 good dies per wafer. Right?

70000 mm² per 300 mm wafer and assuming 90% yield a single die size would be about 20 mm² (4.5mm x 4.5mm), which would fit to the package size.

8162 rolled cores; 65 clock cycles per hash -> equals about 125 unrolled cores;

A single semi-custom (standard cell based) unrolled core has an area of about 0.3 mm² in 28nm.
Implemented based on unrolled cores in 28nm a chip with equivalent performance would have a size of about 37.5 mm².
Taking the area scaling of a factor of 2 from 28nm to 16nm into account, the unrolled semi-custom version of the chip would have 18.75 mm² in 16nm (but would be probably not that efficient).

So I have to agree, your estimation is feasible and should be close to reality.

Any word on when the resellers are getting their shipments watching both websites and nothing so far

Printed very large in the first post of this thread, with only slight modifications for emphasis on some things a heck of a lot of people have somehow been overlooking this week (specifically, that 750 - 189 = a buttload of sticks left for sale; take a note of that, four people who have messaged me since yesterday):

When can I expect my ordered miners?
 

Hopefully you keep the boards for when new chips are available to you, a quick new version would be nice.

Will there be anymore batches of the FutureBit MoonLander USB Scrypt Stick run?

Looking at list I see a decent amount have paid for full order it appears.  Should I pay you now for the rest still owed?   

Just wanting to check and make sure I did not miss something about paying the rest.