[Tom Line]

I heartily agree: FIRST needs to stop the spin. Especially in situations like this where the cold hard evidence is going to be right in front of the person who has to spend 10 times what a component is worth in shipping just to get it.

Unlike many, I think the tiered pricing can be a good thing: as long as FIRST allows people to choose what kit they want. They do listen to posts here on occasion, so a loud-and-clear "Let us choose the kit we want" should do it.

Finally, I don't think we should do an apples-to-apples comparison between last years Kit of parts and this year. An intel classmate PC costs between $450 and $500. Replacing the driver station last year cost $162. That's a roughly $300 swing in cost by itself. We don't yet know what the other components cost - the driver station breakout board is likely to cost around $30-40 as well. So even the upper limit of $2100 difference I've seen thrown around may be mitigated to some degree by the cost of the new components we'll be getting.