Because I won't be rode.
The key economic concept one must grasp in order to make intelligent PC decisions is that of the tiered marketing approach. Manufacturers sell crippled versions of the real product and/or chips rated for a mere fraction of their true clock speed capability to create low-end products. These products often cost no less to manufacture than the high end ones, and in fact at times cost more to manufacture. But makers are willing to essentially give away these products in order to create a baseline price that they will inflate 2-5 times in pricing the real stuff.
They then hope that they have done a good enough job in crippling the affordable products that in combination with all the hype they can muster it might motivate the buyer who has any standards at all to opt for the (ridiculously overpriced) higher-end products. For this choice they are taxed heavily (something I refer to as the dumb-*** tax).
When a 1.8a and a 2.4b are the same thing, why spend more for the 2.4b. Especially when 1.8a's will run 2.4GHz in almost every case. If i865 is as capable as i875, why pay the premium for 875? It goes on and on.
In the end I don't care what the manufacturer's priorities are. I am only going to spend what the mainstream products cost, all marketing games be damned. They will have to punch somebody else's buttons if they want a response. Personally I will continue to use knowledge and hard work to approximate the performance of the high-end systems with as unlikely a collection of "second rate" components as it may take.
Basically, they can only see you coming if you haven't seen them first.
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