When you ship a product that performs at a high level to review sites and to initial buyers, you are baiting consumers to into thinking you are offering a lot of performance at a relatively low price. That's called value. If you change the product such that its performance is greatly reduced in relevant, real-world scenarios, and you do not change its model number, you are switching products. Get it? Bait with a better product, switch to an inferior product.
I bought and recommended Kingston products for years. I recommended their products when I wrote articles for AnandTech that were viewed by millions. I don't write for the main site anymore, but I definitely will NOT be buying Kingston products nor recommending them to others moving forward.
Agree with Gigantopithecus here. You can argue the legal nuances, but this is a textbook definition of bait and switch - create a market for a product, publicize it as top of the line performance, and then switch to inferior parts without giving any indication to the public that anything has changed.
You can read the claims on the package of the drive (the one I sent back last week). It says nothing about being the "value" line, or even the "better" vs "best" performance that some companies indicate, like Netgear puts on their middle range routers. Everything in their adverstisements claimed the opposite - you are supposedly getting top end performance. Then they manufacture the first batch and sell them, providing that top end performance and creating a market for them. You may have a personal knowledge about the history of Kingston v-series versus hyper-x, but that doesn't mean everyone should assume that v-series will never improve, never reach higher end performance (like the performance Kingston claimed and stopped delivering).
I am sorry, but you guys are both wrong in here. Unless the package clearly says "sync NAND", there is nothing that guarantees what you are getting. Furthermore, don't all the packages always say "specifications subject to change without notice"?
Gigathopitecus, more in my favor, if you wrote for Anandtech, you know that many users rely on the tech sites to uncover all the details of the products, and it is the obligation of the reputable tech sites to ask those tricky questions. If I, as end customer, knew quite well the difference between the V series and the hyper-X, shouldn't one of the tech sites reviewing the V300 notice the sync nand, and furthermore, ask the question to Kingston if the indeed it was changing the V series to sync nand, and how that would play with the hyper-x? The tech sites failed to ask it.
Rio Rebel, why do you think that the intention was to deliberate change from sync to async? What if the final product was always intended to be async, but because of product development delays (validation, firmware, etc) it wasn't ready for sale at the target date, so the solution to not delay the launch was to just take a hyper-x and put it in a V series shell? Bait ans switch would be that the initial intention was to have sync, then they changed to async, but I would bet that the final objective was always async. Oh, and the hyper-x itself has been subject of changes. the initial hyper-x had 5k sync nand, later replaced by the hyper-x 3k, and in that case, even the box says in big letters "hyper-x 3k".
Was Kingston sneaky on omitting that plan (async for mass production) to the reviewers? Absolutely! But as far as giving you an inferior product that what was intended for production, that is not the case. The product was always intended to be a low performer to compete in price, some people just lucked out that the initial batch was a better performer than intended.
