There has been a lot of bitching about this on the TiVo board. Someone made a terrible miscalculation and there were very few standalone TiVo's in the retail pipeline for the holiday season. In 2000 there was a glut of 14 hour TiVo's when they discontinued that model (I bought a unit at Amazon for $99 with a $100 rebate :-D ). My guess is the retailers or manufacturers were burned by that and overcompensated this year. I'm expecting some new hardware to be announced at CES.

There were some really long threads that I stopped reading on this topic. Maybe the real answer is contained in one of them.

Last month I sold two 14 hour standalones on eBay and was shocked that I got $180 each for them.

-Dylan