Outlaw has a history of reducing the price of processors over the course of their production life. The 950 started at 899 and was at 699 when it was discontinued, and before that the 1050 started at 599 and dropped to 499 for the last year of its production life. In this case, the 990 and 970 both went on sale back in October, and afterward they settled into new, lower regular prices. At the time of the sale in October, Outlaw did reveal that a new processor (or processors) is in the pipeline with HDMI v1.3 and the assorted decoding, but there's no ETA on when we'll see that (or them).