I believe that there is no way that Sony will ever upgrade the first generation Hi-MD players that have already been sold. The reasoning is simple. Any upgrade is going to cost Sony a fair amount of money. Setting up an idiot-proof update procedure and rolling it out to the field costs money. They have to pay for any extra materials. Every update will cost someone time (and therefore money) to perform. Even if you assume that the sales person could do upgrades in their "spare" time, they have to be trained on the upgrade (and generating the training information and any materials will cost money) and some of the time, they will be doing an upgrade instead of their normal store jobs (cleaning, stocking, inventory, helping to sell something, etc.). Even spare time isn't free. So a firmware upgrade will cost and that cost comes out of Sony's pocket. I'm not sure how much Sony makes on a Hi-MD player in profit for every unit sold but the profit margin on consumer items like a minidisc player, even a high-end consumer item isn't that great. The cost of performing any such upgrade is likely to wipe out much, if not most (or even all) of the profit that Sony made on the original sale. Not to mention the fact that some folks at Sony undoubtedly believe (and probably correctly) that upgrades of first-gen Hi-MD units will cannibalize second-gen sales. Sony might decide to charge for the upgrade but it's simpler and less confusing for them, for everyone in the sales/marketing chain and the customers to leave the first gen units alone and roll out the second gen units now that they have them. So in my opinion, what you see is what you get with the first-gen units. If you want MP3 playback, you'll have to buy a new player that supports it. - Ray
