Quoted from MachineGunGuy:

This entire thread is amusing although a bit tedious. No one likes price increases and unless it's a requirement to survive, Food, shelter, clothing, energy. You either elect to buy the product that had the increase or not buy the product. If the increase is too much and demand dries up the seller has the option of either reducing prices to improve demand or adding additional value in an attempt to restore demand. Clearly Stern has a solid business model and they are tweaking it and attempting to improve profitability. Their price increase was most likely driven to a combination of real increases in material costs, labor, freight, taxes and general business operating costs along with a realization that demand was far outstripping their ability to produce product. Why not increase the price and make more per unit and if demand falls a bit so be it, you weren't able to produce enough to meet the demand anyway. Might as well make more on what you produce. So from a purely business sense, without an emotion attached to the decision, it makes perfect business sense. As a few people pointed out these are discretionary higher end luxury items. No one needs a pinball to survive. (Yes, I know there are a few exceptions to that rule on this forum)
Stern insider connect is a great idea. A gateway to allow for various levels of subscription services ensuring a continuous revenue stream without additional investment is a hard product. I have built and ultimately sold two rather large service based companies. The best thing about the business model was it is more easily scalable and while you have development costs for software and personal costs for providing the necessary customer service you do NOT have inventory that ages and/or not sell. The insider connect is an evolution of the pinball business. Frankly a brilliant long term move for Stern. How or if it works well or at all is yet to be determined, but it is intriguing. People often complain that they don't do code updates or refine the game code much after its final release. The economic incentive to do so is practically zero. People have bought and paid for the machine and it runs, barring an egregious problem impacting functionality, there is little incentive for Stern to keep programmers working on code. However, if doing code/game enhancements generates revenue on a consistent basis it makes business/economic sense to invest in that providing you get a return on that investment. It won't do much for the older pins that don't have insider connect installed., but going forward if they offered game enhancements for a nominal fee whether it be one time or a monthly subscription the market may well determine it is worth paying for.
Sorry for the long winded business lecture, but after reading through essentially this entire thread, I felt compelled to try and summarize the realities of the situation. At the moment we are still a quasi-free country and you are free to say things like F-Stern as well as to never buy another Stern Pinball machine or any other for that matter.