Hi Erik,

Atmel was only an example and many others (Analog Devices, Cygnal, Dallas, Philips, ...) goes this way also.
And also many manufacturers outside the 8051 world (Cypress, Fairchild, Hitachi, NEC, ...)

Today already many circuits can be programmed over SPI, JTAG, RS232, ...
and in future separate programmers die out.

So why you should buy a gadget, which become useless soon.
Also most low cost programmer support only few derivates of only one manufacturer.


Peter