When Oxford Nanopore announced their GridION X5 instrument in March, I and others attempted to parse the difference between the two pricing plans -- and I made a bit of a hash of it. The X5 runs 5 MinION flowcells independently in parallel from a single desktop instrument, which also includes FPGA-based acceleration of basecalling plus a license to perform sequencing-for-hire. Indeed, Matt Loose tweeted out an image of an "X6" and then mention of an "X7"; the X6 had a MinION plugged into the USB port and apparently the FPGA unit can keep up with seven flowcells all running simultaneously. Now Oxford has launched an interesting third "Starter Pack" plan that offers an even lower price point for the system.
