Funny, I could swear that the Synchrosoft dongle used to be more prevalent, used with other products, and available as a generic dongle like the iLok is - i.e., without the Steinberg branding. I could be mistaken, but either way, it sure does look like it’s a Steinberg-only contraption for now, doesn’t it?
DOH - just found the press release - I guess that all ended in Dec. 2008:
However, you still can buy a dongle separately… I think?
I’d like it if they supported iLok too - then I could just have one dongle instead of two.
I don’t know how much of Steiny’s Cubase/Nuendo sales consist of current users (versus new buyers) but my guess it’s actually the majority of potential buyers
Ditto! Over the years for me it’s been 5 initial purchases and 13 upgrade purchases. After my first purchase of Cubase SX, I could have saved a LOT of trees by just downloading. FWIW, All the manuals and boxes from those early versions are LONG gone, most of them unread.
The strangest of all the upgrades was the Groove Agent 3 (or was it GA 2) - where they started selling the Full Version several months before the upgrade version was released. When I finally got my my upgrade, it was really just a full version with a different label on it - at least as far as I could tell. THAT was when I really started chomping at the bit for downloadable upgrades.
At this rate, I don’t expect to see downloadable upgrades from Steiny until after cloud-based DAWs with and negative-latency and automatic talent-correction are the mainstay 
Dave