How many amigas were built ?

[rednova]

I am very interested:
How many amigas were built and/or sold ?
Does anyone know ?

[Duce]

According to Wikipedia....

"Ultimately the Amiga line would sell an estimated 4,850,000 machines over its lifetime".

"The machine was less popular in North America, where an estimated 700,000 were sold"

[rednova]

Thank you for replying !!!
I am very impressed, 4 million !!!

[tonyvdb]

Yup, that seems about right. just under 5million Amiga's were sold around the world.

[midway]

I think Germany and the UK were the bastions of Amiga.

I have a few of the 4.8 million :roflmao:

[spaceman88]

I remember reading in a Amiga magazine (around 1994-1995) that the US and Canada had about the same number of Amigas even though the US had 10 X the population. Apparently they were much more popular up north.

[Pyromania]

Not even a million sold in USA? That's a bummer since it was originally was designed in California. I guess Europeans and the rest of the world saw the outstanding elegance of it. Thankfully millions of people did see the value during those years somewhere in the world. At least America had some cool developers like NewTek.

[agami]

Markets, markets, and markets.

In many ways Commodore had the same issue with Amiga that Apple did with the Macintosh: The previous darling model was just way too profitable and had an existing ecosystem of hardware peripherals and software library.

It wasn't until A2000/A500 lineup that the lower cost A500 become as appealing as a C64. And also fit the budgets of lesser economies throughout Europe and they also did well down here in Aus and in NZ.

With a favourable cost of living and homegrown IBM / compatibles + MS DOS there was no need for a business machine from either Apple or Amiga. CBM did of course make IBM compatibles. BTW, I always hated the name CBM; Stop trying to be like IBM and just be yourself.
Creatives however couldn't get much out of a business machine in late '80s so Apple went after the DTP crowd and Amiga + Newtek went after the DTV crowd.

Smaller average living spaces throughout Europe discouraged the purchase of multiple devices. Within US market in late '80s it was common to have a Nintendo for games and an IBM compatible PC for work. In Europe there is a tendency toward multifunction devices so a PC capable of playing games is favoured.

[spaceman88]

Not even a million sold in USA? That's a bummer since it was originally was designed in California. I guess Europeans and the rest of the world saw the outstanding elegance of it. Thankfully millions of people did see the value during those years somewhere in the world. At least America had some cool developers like NewTek.

Since the 700,000 is for all of North America the US sales would be much less than a million, probably not much more than 400-500,000.

[Ral-Clan]

I remember reading in a Amiga magazine (around 1994-1995) that the US and Canada had about the same number of Amigas even though the US had 10 X the population. Apparently they were much more popular up north.

That seems about right.  Whenever I read comments about the Amiga not being popular in North America I always wonder "what the heck?" and have to check to see where the author is from (usually the USA).  Here in Ontario, Canada my friends and I had Amigas.  There were several stores nearby that sold them, too, including at least one in the local mall.  I worked in a K-Mart store (a retail chain now gone from Canada) in 1988 that sold Amigas and Amiga software in the Electronics Department.

The CD32 was even around (although I only saw one or two) - but by 1994 the Amiga was fading from Canada.

So blanket statements that the Amiga didn't do well in North America really should be edited to "The Amiga didn't do well in the USA".  Here in Canada it didn't do too badly --- nowhere near as well as the C64, but I don't think that was the case anywhere.

Commodore was also way more prevalent in schools here than Apple was (the reverse seems to have been true in the USA).

[Iggy]

Its simple, there were a lot of other options that were less expensive.
At the time, except for gaming, the additional features of the Amiga chipset were of limited utility.

[Oldsmobile_Mike]

Also, their marketing in the US sucked. David P. and his pals were much more effective at it over on the other side of the pond.

[dovegrace]

That seems about right.  Whenever I read comments about the Amiga not being popular in North America I always wonder "what the heck?" and have to check to see where the author is from (usually the USA).  Here in Ontario, Canada my friends and I had Amigas.  There were several stores nearby that sold them, too, including at least one in the local mall.  I worked in a K-Mart store (a retail chain now gone from Canada) in 1988 that sold Amigas and Amiga software in the Electronics Department.

Our local K-Mart carried the A500 until '94 or so, but I think they were trying to clear out old stock.  Our store was like the clearance outlet for unsold stock from the other K-Mart stores in Winnipeg.

In school in the 80s, it seemed everyone I knew had an Amiga, C64, or Coco.  The IBM kids were the sad lads of the pack.

[kreciu]

Also, their marketing in the US sucked. David P. and his pals were much more effective at it over on the other side of the pond.

...AND many Americans could afford Color Classic type Mac, Quadra etc. or PowerPC Macs in early nineties that were sold for ~$2,000+. Also many, many Universities could buy boat loads of Mac for schools. Nobody wanted to buy Amiga. What about games? People could afford PCs capable to run games. So, US market was "to small" for Amiga.

Also in 1994, there were PowerPC Mac, and Amiga was nowhere there and later... I'm putting my A1200 into E/box case .

[matt3k]

Wonder what the breakout is of each model, that would be interesting to know...