oaktree wrote:
I was wondering if anyone here things that the Amiga would be a popular seller if someone brought it back? What features would it have to have in today's market? Would it need to support legacy applications?
If the Amiga (a unique and proprietary hardware platform made exclusively for AmigaOS) was to be brought back I guess it'd had to be made by someone with enough dosh and engineering/marketing resources. Something like NVIDIA or ATI, if it were to follow in the graphics/"multimedia" track.
I remember I had some hopes for a new Amiga back when Gateway owned the name.
I'm not sorry that there won't be a new Amiga though. When you can't make cheaper and better hardware than everybody else - and stay ahead - the obvious thing to do is what's currently being done, drop hardware and make AmigaOS for non-AmigaOS-specific third party hardware. Let hardware makers worry about hardware, and sell the OS for the hardware people want.
I just think it's too bad that this riddance of Amiga hardware is an advantage that is made moot, since we still will have to pretend that there will be "Amigas", as the third party hardware (currently Teron motherboards) has to be sold using an Amiga, Inc. distribution license and be bought together with AmigaOS from a licensed distributor (currently as "AmigaOnes"). A poor emulation of an 1980's strategy. Fortunately that's just a business decision (an extremely stupid and counterproductive one, in true Commodore tradition, IMO) independent of engineering and development, so I'm just hoping it will be
retracted ASAP. If they yank away a viable hardware base and hardware market, entirely unrelated to Amiga Inc., from under the feet of their own software product AmigaOS, then AmigaOS will remain as dormant/dead as it is today. There are only so many people that are prepared to pay $800 for a $500 motherboard relabelled and dongled for an artificially created "Amiga" monopoly.
I'm curious... anyone know any investors that might jump on the bandwagon? 
I'm afraid all the owners of the Amiga brand, since Commodore and to an ever increasing extent onward, have made everything humanly possible to devaluate that brand. I believe that for there to be a point with a new Amiga, the hypothetical company would have to spend more than pocket change on its development and marketing, and I doubt Gateway even spent that kind of money on "the new Amiga" when they said they were working on one. Being better and cheaper costs money. Except for some of us here, not many would buy the machine for its name alone. Not that name.
Nobody's planning to make a new Amiga, and I don't think that will change. This would be a good thing for AmigaOS, if only Amiga Inc. would adapt its software strategy to reality and stop trying to make people pretend they'll have to buy "Amiga hardware" anyway.
