Market research for new PowerPC system

[tone007]

Awesome, more overpriced and underpowered (though apparently less so than the SAM) hardware to segment the already small market.

I guess it's a hobby.

[tone007]

Having new hardware from someone willing to help fund the porting of AmigaOS4.x & MorphOS2.x to it is hardly segmenting the market further, unless you feel that we should ONLY be purchasing SAM and used MacMini computers in the near future to run those OSes on?

If there were fewer hardware configurations to support, more development and support could be put towards a single system, more units could sell, and prices could become more reasonable (dreaming, I know.)  How about the guys that just bought a SAM thinking it was "the new Amiga?"  Then suddenly a fancier new system comes out and everyone wants to switch to that, killing the other boards' sales.  As for MacMini, that seems to not be happening at all for AmigaOS, possibly due to lack of time on developers' parts, when really it would've been the most logical choice of hardware due to availability and price.

It really is lucky this is only a hobby platform.

[tone007]

And Linux?  You have Yellow Dog on PPC and that's about it.

The newest versions of Ubuntu continue to support PPC Macs, and they actually work fairly well (a whole lot less hardware to support there.)

However, Haiku is funny.  It looks like Linux looked 10+ years ago, I can't see that taking off and being wildly successful.

[tone007]

I think a PPC-based one would be much more expensive though and not directly competitive

This is a good quote, and applies to anything, including a workstation.

Why the heck would someone pay crazy money for a board that runs an OS (Linux, Haiku)  that'll run better (performance and support-wise) on hardware a fraction of the cost?

At least with AmigaOS and its kind the hardware choices are limited so people are more likely to consider an overpriced board, but as has been mentioned before, the market is small.

That said, I'm sure there are probably at least 500 people in the world with money they'd blow on such an item if for nothing more than to kill some time.  It might just take a couple years to find them all.