So what people are saying is that everyone should be fawning over a $3000 system that has nonfunctional hardware on the mobo, requiring additional investment just to get "the basics", just because it's a "new Amiga"? There's a valid concern that said onboard hardware might never work, don't you think? After the A1 fiasco with build quality and nice promises, I think people do have a right to be leery, IMO.
It's not common industry practice to ship products without drivers, not by a long shot, lol. This is not "beta", this is a matter of having 2 very important motherboard chips simply being useless and they must be replaced by add ons. Stuff is being shipped that doesn't work until you buy additional cards.
It's like buying a car and finding a hand drawn picture of an engine on a slab of paper under the hood that says "call us in 2 months and you'll be able to use this thing, maybe!" It's even more of an onion in the ointment that you can add cards to get this working on your dime. The drivers are there for the add-ons, after all this time why not for the onboard? If I am paying for a NIC/Sound on the board, then being forced buy add on cards to get very basic functionality, that's just insane. You are being forced to spend more money if you want audio or networking. A computer is a doorstop without networking out of the box in basic form in my books. The acceptance by the community in regards to half arsed solutions is a major part of the problem - I haven't bought a computer in 15+ years that hasn't had functional networking out of the box.
Shipping kludge products may be sadly common on the current Amiga machines, but it's not industry standard by a remote stretch in the the big scheme of computing.
As was said, no skin off me if people want to spend this kind of cash, but it's zero progress for the Amiga community in my books when you factor in price vs. performance, but that's nothing new. I suppose that's also why there's so much interest in the grassroots (cheaper) solutions coming like Natami and Mike's FPGA board. I paid $800 for my 440ep/OS 4 kit, so I guess I'm as guilty as the next dude - but $800 is a far cry from $3000. That being said, to Hyperion's credit - I have never hit a single driver issue on my SAM 440ep, zero USB problems either. I hope people that buy these machines enjoy them, sincerely - I simply wouldn't buy one at half the price when the 460 is a viable option.
Said it 1000 times before, will say it again - Hyperion could sell 25 times the number of OS 4 copies if they supported PPC Mac's, but they seem to stick to this ideal that proprietary high buck solutions are the way to go. The PPC mac's don't have a widely varying amount of HW configs, it just makes no sense to me why Hyperion as a SW company would not try to broaden the audience by supporting the most wide base of HW.
