The main advantages of the Pegasos to the average user:

[Dan]

I don´t think the Pegasos is aimed at the average customer. Hasn´t they said  repeatedly that it´s aimed at developers, powerusers and as a geektoy.
It´s the STB that aimed at consumers.
Perhaps the question should be why would an nondeveloper and nonamigauser get a Pegasos?
Linux?
I don´t think so, the VIA miniitx boards are cheaper if you want just a cool and quiet linuxbox.

[Dietmar]

>I don´t think so, the VIA miniitx boards are cheaper if you want just a cool and quiet linuxbox.

VIA's mini-itx boards are also very slow. For example, the EPIA with 800 MHZ hardly reaches the performance of a Celeron 400 (because the CPU is quite crippled). They are still useful for playing video and audio: the more expensive variants have hardware-assisted DVD decoding to get around the poor performance of the CPU. But compared to a G4 with 1.4GHz (or whatever will be on the Pegasos2), Via's mini-itx boards are underperformers. That shows if you encode material: none is good enough for real time recording with a DivX codec. They are not good enough for recent and not-so-recent 3D games. And they are not necessarily "cool". In fact all but one of their boards, the 533 MHz variant, come with a fan on the CPU.

[gary_c]

A first-time computer buyer would not want a Pegasos, or an AmigaOne, like other people have said. The main attraction of the Pegasos at this point in time is to be in on the ground floor of something new, and this is only appealing to people who probably already have other computers to use, and can treat this as an extra.

Also, MorphOS1.3 or 1.4 is not for the new computer user, or even the old computer user if he/she isn't familiar with Amiga-like OSs, because it isn't complete yet, and because there aren't necessarily a lot of people in the neighborhood who can help out with the problems that come up. Even experienced Linux users don't find this a smooth process yet, but of course some people prefer to be the trailblazers, so that's where the market is right now.

As for more advanced users and applications, just what advantage the Pegasos might have over other hardware I think has yet to be articulated, really. At present, it's mainly appealing because it's a geek toy, and in fact that may be enough to get it to critical mass. A lot of people into other OSs have said good things about the Pegasos board, and Genesi is pushing this angle hard. There are also the other, non-PC products that Genesi makes, and it seems there are plans to integrate them in systems that will leverage the Pegasos's strengths.

If the cpu roadmap is followed the way Genesi is outlining it, this could also be the fastest-accelerating product evolution in personal computing (is that ad copy or what?!). So by next spring some time we could have a small, powerful board to play with (anyway, people with enough cash could). There's still the question of exactly what problem is this the solution for, but with a line that goes from G3 to PPC 970, there would be a lot more possibilities.

-- gary_c

[n-ary]

" If you're only doing word processing and browsing, Windows systems are not high maintenance. It's only when you start trying to do interesting stuff on it that the maintenance cost rockets"

Thats true... in theory.

As the theory goes:

1. buy your fancy new PC
2. install all the extra HW (video card etc)  you will need for the next (lets say) 4 years
3. install the final bug free OS
4. install the final bug free drivers for your HW
5. install the final bug free applications
6. happy computing for the next four years..
.
7. start over again from 1.

Neat.

But is that likely to happen in real world?

No, that is a myth in the real word of today.

No matter how simplistic needs one has regarding  apps, sooner or later you'll need and boldly go to bother teh godly system with driver/OS/app. patches, if not anything else.

The grim fact is everytime something not completely isolated from the (Win) OS is altered, you face the risk of total destruction (i.e. OS usability dropping below acceptable level, not fixable, OS reinstall ahead).

"Pegasos/MorphOS will not qualify for the "it just works" accolade until the quality and range of software available for it matches or exceeds that expected as minimal on higher availability platforms like Windows, Linux and MacOS X. There's not much attraction for people who just want to word process and browse the Internet if you don't have a top quality office suite or browser."

I agree here, mostly. The thing is, Peg/MOS still got hope to get it right!  Win systems, on the other hand, are stuck with fundamentally flawed design -- a problem even not the giga$ seem to be able to fix..

I'm not saying MOS or OSx will make it, no.
What I say is this: XP/Win2k isn't good enough. Not even close.
As long that situation remains there is room for other players..

PS. please bear with me, just had to reinstall Windows after a problem that occurred while installing a device driver (complete registry destruction) :-)

[tumash]

Cymric:

perhaps a little more stable, although I have heard good stories about XP and 2000.

And I've seen it with my own eyes - I use Windows XP and my recent uptime was 14 days -- turned it off during heavy thunderstorm. And my friend, a Pegasos user hasn't seen uptime longer than 1.5hour on his MorphOS.. so it all depends. Surely we can't generalize that Windoze is clumsy, hangs a lot and (quasi)AmigaOS is great, fast and stable etc... that simply all depends

[KennyR]

tumash wrote:

Surely we can't generalize that Windoze is clumsy, hangs a lot and (quasi)AmigaOS is great, fast and stable etc... that simply all depends

I agree. It depends on how an OS is used an what software is run on it, and the drivers. My own experiences are completely opposite to yours; MOS here easily runs for days with not a single reboot, while Windows XP bluescreens every day, losing yet more data. I'm told its the VIA drivers...but I can't fix them. On the other hand, Pegasos also has VIA issues...

[magnetic]

Tumash
 I can tell you I run this Peg for days on end sometimes and it works flawlessly. Sure there are some things that are unstable but I can stay away from them. I can push this machine farther than any Mac or PC I have used.

magnetic

[Dan]

tumash wrote:
Cymric:

perhaps a little more stable, although I have heard good stories about XP and 2000.

And I've seen it with my own eyes - I use Windows XP and my recent uptime was 14 days -- turned it off during heavy thunderstorm. And my friend, a Pegasos user hasn't seen uptime longer than 1.5hour on his MorphOS.. so it all depends. Surely we can't generalize that Windoze is clumsy, hangs a lot and (quasi)AmigaOS is great, fast and stable etc... that simply all depends

Have to agree with that, in my experience WinXP is not fast  or resource effective but it is the most stabel windows i have run yet. No nasty win95/98-like crashes yet and lockups are maybe once a month. But it IS memory hungry. On the other hand if my amiga crashes it doesn´t matter because of instant reboot and I have never lost any work because it doesn´t crash if you don´t experimnet with it.
Autocrash was an win3.1/win95 feature  :-D

I doubt that linuxusers will buy a pegasos as their main machine, they tend to have big x86s if they just use linux. And as a secondary machine for personal/home server any old x86 tincan will do.

Selling as server to companies is doable but then it has to be in an easy to use package out of the box not a bare board.

The market at the moment IS the "geek toy" market.
First and foremost it´s amigausers.
But if we could get it to be the primary hardware choice for BeOS users it would be a bigger "geekmarket"
Why isn´t there any atari-people interested in the pegasos hardware?
They are stuck with m68k just like the amigausers was or even more so since they never got any PPCcards.
And please don´t reduce the number of available IO-ports put some more on there instead  :-)

QNX on the other hand seems to have much more of an  commercial application for OEMs.

I don´t think the Pegasos is the way to launch MorphOS as a mainstream OS. For this the STB is much more important.
Its kind of like with the A500 it was the games that was the selling point not the OS.
The STB could and should be all those things Commodore wanted with the CDTV.  

[takemehomegrandma]

iamaboringperson wrote:
So what would a potential - especialy first time - computer buyer want with a system like a pegasos?
What I mean is that since the aim seems to be for a more than just a nerds toy, what else will there be that will interest a wider range of customers?
If the average person wants word-processing and email, the Pegasos would surely deliver, but what would make people choose it rather than Windows/x86?

You mention Pegasos - but do you have a special OS in mind? ;-)

Well, I guess you are mostly interested in the HW aspect? No noise is the first thing that comes to my mind. Also the small form factor. That, plus the integrated peripherals and things like the optical digital S/P DIF out connector.

So I guess that the Pegasos would be appealing to people interested in the cool/silent yet powerful systems. What x86 alternative is there, if you put equally importance on the Heat, Noise, Features, Price, Performance aspects? The VIA Epia with Eden? Well, it's small, cool, cheap, silent, ... but weak! The higher CPU performance of the Pegasos might be worth the extra dollars to some people in that market segment.

But what we really should be discussing in this case is the Pegasos 2, but that will be a little difficult for obvious reasons :-P. But I guess that the same things as above goes for the Peg2 as well, plus the Gigabit ethernet connector, especially if there will be two of them, which will be PRETTY UNIQUE compared to most other motherboards out there, especially since it sits directly in the NorthBridge.

[mdwh2]

takemehomegrandma wrote:
So I guess that the Pegasos would be appealing to people interested in the cool/silent yet powerful systems. What x86 alternative is there, if you put equally importance on the Heat, Noise, Features, Price, Performance aspects? The VIA Epia with Eden? Well, it's small, cool, cheap, silent, ... but weak!

I'm not sure how to combat the heat problem, but just to point out, that if it's just an entirely silent computer one wants, you can get silent PCs that aren't crippled in anyway (eg, see http://www.quietpc.com ). I know a friend whose Athlon is silent.