While I find it unusual to see myself agreeing with tmhg I can only assume he means commercially viable, which for the moment appears to be true. Price, performance and most other properties make it not an option in anything other than homebrew/hobbyist circles where rational decisions arent important. If anything Id have to say the ppc systems youve mentioned support that idea rather than negate it.
I think any platform needs to be of a certain size to survive in the long run, it needs to be able to carry its own weight, but not only does it need to be self-sustaining in a credible way, it also needs growth, a credible future and momentum for anyone to invest any kind of money, time, or even interest in it. It needs developers. It needs users. Users won't come without developers, and developers won't come without users. A growth in user base might result in a growth in developer base, resulting in a growth in user base, resulting in a growth in developer base, and so on. That kind of momentum.
Obscure $3,000 systems of 2007 standards is not what is needed to get momentum. Neither is €1,000 ones that is completely stomped to the ground and run over by a common smart phone. The only ones buying this kind of stuff, are the few hundreds already die-hard fanatics that literary buys *anything* at *any* price, as long as Hyperion tells them it's a good thing and/or it has a boing ball slapped on to its bog standard PC-case. This is hardly "self-sustaining", it's more like living on a life support machine. I think it's a safe guess to claim that 99% of the A1X1K systems went to people *already owning* an OS4 system (the remaining 1% would be "amigadave" and possibly one or a few other blokes). So it's not leading to any kind of advancement for the platform, in fact, I think it might *scare people away* since it signals so darn clearly to everyone with a brain that there is *no credible future* in this, and they will invest their interest somewhere else, and then we are talking about a platform *decline* in the same pace that the old Eyetech A1's die off or simply being put out in the garage due to the obvious lack of progress and lack of a future. *That* is what the A1X1K brings to the table, *that* is what it means for a desktop OS being tied to a HW platform that completely lacks viable desktop systems, *that* is what all this "pro-PPC advocating" results in; pulling the plug on the life support.
PPC is **DEAD** as a desktop platform, even if the suitable CPU's would be here (which they aren't) it's simply not possible to build a viable desktop machine in the ultra-low volumes Acube/Aeon can afford, and those who *could* manage (like ASUS, Abit, MSI, etc) certainly won't do it, and I have asked this question previously in this thread: "Why doesn't anyone build desktop motherboards using PPC today?", and of course nobody has answered it. But by all means people, keep advocating it as the only route forward for OS4... :lol:
