Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: iamaboringperson on August 16, 2003, 10:03:29 AM
-
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?
-
"So what would a potential - especialy first time - computer buyer want with a system like a pegasos?"
Something we all want - something that works!
IMO, it's plain ridiculous how people are now forced to use heavy maintenance Windows systems just to get access to simple word processing and net applications.
..and then newcomers are slowly educated to believe that is computing at its best. Nothing less than intolerable!
-
What would make people choose the Pegasos over a standard Wintel-box? Near inherent protection from viruses and worms, perhaps a little more stable, although I have heard good stories about XP and 2000. (That's hearsay, I'm sure you all know a friend who cursed said OSes from here to Hell and back.) That's about the only things it has going over Wintel. As for the rest: no wide selection of (lots of illegal) games, very little support for hardware which you can buy cheaply at the local store, no wide range of applications.
It *is* a nerd's toy, and never will be more than that, unless you have billions of dollars in your development and marketing bank accounts. Making it appear something which it isn't is a waste of time, money, and effort. That said, it is a pretty cool nerd's toy, though... ;-).
-
To the average Joe? That doesn' even know what a respondsive sleek and sexy OS is? Hmm... none? Ok, maybe booting time, and maybe the fact that it exposes the user to computing stuff that he would run away from if in a PC. Well I'm assuming MOS is like AOS, cuase I realy haven't used it. Same for A1, few advantages for the average Joe.
Hey, there is one BIG advantage. Not supporting the current PC market that is an ultrage to "real computing", it really kills any decent alternative that could exist, except Linux.
[EDIT] But then the average Joe is not an idealist, he buys the cheaper "more appeaing" stuff....
-
Physically speaking, the Pegasos is quiet, runs very cool, and offers a much better motherboard for special applications than any x86 board does. For example, if you wanted to build a hardware router, you could use Debian on a Pegasos and have a totally quiet machine, use NetBSD on a cut down 486 and have a totally quiet but slow as hell machine useless for most modern apps, or finally use a modern PC and have something that sounds like a chainsaw and makes the room 5C hotter. Imagine running that 24/7!
MOS itself is just a pleasant alternative to AmigaOS, it's not aimed at other markets, and will probably only appeal to Amiga users. MOS is being used to sell Pegasos to the Amiga market. It's expandable and may be a great OS one day, but one shouldn't think its the only (or even major) selling point for the Pegasos.
And there is always MOL for those who want to get an Apple Mac for less than £2500...
-
A Lower Price would be a great place to start if you are going to attrack the average joe away from the PeeCee world. As long as the price is high you will only get the Geeks, Nerds and electro-condriacs who have to own everything techno.
-
n-ary wrote:
"So what would a potential - especialy first time - computer buyer want with a system like a pegasos?"
Something we all want - something that works!
IMO, it's plain ridiculous how people are now forced to use heavy maintenance Windows systems just to get access to simple word processing and net applications.
..and then newcomers are slowly educated to believe that is computing at its best. Nothing less than intolerable!
LOL! I sometimes wonder if people engage their brain before posting stuff like this.
(a) - 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.
(b) - 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 too am curious as to what the answer to the question posed in this thread is. I've asked the same question for at least a couple of years now, and haven't heard a single compelling reason in all that time.
-
@KennyR
Physically speaking, the Pegasos is quiet, runs very cool, and offers a much better motherboard for special applications than any x86 board does. For example, if you wanted to build a hardware router, you could use Debian on a Pegasos and have a totally quiet machine, use NetBSD on a cut down 486 and have a totally quiet but slow as hell machine useless for most modern apps, or finally use a modern PC and have something that sounds like a chainsaw and makes the room 5C hotter. Imagine running that 24/7!
If you're just building a router, it doesn't need to be all that fast, so the cut-down 486 would do just fine. If you want something a bit faster but quiet, a VIA Epia board will do the job at a fraction of the price of a Pegasos. Noise and temperature are good qualities for the Pegasos, but hardly a compelling reason to buy one.
-
The average user wants:
-Web browser
-email
-office apps (word,exel,quicken)
-mp3/CD player
-average games
-basic picture/video editing
-easy installer for everthing
-easy to use OS
The Peg fills about half of these demands so far, but hey they said themselves that its currently a geek toy. :-D
-
KennyR wrote:
And there is always MOL for those who want to get an Apple Mac for less than £2500...
The cheapest eMac starts at £649, and that's with a G4@800.
Hardly worth buying a Pegasos just to run MOL in such circumstances, is it?
In fact, you don't want people to buy a PPC mobo as an ersatz Mac - Apple only tolerate MOL for now because it runs almost exclusively on Macs anyway. They make their money from the hardware - hence the abrupt termination of the Mac clone experiment some years back. They really wouldn't look kindly on someone trying to horn into the market unofficially.
-
Good question. I see most of the answers are missing the point here. The Pegasos offers no more to joe-user as would any computer motherboard, it's just a flat board with bits on it and they don't know what to do with it. No difference, they wouldn't grasp what a Pegasos is vs. an EPoX AMD this way.
But, the Pegasos is not intended to be sold to joe-user, well, not directly anyways. Welcome to the wild world of OEM's. What you can use the Pegasos for is as limited as the OEM's imagination.
-
It is my opinion that the current MOS 1.4 needs the TCP/IP stack completely integrated with GUI and it is ready for "Joe Average". This is with a turn-key type solution of course, with everything installed like YAM and Ibrowse (Voyager is the fastest Browser but still buggy) It seems that most average computer users just need to get email, go online and surf, and play media. What is lacking and will be impossible to overcome is Streaming Video like Real Networks and M$ crap. With the port of mplayer to MOS it should give us DVD playback which is essential as well. There are lots of native apps coming down the pipeline as well. We also need the BurnIt Pro for MOS we keep hearing about with DVD burning support. Gaming is crucial as well, so we need native MOS games that are cool and unlike all the FPS crap on PCs! With all these elements in place the Peg/MOS is a great alternative system for people. Alot of consumers dont even care (or know) what OS they are running just that "it works"
Keep it up Genesi
The Revolution has Begun
magnetic
-
The correct answer is "why not?" :-)
But, do you mean MorphOS on the Pegasos, Linux, AROS, or some other OS that runs (or will run in the future) on the Pegasos? The specific bits of the question seem to be geared towards MorphOS not the Pegasos. Remember, you can run Linux on a beefy A1200 for a completely different computer :-D
-
Right now I am waiting for the band to show up for practice so I don't have time to read all the replies here. But what I've wanted first and foremost is a replacement for my dead Amigas - and I've gotten that and more!
Another aspect of my interest is that I wanted to see the trail become a little more of a road again, so I've stayed involved in spite of how easy it would be to just use Windows and forget about all those good times I had in the past. I want to help the good times roll again, for others too...
That means improvements and additions - and pressing myself and others to thinking more like innovators and inventors, as well as imitating where it is needed so that the system fulfills what are considered all the basic functions these days with less effort.
We'll see. Some of us have kept trying, and the efforts are paying off; others are joining us and I've been privileged to see some mighty big grins (and used the grimaces as feedback, knowing that people want the experience to be more wide and current).
-
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.
-
>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.
-
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
-
" 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) :-)
-
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
-
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...
-
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
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.