The Best Things Come In Small Packages

[vexar]

Somehow I can't imagine who is going to buy such an overpriced PC, and I'm trying real hard. I mean - if someone who's got the money and is that retarded, there's usually somebody sane who handles money for him/her, right?

Hey everyone!
   I am that retard, apparently.  Or nearly so!


It is refreshing to know that some users never change.  So, two things:
1.  I was willing to buy the system at $2500 USD
2.  I am concerned about the power supply discussion


My post on the Commodore-amiga.org forum (based on what I learned from this thread on amiga.org) yielded this discussion:
http://www.commodore-amiga.org/en/forum/33-hardware-support/13746-amiga-mini-power-supply-gpu

I halted my purchase because half of my original post was not touched.  Thanks to Xerxes for affirming I have a valid concern.  

Also, when companies go from private to public, they get a really solid going-over by investment firms.  These people ask the right questions.  I met one of those folks on a plane flight, and it was an interesting conversation to say the least.  Let's just say that one company's CTO got a lot of questions about why their IT application infrastructure was built exclusively in MUMPS programming language, thanks to my little chat.  

Amiga Mini price:
I admit that until February, I had owned a Mac Mini for four years.  In fact, I wouldn't even be looking at buying a Commodore system if the Mac Mini had not choked and died.  The motherboard fried or the power circuitry failed, if anyone is curious.  Anyway, since Apple won't do a thing to extend warranties past 3 years, I wasn't about to pay further premiums for their funny upgrade practices, one-off HFS+ filesystem (that was annoying, and thanks to Erik Larsson, author of Catacombae, for rescuing me there), I thought maybe a Linux distribution would be a good idea since repairing was prohibitively expensive on the Mac.  So, yes, I agree, $2500 is a lot of money for a computer system.  It certainly was a lot of money when I bought my A4000t.  You are probably wondering why I thought this was a good move.  Well, a Mac Pro quad-core is $2500, and specs aren't quite as good.  An iMac prices in about the same, so no matter which comparable Apple system you go with, you are at or above $2500.  A Dell Vostro, which gets close, comes to around $1500 when you play with the configurator, but it is quite bulky, and size matters for usage and portability to me.  I do put value on the Commodore OS Vision.  I realize that yes, it's a distro of Linux, and you can go and download all these things, but my time is worth something, so not downloading a dozen applications, configuring, and patching, that is easily worth a day of my time, and you can price that out however you see fit.

I do appreciate the efforts of folks here to price out building nearly the same setup as an Amiga Mini on their own.  The 1-year warranty is worth something to me.  I can't go build my own system, though, I don't know what I'm doing.

The Amiga Mini looks impressive on paper.  Until you dig into it, and discover that on paper, the power supply unit is a concern from simple arithmetic.

[vexar]

@Tripitaka:  
MEMORY    8GB (2x4GB) Dual Channel DDR3 at 1333MHz    

I need more RAM.  This machine is partially for work, and I'm not using this hardware for serious gaming. Alienware appears to be Dell on the back-end, no wonder they have their act together.  I think my mistake has been to assume that a name is the same thing as a brand experience.

If Commodore comes out with some third-party evaluations in the very near future, I will pay attention, but for a guy like me to be able to understand holes in their engineering is not a good sign.

Thanks for the replies!

[vexar]

Seriously - if an extra 8G of ram is making you spend a grand more for hardware, you need to spend some more time researching the field.

I tend to ask people I trust, and nobody has advised me to go and get this C= product.  If you buy a computer once every four years, what is the point on staying up-to-date?  Thanks for the links.  Actually, I have a pile of RAM laying around, but it's all different speeds and what-not.  I really should turn it over to the IT department, I have absolutely no use for it.

Wow, one person was willing to buy the Amiga Mini!
 
Just in the nick of time, they managed to lose the sale by ducking a legitimate question.

@vexar Don't feel to bad, they can't answer your question, because they haven't made one yet. Your only fortunate they didn't delete your post for daring to challenge them. Xerxes is probably facing a ban from the site for his heresy.

@Optimus, to be fair, they did say they "imagined" it would run Blu-Ray just fine.  Couldn't be bothered to go and test basic hardware functionality, and they admitted it.  See, in my job, we spend time analyzing both what was said and what was not said by an individual or organization.  The CTO for my division would have answered something to the effect of:
"All our products are tested and guaranteed to operate according to specifications.  We do not warranty the behavior of specific software products which are not part of Commodore OS Vision, however if you run into concerns with the hardware or our operating system, you may log a Technical Support Request."
It is a solid, powerful response.  If I pried for testing data, I would have expected the response of:
"Our testing process is a proprietary operation of our business, and we do not disseminate this information to the public.  Our work complies with regulations for our industry and records of our testing results are held by managing regulatory groups."
What I now know is that the CTO for Commodore had a rough week, he's angry about something, he can't filter himself, and he really hasn't tested the products very much, but was reckless enough to admit it.  Can you imagine the CTO of Dell saying this sort of thing?  

So, here's a fun thing to ask anyone with an existing Commodore USA system: was there a UL, CSA, and FCC sticker on the box somewhere?  Those would be the organizations that would test the soundness of the hardware, dissolving my gripping concerns about power consumption.