I never did get around to reading the petition...until just now.
Seeing Jens' reaction to the petition, I wouldn't blame him if he got very annoyed. Jens' statement about Apollo stability/reliability is spot on. On the other hand, all of the many pieces of hardware I have bought over the years made by Individual Computers or its partners have been rock-solid reliable and stable.
Personally, I own an Apollo 2030-25MHz w/64MB on it. I was never terribly impressed with either the:
- build quality (tin-plated CPU slot edge contacts rather than gold causes no end of trouble at that frequency)
- stability (the on-board Apollo SCSI controller was fast but died a couple months after I bought it and I had to buy an A2091+Guru ROM [thanks Ralph!] which works wonderfully)
But as a CHEAP basic bare-bones accelerator it worked well enough but I didn't really expect much out of the board for that price; I remember reading about many problems with the higher clocked version of the board though.
However in 1995-7(?) where weren't any other options that were available to me. Had I the opportunity to buy some other brand, I would have - even if they cost 50-100% more. Why? I want a stable computer. I want to spend more time using it and less time trying to get it work. Everytime I needed a workaround for a PITA problem, Jens' and Oliver had something that did the trick permanently.
That said...Jens' conditional offer regarding the MACH chips is far better than what we deserved after THAT petition. My guess is Jens' got so frustrated with all the support requests from Apollo owners that it was probably cheaper to just buy out the mouldering designs and lock them up. I have the feeling Jens' is doing Amiga product development mainly out of a love of the platform, since I can't see how you could keep a business going with a small, dwindling user base.
I did a search on Amiga.org for 'Apollo' and I see 13 pages of threads, perhaps 70-80% of them involve troubleshooting for seemingly random issues. Many of the remainder are from Apollo owners wanting a different brand of accelerator. One wonders why. You don't patch up a shoddy design over and over, its like bailing water out of a sinking rowboat with a 0.5m (~18") hole torn in the side. Just abandon that ship already.
As for the suggestion that Jens somehow needed the Apollo design as a starting point for his own, I find that hilarious since Jens and his fellow designers have repeatedly demonstrated their engineering competence many times over through many dozens of product designs. Many times I've noticed Jens' trying to reduce costs in later revisions of boards or expanding features while using quality parts so the product isn't compromised.
If Jens' ever finds it worthwhile to make an A2000 or A3000D accelerator with on-board RAM, I'll snatch them up in an instant, especially if they feature IDE (or sata even) controllers with nice speed/compatibility onboard. I'm willing to pay for the quality I've come to expect.
