A500 for the 21th century

[PMC]

bloodline wrote:
The Whole concept of the A500 is long gone. The market which it filled has been split three ways:

1. Low End "Multimedia" PC's
2. Games Consoles
3. Mobile Computing (Laptops/PDA's)

There is no going back.

That's right.  You can build a bloody decent PC for £350 which might not be state of the art, but certainly won't embarrass you.  Back in the day, the A500 cost £399.

I'd love to see a low end Amiga with a state of the art chipset and mid spec CPU with a killer OS, but there's no chance it would appear on the shelves for £400 or less.  Sony and MS make a loss on every PS2 / X-Box sold as they recoup costs on licensing the games, which isn't an option for a platform like Amiga.  

[PMC]

anakirob wrote:

The AmigaOne seems to be an ordinary PC with motorolla instead of intel (a good thing, but it's still a PC). No custom hardware? This is one thing that makes classic amiga so 'classic'. Is WB4.0 going to be any more than LINUX-XWINDOWS with amigalike icons and bundled linux drivers?

How do you define "custom hardware"?  An architecture unique to one platform?

In that case, Sony, Nintendo and MS have custom hardware in their consoles but these are sold at a loss because the software makes enough profit to offset the hardware losses.  It's a marketing ploy to tempt people to buy a low cost console and fork out £25 - £45 for the games.

A new Amiga wouldn't have the luxury of a huge software base, therefore custom hardware would cost.  

Remember that PCs nowadays can be built up from a huge range of components, with no single standard build.  You can choose between ATI, Nvidia etc all competing to better the other competitor.

If Amiga needs to re-emerge then it needs to regain credibility (the average Joe thinks an Amiga is a 1987 vintage A500) by raising its profile.  Personally, I'd love to see a world class chipset that's unique to Amiga, but the commercial realities dictate otherwise.  Eyetech are going down the right route with an embedded system, as even subtle "copyright Amiga" small print on smart terminals etc is a major step.