Amiga HW price in a perspective

[mpiva]

It's sort of like saying well yeah people should be able to afford a fifty US dollar cup of coffee when Starbucks is selling them for a fiver.  Add that to the fact that in Starbucks you can have your choice of flavours and additives whilst in your store you can only have rancid yak butter, and if your coffee cup has a hole in it be grateful there's a cup and we didn't pour it in your hand.

  I disagree, I'd say it's more like: would you rather spend $5 to buy a well-brewed full flavoured coffee you can really savor but it comes in a flimsy plastic cup that's hard to hold without burning you hands, or would you rather spend $0.25 to buy some watered down insta-blend day-old coffee that comes in a nice thermally insullated, ergonomically moulded, spill-proof, thick cardboard cup?

  Personally I care more about the taste of the coffee (OS) than the cup (hardware).

[mpiva]

@ countzero

  A basic rule of literacy is that ALL analogies break down when you try to extrapolate them too far.  Market trends for coffee could never be used as an analogy for market trends for computers.  First of all, there are infinitely more blends of coffee to choose from then there are OS's to choose from.  And don't blame me for choosing a bad analogy, persia chose the analogy, I just tried to improve it. Despite your critism, I still think my analogy is better then persia's.

[mpiva]

Fortunately, thanks to the choice of OS's out there, I can get both a good cup and good coffee (to continue your analogy).  OSX, Windows of just about any stripe (2000, XP, Vista, 7), AROS, Linuxes galore...

The important point here is that what constitutes a "good" cup of coffee is totally a matter of opinion. If you don't think Amiga coffee is worth the cost, don't buy it; simple as that.

I think it's pretty obvious by now that nobody's going to buy an Amiga/Sam because it's "pratical" but because they enjoy it.  The question is, how much is that enjoyment worth to you? Everyone's going to have a different answer and no amount of arguing or "discussion" is going to change a person's opinion in that regard nor is it going to change the current situation.