Did you ask something similar when the Mac moved from 680x0 to PowerPC? Probably not.
No, because the transition was seamless. All the classic Mac 68K apps worked perfectly on the Mac OS for PowerPC. I think that's a little different than a completely new platform that keeps the brand and has an emulator for legacy apps.
many prefer x86
x86 is a dead end. PowerPC (and AMD64) are the chips of the future.
Still talking about the architectural issues, the custom chips, once the platforms strengths are now extremely dated compared to off the shelf hardware. Most serious users have gotten gfx cards, sound cards, PCI expansion busses etc. and so even for many existing 680x0 users, the 'architecture' is not as it once was. The migration to A1 won't be that big a deal/
As long as the OS, look and feel, etc. are preserved as well as a degree of compatibility with the prior Amigas, I'd say it's an Amiga.
Would someone with an A1200 be able to easily migrate to the new Amigas?
Who is manufacturing them?
What is the commercial channel for them (distribution-wise)?
I'm not trying to be obtuse here, I am just trying to figure out how one would go about evaluating and buying one of these mythical beasties.
Right now, my understanding is that it's not much more than a motherboard you have to fit into your own case. I think to be successful, it needs to be more than that -- it needs to be an integrated solution with out-of-the-box setup and a strong degree of backward compatibility.
I think there could be success selling Amigas as user-level machines that lack the "Microsoft tax" -- a Macintosh for less, if you will. :-)
As for my beloved ST, she is dead, dead, dead as a separate platform I am afraid. :cry:
However, the best ST apps like Calamus and Notator live on as Mac OS X apps -- in fact, Calamus runs in a MultiTOS emulation environment on PCs and Macs. That's good for me, though there's a lot about the ST I miss on "modern" systems. :-(
