My apologies, I just get really worked up when people seem harsh towards peoples achievements and bringing a PPC computer to market running AOS4.x is an achievement these days. It may not be a wise one, but it's their choice to do it or not and peoples decision if they want to buy it or not.
Indeed.
Look the way I see it is that £1500 for what you get is overly steep for me, I can't afford it, but your criticism's are harsh.
Possibly they are. But their being harsh doesn't (or at least, shouldn't) take away from the fact that they are true.
You basically stated this CPu is a dead end, but they don't have to use this CPU again, any compatible PPC (from AMCC, Freescale, IBM, etc) chip will do in future if they're still around.
And this is where I think we have something of a problem. PPC right now, even for G3 class cpus is hideously expensive. In fact they're more expensive now than when the G3's were first released. It gets worse again with the G4 class parts. Seriously take a peak at development boards along the same lines as that ARM beagleboard I posted about the other day. To get the same sort of performance in PPC you're looking at a 6 fold price premium and it isn't going away or getting any better.
Telecoms don't really need uber fast CPU's for their gear as they tend to tie in the CPU with an FPGA. The market for top end stuff like the PA6T died with Apple going x86. IBM will happily take one of their POWER cores and strip it down or even design you a new core based on the PPC ISA, but for that you need to be on the scale of SONY, Microsoft or Nintendo to justify that sort of outlay.
In the embedded/industrial sector, unless you're in the military PPC doesn't feature all that much. Here it's ARM, MIPS and even Coldfire (for continuation of 68k code). I can see a day where ARM and possibly to a lesser extent MIPS move in on PPC's last major remaining niche in telecoms simply because price/performance is hugely in their favour and the tools to develop with them are well known and mature.
Or it's not a good power/performance/price relationship, neither is a Mac but it's the only way you're running OSX.
Macs aren't *that* bad in terms of price performance. They also have the advantage of having tools and software that make the price palatable to consumers. I can't honestly think of one piece of OS4 software that remotely justifies the price of the X1000 (to be fair though, I could throw the same argument at the Sam and make it stick. Up until recently anything MorphOS could run on too).
Those developers who wanted into OS4 are here already. So this is the pool of talent you have to work with. I can't see too many developers popping out of the woodwork at the thought of a £1500 piece of kit that haven't already.
Hardware lock-in only really works if you can offer something so good as to justify it to your customers - See Oracle with Sparc, for instance or the games console model.
I don't want to come across as nasty, especially as you seem so passionate about this. But at the same time I don't want to sit and watch people getting hurt and possibly being made bankrupt by this knowing I did and said nothing to try to avert it.
Simply slamming them for doing it at all though seems churlish.
I agree, if that were what I was doing.
I'm gonna bow out 'cos you're right though I am making it personal when you don't mean it to be, so my apologies once more.
No worries man, have a good'un. I find watching the women's tennis is a good way of relaxing, hooray for Wimbledon
