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Author Topic: Would you buy a new PPC laptop, if A-Eon made one?  (Read 9149 times)

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Offline amigadaveTopic starter

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Would you buy a new PPC laptop, if A-Eon made one?
« on: November 25, 2014, 11:20:07 PM »
As I stated in another thread, I don't know if the CPU's being used for the Cyrus+ motherboard designs are low enough in power usage and heat produced to make them a good choice for a new PPC laptop computer, but I am guessing that they probably don't use any more power, or produce any more heat than the i7 Windows laptop I am typing this forum message on right now, so why not design a new PPC laptop?  Sure, it costs more money to design an entire laptop than it does to simply design a PPC motherboard for standard PC cases with PCI and/or PCIe slots, and writing drivers for the graphics and other ports & controllers of an SOC is much more work than simply putting existing components for sound & Ethernet & SATA & USB, that are already supported by AmigaOS4.x, onto an ITX, or ATX sized motherboard.

Such a new PPC laptop would probably cost much more than any existing Intel, or AMD powered laptop, and it might not be feasible to even try to design and produce such a laptop, if the final cost would have to be in the $4,000 to $5,500 range to recoup design and production costs, but this won't be the first or last useless poll posted to these forums, so what the heck, here goes.

The poll choices are multiple choice.
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Offline amigadaveTopic starter

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Re: Would you buy a new PPC laptop, if A-Eon made one?
« Reply #1 on: November 25, 2014, 11:40:48 PM »
Quote from: carvedeye;778247
TBH probably not as it would more than likely cost a good 2-3k to buy one :(

Yes, that is probably a conservative number, but I don't really know what it would cost to custom design and produce a laptop.  I know that many years ago, my first ever Intel powered computer (not counting the Bridgeboard in my A2000) was an Intel Celeron powered non brand name laptop and there were dozens of small companies making laptops at that time.  It cost me around $1,500, IIRC, so factoring in inflation and reduction of production costs due to more modern and widespread production facilities, the cost of a new laptop could probably be only a little higher today, except for the additional cost associated with using PPC, instead of commonly used Intel, or AMD CPU's, plus the cost of the AmigaOS4.x license.

I have no idea what price a new PPC laptop could be produced for and would be interested in reading opinions from people who know more about design and production costs for such things.

I just know that it would be a great thing to have a fairly powerful (meaning at least as powerful as my G4 PowerBook @ 1.67GHz) PPC laptop that is brand new and likely to last many years.  I love my G4 PowerBook and don't think it will fail any time soon, if I take good care of it (specially if I stock up on a few parts that are most likely to fail), but if there were a new PPC laptop that I could run all 3 NG Amiga platforms on, it would be worth it to me to spend several thousand dollars on.  That is because I am still interested in all NG Amiga platforms and would like to see them succeed and grow more user base.
How are you helping the Amiga community? :)