reflect wrote:
The thing that strikes me as funny when people are comparing prices are this;
They take a commodity motherboard with equivalent or better specs, then compare the prices and come up "the A1 is overpriced!". Now, have you ever considered the other costs, apart from manufacturing?
As in, licensing/buying the schematics for the design you're going to use? Paying someone to make changes to that design .. cause, no matter what some people say, the original Teron and the A1 aren't exactly the same. They have evolved over time, and that's not cause someone was nice enough to just update them for free.
Let's take an example.. someone spends 50k USD on design. That same someone spends another 50k USD on producing 100 boards.
Now, production costs alone reach 500USD per board, but that's without counting the previous 50K USD used in design. It's also without adding the price for the operating system (let's face it, Hyperion have spent 3+ years on this and they've done a pretty damn good job). Big question is, do you support this someone spending *alot* of their hard earned cash in giving you a new platform, or don't you? Is it unfair to charge alot more than what it costs to produce? I'd say it depends on the other, hidden costs that most people don't have a clue about - often the same people handing out long rants about how boards are overpriced and obsolete.
Wake up and smell the coffee, this isn't about being state of the art, it's not about being the cheapest on the block either. It's about bringing people something so that they can run their favourite operating system.
Your argument only holds true if you discount the fact that Eyetech could very easily bought a Commodity x86 board and used a Custom BIOS (for the OS 4 lock in) on it, called an AmigaONE and sold it very cheaply.
