And these days about as useful.
Make of it what you will. It was just an observation on what is considered a reasonable price these days, for the sake of social science.
Back in the day my £1500 486 was a bargain. It was as good as many £2000 PCs of the day yet my A1200 was £300. The PCs offered some advantages over the Amiga and the Amiga offered some advantages over the PC. Let's not forget of course that PC's of that time had hard drives, sound cards, CD-ROM's and four times the amount of RAM compared to an A1200.
Now the situation is very much reversed in terms of price. £300 PC or £1500 Amiga?
The PC still offers the same advantages over the Amiga as it did before (raw power and standardized components). Now more of the Amiga's components are standardized parts too of course, the PPC processor and OS are the main differences now.
I have a PC, a netbook, various consoles and five Amiga's already, maybe I should sell some classic Amiga's (just keeping my A1200 and CD32) and put it towards an X1000. Can I justify £1500 on the most powerful Amiga ever?
For some £1500 is pocket change, for others it's just not feasible financially to pay out so much for a hobby computer. Ironically my 486 was my hobby computer when I bought my A1200, I ran more productivity software on my Amiga than I did my PC.
Sadly I can't afford £1500 for now and selling a few classic Amiga's will most likely not even make a dent in the price. However, I know full well that at other times of my life I wouldn't have cared that it was £1500, it's about the same amount my current PC cost when I built it too, and it's had a lot of upgrades since then. Well... ..Maybe next year.
