Amiga Acknowledges T-shirts Shipping

[smithy]

rayt wrote:
May be a bit off topic, but I can't understand all the hype about the mac mini destroying the "amiga market".. It has been always like if you want to run amigaos, you have to pay more.. Before the mac mini there were enough cheaper alternatives too.. people could have bought an emac, or a cheap 2nd hand mac, or even a 3ghz x86 for less than the amigaone boards.. but the main reason for paying that much for old hardware ist not thats ppc, but that its running amigaos4.. nearly everybody has a pc/mac at home anyway, so they don't buy these boards because they (excluding) desperatly need it for "serious work" anyway..

I agree with rayt, I don't think the Mini-Mac will have a huge effect on anything Amiga.

I think the reason that the Mini-Mac has caused such debate is for psychological reasons... we have here a £399 computer, without monitor?  It's in exactly the same niche that the A1200 was 10 years ago.  That was my thought when I read about it, and I thought "damn, they're in our market".

But then I realised it's aimed at the mainstream, it can do anything a mainstream Windows PC can, it's for the average joe.

I think Amiga still has some time before we can aim at this mainstream marketplace.  When more modern software is developed then things can start to happen.  For now, we're very much in the computing enthusiast market, which is no bad thing of course.  But when it does happen, I think we could follow in Apple's footsteps and perhaps become a direct competitor with them.  There is certainly space for another mainstream platform alongside Windows and Apple.

[smithy]

@Wayne

I think you're right that pretty much every Amigan has bought their motherboard and that future sales must come from outside the Amiga market, but I don't agree that the Mac-Mini is a threat.

There are two markets outside of the Amiga one.  There is the mainstream computer market, made of people like my parents might who buy a computer for occasional net surfin or writing letters.  And there is the computing enthusiast market, made of people that use computers as a hobby and use them to develop and create stuff.

The Mac-Mini is targeted at that first market - more specifically against the £300 Windows PCs.  And as a one-stop package, it is perfect for that first audience.  The Amiga has no chance in this market because it just doesn't have the software.

In the computing enthusiast market, it's all about computing for the sake of it, price and top-class applications are less of an issue (most have more than one computer including a Windows PC anyway).  This market seems to be dominated by Linux and OSX.  It is this market that Amiga/etc must make some serious inroads in to stay afloat.  So this means trying to attract some geeks, tinkerers, and hobbyist developers.  I think Amiga/MorphOS is equally placed to do as well here as the Mac Mini, what we need is presence in the computing press, articles on Slashdot, OSNews etc... we need to be in the places where the geeks are and make them notice these new platforms of ours.  It needn't be expensive, we really need to just make some news.

The other options we know of is that these companies look for embedded deals, and Eyetech has mentioned in the past taking an interest in the kiosk market.  We also know that Eyetech has a whole business outside Amiga, and doesn't rely on the Amiga side of the business.