Lando wrote:
I'm not saying the A500 was a stupid move - it's the machine that made the Amiga the success it was - just that they had 2 years after the A1000 to work on it, and releasing the A500 with such minor improvements (Kickstart in ROM and a little extra RAM) was not enough. They should have spent more money on R&D, had AGA ready by '88, AAA by '91, and the next revision (AAAA?) by '94 - a 3-year gap between chipset revisions. This is what was needed to stay ahead (of Mac / PC) at the time.
I'd have to disagree here, and say it's rather unrealistic. Part of the reason why the A500 did as well as it did was that it offered what it did at the price it did. C= would not have been able to hold that pricepoint if it introduced new technology in there. The A500 was still selling well in 1990. In fact, if you look at the UK sales figures, A500 sales increased year on year until it was dropped.
As it was the A500 was, if anything, too expensive. My parents certainly couldn't afford one, I had to make do with a Sinclair Spectrum +2 at Xmas 89.
If anything it was the A2000 that was the problem. The A2000 *should* of been a true sequal to the A1000.
However these days Apple are releasing new Mac revisions at least every year, and high-end PC's are generally only cutting-edge for 6 months, so C= would have had to either keep up (impossible) or ditch the old Amiga chipset after about '97/98 and design their new machines with licensed chips from ATI or NVidia (again, like Apple), this would have been a very difficult transition (losing compatibility with all hardware-banging software) but necessary.
I wonder if the computer market would of remained as competitive as it was in the 80's (that is several large companies with decent market shares), would progress move in the way it does now?
