From the book "Freax"
— What's your opinion about the new Amiga successors, the Amiga One and the Pegasos? Do you think they have future?
They're both just PCs with PPCs. Nothing more, nothing less. If a PowerPC is something you find interesting, look at these. If not, they're barely a blip on the radar. What really bothers me is the business case. I don't think anyone working on these things has actually run a company before, certainly not a real company.
First question: who are your customers? If you can't answer that, you are not in business. Both seem to be saying "old Amiga users", but I don't believe that alone is a market large enough to sustain one new computer platform, much less two. Second question: how dedicated are your customers? AmigaOS/MorphOS require custom hardware. So it's $800-$1600 invested before you boot to Workbench. Once there, you don't have applications yet. So it's just a toy.
My claim is and has been that AmigaOS, or a clone, should have been ported to a PC. I just bought a 2.6GHz P4/Celeron machine, including 80GB hard drive, DVD/CD-R/CD-RW drive, 256MB of DDR-DRAM, etc. for $199. Ok, it was a good sale, this is one of my son's Christmas presents. This runs many times faster than any "neo-Amiga" class PPC machine. And many other people have PCs, they don't have PPC machines. What this means: there's a barrier to entry for new Amigas. In the old days, we had advances in hardware and software. But when the hardware is substandard and expensive, why bother? AmigaOS or MorphOS on x86 would sell orders of magnitude more than the current, hardware-intensive solutions. And they'd go faster.
Ok, so my opposition will say something like "but, if it runs Windows, they'll just run Windows, not AmigaOS". Dudes... Newsflash! They're already doing that. No one will accidently run AmigaOS rather than Windows. Everyone running AmigaOS, or MorphOS, made that decision. They're early supporters, they see something better. So they absolutely will run things on AmigaOS, if they can run them on AmigaOS. This is exactly how Linux has been growing.
Flip the coin around... if there's a job I need to do, that I can't do under AmigaOS or MorphOS today, that's a reason to not buy. I might also have reasons, such as interest to buy. Add them up, and there's my purchase decision. It's a threshold thing. If the path-independent means to getting AmigaOS on my desktop is $100 rather than $1000, more will sign up. Likely, many more, because the threshold of rejection is a log scale. You might find, for every 100 people willing to buy a New Amiga, there are 1000 or 10,000 willing to buy the software to run this environment on their PC. This is only made more obvious by the fact that none of the hardware is even as good as the cheap PC stuff. If it was better than PC, you'd have a big geek attractor there, even if they didn't know Amiga. Today, it's a big geek repellant, they understand all the details, and don't want to be made fool of.
And all of these issues are largely independent of the OS itself. In OS terms, "better" gets some curious people, if there's a free download. "Dramatically better" gets more, if there's a free download. "Dramatically better, with applications" is where the revolution might begin.
