rednova,
The AmigaOne was more of a scheme than a product, concocted by Alan Redhouse of Eyetech. He wanted to figure out some way to squeeze a little extra cash out of the sagging Amiga community, and in rehashed-game publisher Hyperion he saw his opportunity.
Hyperion at the time had ambitions of doing more than just re-releasing staid old videogame titles, in fact they had their sights on becoming the new Amiga. To achieve this goal they came up with the idea of creating an Amiga-branded OS. All they needed was hardware to run it on.
For whatever reason both Hyperion and Eyetech were fixated on PPC-only hardware. Eyetech had a line on a Chinese wannabe chip fabricator named MAI, who to promote their product produced a series of evaluation boards to allow their potential customers to try out their bus controller component. These eval boards, which carried the name "Teron", were PPC-based.
Eyetech and Hyperion got in touch, pleaded with Amiga Inc. for license to use the Amiga name, and Eyetech began ordering Teron evaluation boards like there was no tomorrow, labeling said boards as "AmigaOne".
Unfortunately there was a problem with MAI: their bus controller was buggy. However, this didn't seem to phase their biggest customer, Eyetech, who continued to buy MAI's evaluation boards throughout serveral redesigns. To explain away the differences in MAIs board designs Eyetech began labelling them differently: AmigaOne XE, Micro A1, etc. As for the faulty bus controller, this wasn't much of an issue for Hyperion as they explained it away by saying the MAI controller was simply too advanced for lowly bus operations. While this didn't address any of the problems with the bus controller, it did have the effect of placating many AmigaOne purchasers who apparently believed that Hyperion would somehow release a version of OS4 "advanced" enough to be able to magically repair the faulty hardware.
In fact the MAI controller wasn't the only problem with the Teron aka AmigaOne boards. Initially a number of the boards didn't include the sound controller component, most likely because MAI felt that an evaluation board didn't really need audio. But when their biggest customer (Eyetech) complained, they began adding audio. Also MAI had also chosen to use a faulty VIA component for the USB bus.
MAI seems to have rectified the USB problem in the final iteration of the Teron (aka Micro A1), but by then it was too late - MAI was geared towards selling components not motherboards, yet their main customer was only interested in buying whatever evaluation boards they could slap together. Their flagship product, the bus controller, was broken and apparently MAI lacked the expertise, time or money to redesign it. MAI went out of business around 2004 - 2005.
Eyetech continued to sell the evaluation boards they had stockpiled under the AmigaOne name, but with MAI out of business even Alan could see the gig was up. Eyetech sold all of their Amiga related stock to a well-known Amiga product vendor, and thankfully closed their doors and left the Amiga scene entirely.
Hopefully that answers your question about the AmigaOne. But it might leave you wondering about Hyperion and their OS4 product. Well, it turns out Hyperion wasn't as smart as Eyetech. With no new PPC hardware left Hyperion was forced to revert to their original (circa 2000) idea of producing a version of OS4 that could run on the almost forgotten Blizzard and Cyberstorm PPC expansion cards. While recuperating their development losses thru OS4 sales on these old expansion cards seemed like a long shot, it's really the only chance Hyperion had, so they spent a couple of years finishing up that version which eventually went on sale a few months ago. While it does seem to have helped to bolster the sale prices of the expansion cards on Ebay, whether Hyperion made enough from the "classic" OS4 sales to get them out of the red remains a matter of speculation.
