Commodore 900 vs Commodore Amiga 1000

[Darrin]

Interesting.  I never heard of the C900.

That said, I think Commodore made the right choice.  Back in the 80s $2700-$3000 was an awful lot of money.  Even the lower price of the A1000 at $1295 placed it out of reach for your average family which is why it took the A500 to make inroads into the home computing market.  The only reason I got my hands on a A2000 when I did was that I had just completed Basic Training in the Army and hadn't been able to spend my pay on anything for months and then I was living in a barracks with minimum outgoings (I didn't even own a car back then).  The A2000 probably saved my liver from getting more pickled than it did.

What commodore would have been better of doing was opening up the Amiga to ISA/PCI expansion cards and upgrading the processor/RAM in the base machines to encourage better software development (and ports of PC software which was starting to eclipse the Amiga).

Unless future C= Amigas switched processor on the motherboard then I suspect that it would have gone the same way as the C64 and C= would have ended up selling PCs running Windows.

[Darrin]

Indeed... it is, but relatively speaking... Macintosh 128k was 2595$ in US(the quoted price for the C900 is the European price, as C900 was not initially planned to go on sale in the US).
Compare a Macintosh(128k RAM, 7 MHz 6800, no disk, lousy OS, no software) with C900(512k RAM, 10 MHz Z8001, 10 MB disk, UNIX based, thus has available software - C900 was planned to ship with an C compiler, BASIC compiler and 50ish apps built in) and I think it's actually a steal at that price.

Put that way, it does seem a bargain.  

However, from what I remember of the average family living on an average wage, it was in the "business" price-range, rather than directed at the home user.  The same can be said for the A1000 and it was really the arrival of the cut-down and much cheaper A500/Atari ST that brought a new generation of computing into the home.

The C900 might have been one of those computers in a magazine that we wished we had while playing Defender of the Crown on our trusty (but afordable) Amigas.