$77 Amiga one or SAM

[arnljot]

It's a 250mhz CPU with 350 MIPS, it's slower than the XMOS on the AmigaOne X1000

It's mass produced settop box, and what you see for sale there is most likely surplus stock, it didn't cost anything near $77 when it was released, at least not in Norway.

[arnljot]

When it was released it cost from £300 and up in Norway (3000 NOK), current models range from £149 to £999

[arnljot]

No we don't need a unique board. But we do need something that doesn't have the bios in ugly text mode like most awardBios pc boards do, or similar. Why is it only mac which has survived with a minimal footprint of firmware? grr...

But we do need a mass produced board. That's why I root for A-EON and ACube and hope they manage to sell as many boards as possible to any kind of use, not only amiga use.

[arnljot]

Yes Acube can sell twice as many units with a Lower price. But if they can make the same money selling fewer units at a higher price why bother?

If that was the case, they would. It would build their brand and grow their market for the next machine.

I don't know if they've marketed the machine hard enough to Linux PPC fans...

[arnljot]

@quarkx

This pushes my buttons :-)

If the Shark was a Amiga product. Even if it was the same hardware as the Sonnet Cresendo. Do you think it's elves in santas shop who code drivers and software for free?

A coder in Europe can cost as much as €50.000, some are cheaper and some are way more expensive. This guy needs his pay, the hardware engineer who works in any given amiga company also needs his pay. etc etc. And the total cost is then to be recouped through a few hundres or even a few thousand units sold.

I hardly think Jens, Chris or Michael are rubbing their hands and lighting sigars with $100 bills from Amiga hardware sales. The same goes for A-Cube too.

It's simply the scale of things in Amiga land which makes it tough.

[arnljot]

It's not excuses quarkx, products like Deneb, X-Surf, Sam440 and Indivision all have engineering costs and software costs which have to be covered.

The drivers to use pc pcmia nics with A1200 costs €35. Most of this cost is probably software. Send a mail to AmigaKit or the programmer if you feel that they should have provided the software for free.

I agree that it's strange that some software is still sold at full price, but it's the owner of the softwares privilege to charge what they want. As it's ours not to buy it.

Crumb, when I boot my Mac mini, all I see is a gray screen with an apple. It's there until the OS takes over. Beutifull. When I boot my PC it shows an ASUS logo, spews out loads of text, and then Win7 takes over. Butt ugly.

[arnljot]

Have you seen a SAM boot up?

No, I suspect it's a chatty bios...