Takers - One Woman's Opinion of the Amiga Mini

[warpdesign]

I found no evidence that CommodoreUSA have ever put anything into the Amiga community. They only want to take.

Well, with their "Amiga" computers they already have created a community that's maybe 10-50 times the size of the war field you're calling "Amiga community" (because there's nothing but blue vs red fights, hates,...).

And btw, the only group not wanting to take anything is AROS: they work for free, and give anything for free. Do you think asking $2000 for a $250 g5-like computer is giving to the community ? I'm not sure... Apart from restricting Amiga access even more, I don't see what it's giving...

Now, I'm not saying CBM USA is doing anything right or wrong. I just think they're doing what everyone else does: asking for your money. There's no such thing as giving...

You might think asking $2000 for an outdated PPC custom board with an Amiga sticker is more "right" than asking $3000 for a high end x86 board with an Amiga sticker. Well, I don't see any difference.

[warpdesign]

But being truly different (even if only some geeky AOS way) should have some meaning to some people.

We didn't like the Amiga because it was "different". Actually it wasn't much different by then: most every personal computers were using the very same 68000 (Atari ST, Mac, most consoles,...). Other computers had custom chips as well, doing kinda the same things: blits, scrolls, sprites.

We liked the Amiga because it was more powerful than anything else: more colors, faster graphics, better sound,...

And add to that the quite advanced OS by then.

Now, producing a kinda different PPC motherboard that adds nothing at all more powerful than other computers has very little sense to me. And having some kind of underpowered Xena chip (which usage has yet to be demonstrated outside embed stuff) or a slightly modified PCIe Xorro port doesn't make it more Amiga than any standard x86/powerPC machine.

Seeing how fast the market moves and the money that's spent by the big companies like Nvidia, Intel,... I don't think it's possible to have anything more powerful than what they are doing, so what's the point of wasting resources doing it ?

The only interesting difference that can be made is in software. Or with (truely) Amiga-like hardware like the Natami: that can bring fun, and people...