AmigaOne Hardware Design

[Seehund]

Madgun68 wrote:

Those figures aren't realistic. Nothing in the Amiga community is going to sell 10,000 copies.

Straying a bit from the original topic here, but whatever...

If the current Amiga users ("community" :-P ) is the sole target of AmigaOS/MorphOS, then they're dead projects. Might as well give up right now and stop wasting money. In the nonsense zealot "MOS/AOS wars" I sometimes see something along the lines of "but the market is too small to have two competitors!" You bet it's too small - but only if current Amiga users is the only intended market, and that would really be the end of it all.

By only selling a "new" little OS bundled with "new" hardware, and only when it's sold by a "licensee", and thus ignoring the rest of the "normal", "unlicensed" hardware market, you raise the bar of entry for any new users. This is patently Not Good. Your potential market is to a large extent limited to a subset of the current Amiga-users who are prepared to pay extra to simultaneously buy this hardware that's been made "special" through the distribution/licensing situation.

Hyperion is the only licensee for porting AmigaOS to "new" hardware, and they chose PPC for whatever reasons, and they seem quite stubborn about that. Likewise MorphOS seems to be PPC-only for any forseeable future. It seems like we need another developer for an Amigaish OS on cheaper, better, faster and more abundant x86 hardware. For the time being I'm keeping an eye on AROS for that. AmigaOS 4 by Hyperion and MorphOS will not run on anything else than PPC. Period. Let's just hope AInc change their minds to actually try to make the best out of the current PPC situation and allow for actual sales of AmigaOS to a broad(er) hardware and customer base - in addition to the bundled/licensed thing.

I see that JurrassicCamper brought up the tired old "but if it runs on x86 it'll have to support a bazillion different mobos". Why? What's preventing the maker of an x86 OS to publish a hardware compatibility list, clearly showing the supported hardware? And who says that it's impossible to implement and announce more and more supported hardware as time goes on (provided that there's no "hardware licensing" requirement and that there are separately sold OS copies) after the first release version of the OS? What about third party driver development? How many drivers for expansions and peripherals were made "officially" by Commodore back in the Amiga days? All this is no different from the PPC situation. "Hardware requirements: This version of AmigaOS runs on TeronCX/PX ("AmigaOne" SE/XE), Pegasos G3/G4, PowerMac QuickSilver G4, PowerBook G3 "Wall Street" and "Lombard", PowerBook G4 2002 ... ... Please see our web site for new additions to this list."

Regardless of CPU architecure you don't need to run on more hardware than you say that your product will run on!

I don't expect WinXP to run on that old home-built P90 hodge-podge from ca 1994 standing in the corner, because MS says that this is not supported. I could try and fail, but it would be my own fault and nobody would be angry at MS if I whine in forums about my failure with officially unsupported hardware. I do expect Debian to run on it without X11/GNOME/KDE, because Debian lists it as supported.

[Seehund]

ne_one wrote:

You're missing the point.

Kronos is claiming that even a small percentage of an established market base is significantly larger than one that doesn't yet exist. Investing in a USD$200 software solution is likely to be more appealing than USD$1000 in new hardware.

There are 600 million PCs out there. Even if .001% of these were capable of running an x86 version of OS4 and some of these users were willing to pay for it, the install base would be huge.

Too true. The same principle naturally applies to PPC as well. Imagine AmigaOS being ported to "New World" G3/G4 PowerMacs only.* Let's say that there are currently 2 million such machines out there. An already existing hardware base of 2 million, with a vivid second-hand market and new machines pumped out by the truckload daily. This number does naturally not equal the potential userbase, but it's a hugely better situation than only allowing bundled sales of the OS with $600 (minimum) Teron boards via only one particular distributor.
Add to the above PowerMac hardware base the licensed and unlicensed Teron boards, the Pegasos and a few more Mac/PowerBook models and there's at least some potential, unlike today's situation.

* Edit: By "only" I meant "for this example just one of the Macintoshes", not that Teron versions or anything else would/should be dropped/excluded.

[Seehund]

Madgun68 wrote:

Quoting ~1700 copies of Amithlon sold is a piss poor way of going about it. That's a pathetic number.

I don't think so, considering the circumstances that Kronos mentioned. Amithlon hasn't really been talked about or marketed outside the current AmigaOS userbase, actually I can't recall that I've seen any advertising for it even to the current AmigaOS userbase. Yet it has sold more copies than there are preorders for AmigaOS for Amigas + AmigaOS bundled with a Teron board. Those preorders and the OS+Teron bundles have OTOH been widely mentioned all over the net, on sites like Slashdot, CNet, OSNews, and so on. Sometimes it's even been described as "a new Amiga" by the more clueless "outside" journalists.

Now imagine if you had to buy a "special" PC from a "special" vendor together with Amithlon. How do you think that would have affected Amithlon sales numbers?
Or how about a properly marketed and cheaper Amithlon?

People want Cheap, Fast and Good. PPC is more expensive, slower and less abundant (these factors are dependant on eachother, but the consumer doesn't care about the "whys" so spare me the "but it's lower volumes", please. We all already know that). So AmigaOS went PPC-only anyway, as far as Hyperion is concerned at least. All we can hope for now is that what's been announced will change, so that the PPC route doesn't get EVEN MORE expensive and rare than it already is...