what the hell is an amiga one?

[spirantho]

The A1 is ... controversial.

However, three important facts:

1) It's the fastest and stablest way of running AmigaOS 4 by far.
2) There's no way you're having mine because it's far too nice a machine; AOS 4 runs beautifully on it and I've had zero troubles whatsoever with it.
3) See 2). It's important enough to mention twice.

So you can listen to people without them moan and gripe all you like, fact is you can't get one because hardly anyone wants to sell them. That's a bit strange for what is apparently "the worst consumer product of all time", don't you think?

[spirantho]

I was wondering why some of the other Amiga sites are getting refugees from Amiga.org ... after posts like this one I can see why.

I've not read such a biased and unfair post in the name of "fact" in quite some time.

The reality is simply that Eyetech needed a PPC board, and MAI were the only ones making one cheap enough; it turned out there were flaws, some of which (i.e. the USB) were easily fixed, some weren't. That's what you get when you buy low-volume products. The sound chip was on the original boards but Eyetech didn't think they could be used, but eventually enterprising A1 owners worked out how to. By this time, however, A1s had been made without the sound chip as it was deemed useless.

If you want to know what AmigaOnes are really like there are sites that are more AmigaOS 4-focused. They'll still be biased (in the other direction), but at least you'll be able to see the truth between the two of them.

In the mean time can we please stick to facts rather than attacking companies which for one reason or another we don't like?

[spirantho]

As I recall it there were three available PPC motherboards:
1) Macintoshes.  These were no good because of difficulty getting developer info and because the designs would keep changing because Eyetech would have no say whatsoever.
2) IBM PowerPC reference boards. These were very expensive or demanded large production runs.
3) The MAI board.

It was the lesser of three evils.

That's how I remember it anyway. One thing's for sure, it wasn't some great anti-Amiga user conspiracy like people are trying to make out here.

[spirantho]

Piru wrote:
@spirantho

By this time, however, A1s had been made without the sound chip as it was deemed useless.

No, actually the sound chip was dropped because the programmers didn't know how to initialize it properly and they thought the chip or related parts of the board didn't work properly. The sound chip was always ok.

That's what I said.... the sound chip was removed because they thought they couldn't use it and by the time they worked out how to it was too late.

@redrumloa
I think Hans has pretty well summed up how I feel w.r.t. the "freedom of speech" (a.k.a. opinionated trolling) of the earlier posting. Sure, he has a right to mouth off about stuff but claiming it as fact should always be frowned upon, even if he is free to do it.

The Peg II probably is a better board - I've never used one so I can't comment.
However, from what I recall by this time Bbrv was already advocating the Peg for MorphOS. For Eyetech to have used the same board would have ended up in their playing second fiddle to Bbrv. You don't want to be at the mercy of the competition you're trying to beat, do you?

As I recall it it was simply that the money from Eyetech wasn't enough to keep an already beleagured MAI Logic from going under. This left Eyetech up a certain creek without a paddle, and they weren't making any real money anyway so they left the market.
The option to use the Pegasos boards were down to Hyperion and Amiga Inc, not Eyetech because Hyperion refused to support it, IIRC.

@rednova:

As you've probably noticed, there used to be and there still are red vs. blue wars about who's better and who's best, and opinions still run strong. If you really want to know more you need to ask users of both platforms and ignore the diatribe, and form your own opinions. It remains, however, that the AmigaOne is the best way to run AmigaOS 4, and it runs very well indeed - no amount of forum nonsense is going to change that.

[spirantho]

redrumloa wrote:
I think you are confusing OS4 with AmigaOne. OS4 may work well and assist the hardware with workarounds, but that doesn't make the A1 any less buggy / unreliable. Even in your explaination you explain the problems.

Can you name a worse motherboard or other mass produced consumer product in recent history? I am curious.

If the A1 was that bad as you said, though, it wouldn't be capable of running OS4 - which it does very nicely.
There are problems with it, it's not perfect, but right now it does its job just fine.

As for worse systems, there have been many many worse systems.  Some PC motherboards, such as budget models at the end of the last century (i.e. PC Chips etc.) were far worse.

[spirantho]

hooligan wrote:

That's what you get when you buy low-volume products

Thats the lamest excuse of all-time, no offence. You BUY stuff which should be WORKING. If they are not working they should not be for sale at all.

It's not an excuse, it's a reason.

You deal with low-volume products where they don't have the time to go through rigorous testing, you can expect troubles. It's always been like that, and always will be, it's just life.

The first Sinclair ZX80s overheated because they were new, minority equipment; they were still very popular because they were unique.
The Pentium-60 had the FDIV bug because it was a new architecture and very expensive (though Intel should have known better).
Some IBM mainframes' CPUs actually had an 'undocumented' HCF opcode - Halt and Catch Fire. Which is exactly what happened when you executed it. Why? Because it was very low volume equipment, so the lack of testers hadn't spotted the race condition.
More recently, the Xbox 360 - we all know about the red ring of death. If MS can't foresee such problems how the heck can MAI or Eyetech afford to?

History is littered with low-volume products having problems like this. We live in a capitalist society: if you don't like the product (including it's bugs) then don't buy it. But don't complain to the maker that they didn't test it all, because until they've sold a load of them they won't have had the cash to have done so. Hence why if you want more rugged systems never buy first generation equipment.

[spirantho]

Piru wrote:
Obviously it's much harder to deal with these issues when you have a single product, but nevertheless you should. If you can't, you shouldn't be doing the business in the first place.

Ideally yes. And if the problem was a big one I'd be more inclined to saying the same thing...

... but the fact is the A1 does do what it advertised, and it actually does it rather well given the financial constraints on its development cycle. I'm perfectly happy with mine and seeing how hard it is to get one second hand, I suspect most other people are too.