ACube and A-EON announce One Vision on future Amiga co-operation

[spirantho]

Acube and A-Eon were never competing anyway, and Trevor has more than demonstrated that he's not profiteering off his machines with his X1000 release (which has a very high price tag for the user, but also a very high price tag for Trevor - he's definitely not getting rich off that - if he were profiteering production would have stopped after the first run when the price of the PA6T CPUs rocketed.)

[spirantho]

Either way prices are still going to be high as usual.

That's just the nature of designing and building new hardware, unfortunately....
Luckily we have MorphOS as well so that people content with lower-priced and older but still powerful hardware can still get their fix. Everybody wins, really

[spirantho]

Price is matter of quantities. Hope with aeon support could help with that, producing low end PPC mobos in china would cost about 30€ per mobo.

They'd be very poor quality, though, at that price, and they'd need to be in massive quantities. Also the PPC used would have to be very low end as the SOC PPCs are quite unusual (embedded PPCs aren't, but ones with all the buses that we need are).
And that's even before you think about design costs.

30 Euros per mobo I'm afraid is way below the costs of anything usable.... otherwise Acube or somebody would have done that already.

[spirantho]

Expensive? Yes, but isn't it cool?

Finally, someone speaks the way I think.
If you want something out of the ordinary, you have to pay out of the ordinary prices.

[spirantho]

I will propably never understand why PPC is so cool...

You're obviously not an assembler programmer!

It's more to do with the whole thing, though. The boards that we have now are all really good quality - certainly my Sam440ep is a lovely little machine, and it's obviously different to your standard PC board. My currently-unused X1000 looks to be similar in that respect (not tried it yet as I can't afford the case, PSU and RAM!). I wouldn't get excited about a bog-standard PC mobo, even if it were running AmigaOS. No idea why, just the way it is!

[spirantho]

What TMHG propably means it is simply crazy to build custom hardware based on PPC in 2013.

Why?

Acube and A-Eon seem to be doing ok. Business is about finding a niche where demand exists. They have both proven that demand does exist by their continued development of new boards.

I for one would rather pay more for something special than be tied to commodity hardware. My Amiga to me is a hobby - a hobby is not always about being cost-efficient.

[spirantho]

This always happens, though, whenever AmigaOS 4, Hyperion or A-Eon is mentioned.

It's almost as if people *want* to go back to the days of the Great Drought when there was no hardware. Now we have so much hardware (AOS4 has the bespoke systems like the very-reasonably-priced Sam440ep (yes - it is useful, I use mine a lot) and the Rolls Royce system of the X1000, with more new hardware coming soon, MOS has new G5 support added and improved all the time, AROS has plenty of hardware )... we've never had it so good.

We're absolutely spoiled, really. We've got people like Trevor who must definitely SHOULD be applauded for seeing their projects through to the end, despite personal cost, just so that OS4 users can have really posh new hardware and a platform to build multi-processing on. We've got MorphOS devs continually updating and enhancing their OS to work on the most powerful system available to them. We've got AROS not only being developed on x86 but also 68K and ARM!

We have it SO good at the moment.

And yet still we hear about how people are "Crazy" and how it's "madness", and people "should" do this and "should" do that and "shouldn't" do the other.

Like them or loathe them, people like Trevor, the MorphOS team, Hyperion, AmigaKit, Acube, the multitude of AROS devs... they keep us going out of their love for the system. They're not getting rich - none of them. They give us the opportunity to keep enjoying our hobby - whatever flavour of "Amiga" it is - and for this they should ALL be applauded.

We are not the ones to tell Trevor or Acube or AEon or anyone else how to run their business, not even out of any emotional attachment to the platform. The Amiga 68K as a platform died a long time ago - but that doesn't stop the old machines working and being enjoyable - but it did stop the advancement of AmigaOS 3.x. If you don't like the path that AmigaOS 4 has taken, just ignore it - because if it hadn't taken this path, it wouldn't exist at all. Its existence is not stopping A1200s from working, and nor does it stop G5 Macs from running MorphOS.

We have it so good, we really do.

Now because it's Chrimbo I'm going to end by saying Happy Non-Denominational Holiday Greetings to all Amigans everywhere, whatever their colour (red or blue or... AROS ) or creed.

Rant/Preaching over.

[spirantho]

What an absolute nonsense! "Their" business is concerning/affecting the whole platform, and with that, everyone who is interested in it.

How does their business affect MorphOS or 68K Amiga?