CUSA Amiga range will cost up to $25,000

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I am curious when and why their strategies have changed.
First time around they were making these Amiga boxes for the "retro" market, with intentions of their own rebadged distro with integrated emulation.

Now they are taking a shot at the high, high end content development market.  Where does the "Amiga" fit into that?  Are you telling me that for $25,000 I'll get a "high end graphics machine" running reskinned Linux and UAE on it?  I can just imagine Pixar waiting with baited breath to put in a 20 million dollar order.  The "Amiga" name doesn't mean squat to the people that would be in the market for these high end machines.

Listen, we've all seen the Amiga brand be raped and defiled in front of our eyes for many years, and while I quite enjoy the hysterical nature of all this - I'm confused as to why they would suddenly figure that going from bargain basement $600 commodity hardware stuffed into custom cases to $25,000 machines is the logical step.  And even if that made sense, why would anyone choose these systems over the big boys with 24/7 on site support and millions of customers worldwide?

There's 1001 vendors making systems like this, and not just the big guns like Dell.  It's like Yugo putting leather seats, nice stereos and burl walnut trim in their economy cars and figuring it's time to take out Rolls Royce.

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You'll also note there's no reviews by any reputable review websites on their current offerings.  Some dude posting a 10 min video of an "unboxing" on YouTube isn't a review, boys.

I would think for a company shouting "WE ARE TOP QUALITY!  OUR KEYBOARDS MAKE CLICKY NOISES!" they would have had the confidence to be shipping one to every review site on the 'net.  Just a boatload of overheating, non working wifi stories on their own forums, seemingly.

They shipped product, which is more than I figured would happen, tbh.

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That case can be had for $300 in the North American market, and traditionally has received poor reviews (the S16T).

If this is their entry into the "workstation" market, it would probably be wise to use a workstation case, not an HTPC case.

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The screen is just a VFD in the original OEM case, and a poor one at that.  Just simple text display, no touch screen that I ever saw on those cases.  That's not to say they could not add one, but who wants to get up off the couch to go touch a touchscreen on an HTPC when it comes with a remote.  The stock case is well known for its' shoddy IR remote.  C-USA's solution may be a bit more elegant, I suppose.

So what is the deal here?  Is it a workstation or a HTPC, lol.  Selling $25,000 graphics workstations crammed with PCIe SSD's and Quadro's is one thing, but the HTPC market is a completely different beast where you're not only going against the other HTPC makers, but also against things like Slingbox, Roku, Boxee, AppleTV - and to some extent even the consoles, which can all run Netflix just fine.

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Doing some digging around, those cases can be found on clearance for a couple hundred bucks these days - they are circa 2007/2008 vintage if my memory isn't failing me.  I used one years ago to build a HTPC for a buddy, and I threw some 6800's in it, so fairly old (but still attractive kit).
VFD was hard to see from a distance, and the remote was unresponsive most of the time.

Thermaltake and the other more known case venders have a lot nicer HTPC solutions these days, but the prices would still likely be prohibitive for most OEM's.  I'm a big fan of the below HTPC case, but the touch screen on HTPC cases is sort of a redundancy in the day and age of remotes, and it's not too cheap either:

http://www.silverstonetek.com/product_legacy.php?area=usa&model=lc18

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$1000 will buy you a fully phase changed cooled kit capable of running the CPU at constant sub zero temps.  Paying that much money for a "nice looking" case that isn't some form of exotic cooling system is just insane, and I've done my share of buying expensive cases from the likes of Mountain Mods.  I've got an older 2 mobo MM case that I love (Ascension Duality), but it was insanely expensive at even under 50% of what C-USA is claiming their cases will market for on these new Amiga's.

It better cook breakfast and open my mail for $1000, and for $25,000 for a full system, their staff should wash my cars every weekend as part of the deal.