Up until fall 2009, MorphOS supported only the following hardware: Pegasos 1, Pegasos 2, Efika 5200.
While being good quality hardware, they never offered the performance of similar PPC based machines at the time. Sure, the Pegasos 2 is faster than the AmigaOne's from Eyetech, and slightly faster than a Sam 460 clocked at the same frequency (in some areas more than others), but a Mac Mini G4 @ 1.42GHz has been measured to be almost 2x as fast in some areas than a Pegasos 2. The older Pegasos 1, and the kind of limited Efika 5200 fell even further behind in comparisons of course.
These machines were also being manufactured in relatively small numbers before their production ended forever, thus putting an upper limit on potential growth for MorphOS. The limited availability (and increased demand from OS4 users) was also making them expensive even at the second hand market, thus failing to give a "Bang for the Buck" ratio comparable to second hand Mac HW.
The MorphOS 2.x branch evolved, and when it reached v2.4, the MorphOS Team introduced support for their first Mac PPC machine, the Mac Mini. Two things happened with this:
- There was an instant (but temporary) jump in the number of licenses sold. Many of those probably came from already existing MorphOS users sitting on the fence to upgrade from Pegasos/Efika to faster Mac HW.
- There was also a permanent increase in the pace of new registrations sold, the tilt of the growth graph went steeper, and this was not temporary.
During the 2.5 years that followed, MorphOS evolved, new features and improvements were being added, and support for eMac and PowerMac was introduced.
Early this summer, MorphOS 3.0 was released with many new improvements and features. One of the most anticipated features was that MorphOS for the first time added support for a real Laptop computer in the shape of the PowerBook (the 5 latest models produced by Apple). Again, two things happened with this:
- There was an instant (but temporary) jump in the number of licenses sold. Many of those probably came from already existing MorphOS users sitting on the fence to get a PowerBook laptop.
- There was also (as it seems today) a permanent increase in the pace of new registrations sold, the tilt of the growth graph went even steeper than before.
Here is a picture (based on
"koszer's" excellent trackings of MorphOS licenses sold, click to make it larger):
We can easily see how some events both gave a temporary jump in amount of registrations sold, but also an increase in the unit sales pace in a more permanent manner.
From when MorphOS was only available on those "custom", low volume motherboards, made by a small company, untill today when MorphOS is available for various second hand mainstream HW (including laptops), the
growth rate in MorphOS license sales has gone from
~11 per month, to
more than 1 per day, in what appears to be a lasting, permanent way.
If the graph will indeed be continuing as it has done since the latest "temporary jump", it will mean that MorphOS will have crossed the "2000 licenses sold" mark during August next year.
On the other hand, had it remained on the limited availability, small company HW with poor bang/buck ratio, then August 2013 would probably have meant a maximum of 1100 licenses sold, provided that the sales graph would have remained the same during all these years, which is
unlikely, given the limited numbers of machines produced, machines breaking down, the Pegasos/Efika market for MorphOS probably being kind of saturated back in 2009 already, and the fact that the performance of those boards were kind of low even back by 2004 standards, so closer to 600 licenses sold (or somewhere slightly above) seems more likely.
This "August 2013" difference will largely be thanks to the MorphOS Team's smart decision of going for the second hand Mac PPC market, aiming for mainstream rather than small company custom HW, making the most out of what PPC had to offer when it comes to performance (only G5 machines are faster) and flavors of the HW; we have big-box expandable PowerMac (up to 2GHz with 3rd party accellerator cards), tiny but quite powerful Mac Mini, and of course, the Laptops in the shape of PowerBook. Ibook is coming in the next release. On MorphZone.org we have seen several new faces, not only Amigans cross-migrating from "other camps", but actually a few coming from "outside".
Why do I say this? Isn't all of this obvious?
I'm afraid not. There are still people (yes, in 2012) advocating in favor of expensive, poor bang/buck, low volume, custom built by small cellar-based companies, Hardware. This is the route the OS4 team took, and while the MorphOS sales figures probably wouldn't impress anyone outside the "Amiga Market", I highly doubt that OS4 can present a sales graph and sales growth rate pace that even slightly resembles the picture above.
Imagine if MorphOS had been on even more mainstream and powerful HW, like x86. Now it isn't, and since it's currently locked to PPC, it has been a great decision of making the most out of it by supporting the old mainstream HW that is available from everywhere at peanut money.
The MorphOS Team
did it right!
(Note: The graphs I drew on top of Koszer's are not based on calculations, they are hand drawn, and all numbers I have put in there are interpretations from the graphics, not number data. This should be good enough for trend spotting though. The original picture is of course based on pure statistics!
