I personally say more power to them. If they are willing to buy Alan's 600 Megahertz AmigaOne (MAI Board) and call it a "cheap alternative for Linux" then that's apparently the kind of idiot Amiga Inc wants in this community. Welcome aboard.
Idiot? "Cheap alternative" to *OTHER* PPC MBs on the market, which there really arent any except evaluation boards.
Let me ask all you little hardware tweekers something, and I want an honest answer. When was the last year you guys remember paying $1.00+ per Megahertz for a motherboard? 1991? 1992?
Well lets see, about 4 years ago(1998ish) a P3 MB + 600Mhz CPU would have cost you about $1000USD.
I've still yet to hear a reasonable reason for the A1 to cost $650 + the cost of OS.
Where did you get this price from? The last time I checked the announced price was going to be approximately $600USD for MB+CPU+OS included.
Besides WintendoXP retail is $200USD. $50-70USD for AmigaOS4.0 doesn't sound to bad after all eh? Of course it doesnt cost that much if you pirate it, which of course I suspect is happening ALOT here.
So let's see here.
WindowsXP ~$200
Pentium3 733 ~$100
Decent MB ~$100
-----------------------------
Total ~$400
What I've listed about is a 'close to' spec of the AmigaOne. Amigaone/os4 is ~$600 at launch, P3/WinXP is ~$400 even with the costs of the hardware through the floor because it is out of production. So an extra $200 to support the Amiga platform is what it boils down to when we are being completely honest. But of course there is alot of dishonesty because the OS is usually pirated on the PC.