I was at bplan one of the days they were developing April 1, they'd set up a test set it running and a while later the machine would just lock up. That was just the first bug, Gerald found several and told me himself.
The guys in the Thendic-France office had nothing but problems with the non-April machines, they were constantly crashing.
Mai did do a revision of the Articia based in part on Geralds fixes but according to Gerald it didn't work. To my knowledge there has been no subsequent revision.
At the time (late 2002) this was all under NDA, IIRC Fleecy then Eyetech were the first to say anything in public.
April 1 did seem to get around the main problem but not all as April 2 was later released, both were offered as free upgrades to existing users but some didn't change April 1 to April 2 as they were happy with them.
Genesi promptly gave up on Articia and went with Marvell instead, that took a lot of time and money and meant there was nothing to sell for months.
Now, do you really think Genesi did that for the sheer hell of it?
If it was just "working differently" don't you think Mai would have told Gerald? He was at their offices for a couple of weeks...
It is in Mai's interest to acknowledge and fix problems, otherwise they lose customers.
There does seem to be a way to at least mitigate the bug with a software workaround but the performance impact remains to be seen.
My guess is that it will work sufficiently for AOS 4.0 so those users will be happy.
The problem is more likey to affect Eyetech when they try and sell embedded boards - which they need to do if they want the A1 etc. project to continue.
Embedded customers tend to be rather picky, we had one who took an April2 machine and left it running for a few weeks to test it (yes, it worked). Desktop users don't put their machines through that sort of abuse so machines don't need to be so reliable (if they did Microsoft would have gone out of business years ago), the embedded market is a different ball game.
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For the record:
I worked for Thendic-France, I don't work for anyone right now.
I own neither a Peg or A1, I just blew a heap of cash on a Mac.
I don't really see Eyetech and Genesi as being competitors except in the Amiga space which I wonder is big enough for even one company to live off (survive maybe but nobody is going to get rich).
