Why?

[Cyberus]

Why is it that Amiga hardware is so expensive?
Sure, its an enthusiast's market, but so is the Apple Mac.

It's something I've thought about before, and I'm sure all of you have thought about it too. We all know that we have to pay the price for being so enthusiastic about a platform that is essentially dead.

But what really brought it home to me, is that I've got a Powerwave PowerMac clone, and I've been spending a bit of time playing around with it and looking at the possibilities - its a PCI based Mac, with 604 processor, that can be upgraded to a G3/G4 by way of an upgrade card (which would cost between about 50 and 200 pounds depending on whether it's a G3 @350MHz or a G4@800MHz), capable of running classic Mac OS (which I'm not a huge fan of so far), Yellow Dog Linux and other Linux distros, Mac OSX. It supports PCI cards obviously, and I can hook up a normal VGA monitor, as the gfx card has both the Apple standard and the VGA standard outs. I can run applications such as Mozilla with ease, and at the fraction of the price of an Amiga.

So I'm asking myself, why am I sitting on all this expensive, ill supported Amiga hardware?

Now it isn't my intention to troll or start a flamewar or whatever, and I realise that the big thing about Amigas is that they run Amiga OS (!). But does anyone else take a step back and think.....why? I can understand why people have lost patience with the Amiga - every other classic system seems to be so much more affordable for a start....

Seriously, it may be evidence of dedication, but spending 300 or 400 quid on upgrading a ten-year-old machine to seven-year-old specification seems to be just plain silliness.

[Cyberus]

plexus wrote:

Hey you lay down all the {bleep} and negative talk about Expensive Amiga because it isnt rigt time for that now!!!
wait and se one or two year,,,And we see Amiga Community come together and bring us the best solution for what we all
want of an Amiga!
!!!,,,WHY drive BMW when you can drive Skoda?Skoda is much cheaper!

We Just love the Amiga Computer concept with Amiga operating system!

Windoze,Mac OS and Linux doesnt give you the right feeling of computing, like Amiga!

all the talk about expensive AmigaOne Computer is useless right now,, HeY you ,i dont agree with you!,,1300 euro isnt much money if you really want a Amiga PowerPC based system!!

I wasn't actually referring to the cost of next gen Amigas when I wrote that post, I was thinking at the time of the relative expense of PPC cards for classic Amigas.
Compared with pretty much ANY platform, using the Amiga is expensive. I was just asking why, both 'why' in a question sense, and also 'why' in a rhetorical sense, like in desperation, "Why?!".
 
Just think how expensive Apple stuff has always been, but Mac hardware a few years old doesn't command a premium like Amiga hardware.
Perhaps its because Amiga fans are more devoted and are willing to pay more for secondhand cards, perhaps its because the user base is so small and therefore the product more expensive, perhaps new products in *some* cases are more expensive because sellers know it is a market of devotees and they can charge more, but maybe that's unlikely. But all of that's beside the point, its expensive to buy decent Amiga hardware!