Well the problem is that there is no more real Amigas for people to buy unless one of us here sells one or repairs some broken ones. You can talk about MOS/AROS/AOS4 hardware all you want but an Amiga has a Paula IC on the motherboard and all they are doing is emulating OCS/AGA too when playing those fantastic games we all love (the reason these emulators exist in the majority) anyway.
I can see why people would buy it, same reason people play Amiga games on their PSP hand held consoles.
But as all Apple iOS products are locked down and I would never buy a phone that forces me to buy products and only from their own outlet then I will just have to miss out on this little event 
iPod has mediocre sound quality and iPad is for idiots :lol:
Thats not even close to true,there are still many amigas out there people can buy that work from ebay,amibay,classifieds,garage sales(car boot for you UK people)etc and you would have to be blind to miss them.I have also repaired about a dozen in the last 5 years and put them back into the world.Most amigas are not that hard to fix.There are some of the battery eaten ones that are not worth fixing,but these become parts for other machines worth saving.
This is just one of typical lazy excuses people use to not use real hardware.Then we have the "boo hoo it costs too much crowd",these guys would whine if an amiga cost a dollar.Most amiga hardware holds its value fairly well if you take care of it,and often you can sell it for about what you put into it so this doesn't hold water.Then theres the old argument that its old and it will break...Well thats life,everything breaks(cars,computers,washing machines etc) eventually and most stuff can be fixed.
Someone mentioned in a earlier post that 8520 cia's are prone to going bad. this is not really true,most failed cia's are user error. Plugging stuff in while the machine is on,or blindly plugging a mouse/joystick with the metal shields and shorting pins or a case of zipping across the carpet in winter to build up static and it discharges when u plug the item in..
The most amazing thing is the people that complain they cant find space for an amiga.. i have to wonder,what do you people live in a place the size of a trash dumpster? can't find space? come on.. the typical A4000 takes up a mere 15X15 inches..and with the keyboard out front,maybe another 7" ...approx. 2 feet total with a monitor setting on top and a keyboard.The A2000,3000 are slightly bigger. A1200 is about the same depending on monitor etc.
As far as emulation goes,it does not help the amiga at all. It does not get new people to using amiga,most just install it to play some games,then usually get bored with it. Most don't take the time to find out about the amiga and what it was,and emulation reduces it to only the OS,which is a sad thing. We wouldnt be here right now if it hadnt been fdor true amiga hardware. I think when you get too far away from that you have lost too much of it.Sadly these days it seems people like putting stickers on any XYZ device they can find and calling it amiga.
Someone earlier was bragging about how you can have 32megs chip ram on a emulator.. well yea thats all good and great,but thats nothing to do with the real amiga, its this very thing that causes crappy code to be written to support stuff like that and not the real machines,contaminating the 68K code base etc.There is so much crap that was written to run on emulators at speeds above the real machine on aminet now and this garbage is mixed in with real amiga apps and doesn't run right on them.Then we have the oddball emulator file formats that have sadly become the standard.
The Iphone app is just the latest sad thing to come its not evolution,its de-evolution.
Emulation does not support amiga hardware builders like E3B,individual,or the last remaining stores like amigakit etc.Without these people we would have no cool hardware to expand the machines. Emulation just drives yet another nail in the coffin.
The amiga is long past its chance to be a leading platform,so "getting it out to the people via emulator" doesn't help us at all and even if it did,its still not an AMIGA.what are these new people going to do suddenly decide to code us a new browser? lol most of them will probably be discouraged in a short time or will simply stick with some canned install they found and play games...They certainly are not supporting current companies..Lets face it with everyone split up in 5 or 6 different directions,we are doomed and will never get anywhere.Its a shame that someone like tony wilen(sp?) doesn't use his vast amiga knowledge to support the real machine,instead of trying to kill it off.
