AU why you?

[hamtronix]

Ive been wandering the EBay listing for AMIGA and it seems that Australia has the lockdown on machines, esp. 1200's. Why us that?

[uncleted]

Commodore had an Australian branch for some reason.  They died around the same time as the general chapter 11 and shedded a whole lot of stock.

The Amiga was massively expensive in Australia at the time and after the A500 came out, it was not a great seller, so I guess they had quite a bit of inventory.

[hamtronix]

Thought maybe some evil genius had a base there and was closing up business and cutting out their inventory. I can't imagine anyone would look in the middle of Australia for a base. What with the danger of satellites falling on you and all.

[amigasrule]

Hmmm interesting theory, as far as I can remember the A500 sold like crazy and the A1200 wasn't that far behind either. I  don't recall the machines being massively expensive, after all weren't they mostly all made in Singapore? Which is just up the road from aus.  :-D
But yes Commodore Aus was one of the first to go belly up.  :-(

[tonyvdb]

Still makes me wonder if there is a stockpile of New Amigas hidding somewhere in a celler or storage lockup.

[Dingo_aus]

It was all those Computer Spot stores that used to be around

Damn that used to be fun going and getting new A500 games from them.

I think you'll find Australia has a higher than normal percentage of early adopters and we loved these crazy new things called Amigas.

Plus who could resist the later local packaging that came out with John Laws on the box

[shillard]

uncleted wrote:
Commodore had an Australian branch for some reason.  They died around the same time as the general chapter 11 and shedded a whole lot of stock.

The Amiga was massively expensive in Australia at the time and after the A500 came out, it was not a great seller, so I guess they had quite a bit of inventory.

Dude, are you taking the piss?

C= was HUGE in Australia.  From the C-64 right through to the halcyon Amiga days of the late 80s/ early 90s.

A500s were sold everywhere - Myer, Grace Bros, K-Mart (where I got mine), Big W, pretty much every specialty store, you name it.  The unit sales must have been huge, and compared to PCs they were remarkably inexpensive.  A full A500 setup was available for under $1K, when IBM clones were $3K+.

When C= Aus went bust in 1994, there weren't any A500s at the final sell-off.  1200s, yes.  Some 2000s and 3000s used on the premises - yes.  600s - yes.  No 4000s from memory (I snapped up one of the last before they expired), and no 1942s - ditto there.

[mr_a500]

Amiga was certainly more popular in Australia than it was in Canada. Over here, Amiga died around 1991. I lived about 80km from Toronto (the biggest city in Canada - for the "geographically challenged";-)) and I never saw Amiga in any department store. I only saw them in a couple computer stores - and those stores cleared out all Amiga inventory in late 1991. I've never even seen an A1200 in real life and didn't know they existed.

It's very strange Amiga disappeared in Canada so early, considering the fact that Commodore started as a Canadian company.

[coldfish]

The A500 was hugely popular here, almost as pop as the C64.

The A1200 didnt do so well, I remember seeing them in Myer next to PCs.  And while they were cheaper, the PC came as a complete package, with monitor, productivity software ect whereas the A1200 looked a bit like an expensive games machine.  The CD32 was in Dick-Smiths for a few weeks, but faded into obscurity overnight and was never heard from again...

Amigas havent held their value here in Aus and the scene is all but completely gone.  Its no wonder, as upgrades have always been omparatively expensive and hard to get and the number of stores in the entire country can be counted on one hand.

[hamtronix]

Ive never had anything shipped from AUS and now that im in the US on the east coast it makes even less sense. Still it is a shame when I see the nice machines and can't get at 'em. Feck.

[uncleted]

If you had read what I wrote you would see "after the A500 came out" which is exactly as I remember it.

The A1200 was not popular at all, and WAS expensive for what it was, especially in the mid 90s when Commodore Australia shut down.

The A500 sold very well however, which is what the "after" bit meant.

[Oliver]

Ditto on the 1200 being overpriced as a computer here in Aus.

Moreso, it was just way too late and way too little.  Even when the 1200 was new, I remember thinking it would have been good for a nostalgia trip with a little more power, but one would have to be a bit silly to consider it as a serious computing contender.

I think there were good reasons why organisations needing business and scientific computing passed over the Amiga at that stage.  Amiga already had a rep amongst my peers as being unreliable delivering hardware expansions in Aus.  Some customers, including businesses were waiting well over a year to recieve hardware from overseas.  There were also some compatibility issues.  I was mostly using other people's Macs and some Unix machines at that time, so I'm not sure how bad the Amiga's probnlems were in comparison to the alternatives, but the image had been sullied.  The price for an accellerated Amiga, with graphics upgrade, really was pretty high too, specially for a company known to be on very shaky ground (didn't exactly seem future proof for a business planning it's IT expenditure for the next 5 years).

For home users (mostly kids who wanted the machine), again the price, and the limit of AGA games was a real barrier for the 1200.  There were other games machines looming on the horizon which looked much more tempting, and were actually marketed by companies which knew how to make money.