Yeah, what is a 21st Century Amiga? What's the point of custom chips when you have graphics cards now with a minimum of 256 Mb and running up to a gigabyte onboard? Can Amiga build something to compete with a ATI FireGL V7350 1GB workstation graphics card? They need to leave the graphics to the experts.
Amiga also need to move to intel/AMD multiple cores. Apple realised that, when you are small you can't push the manufacturers, they follow their own agenda. IBM PowerPC will never produce a high end laptop chip 'cause the money is in the game stations. Intel & AMD are drive by computer needs.
The computer industry has matured a great deal, it's hard for an Amiga to make a mark, there's no modern software, Toaster won't impress Final Cut users, for example. And video is digital nowadays anyway and HD. You need an application that an Amiga does better than a PC or Mac, most of the really good alternative programmers are in Linux and they can't build a killer app, how can Amiga with it's $25,000 OS and $10,000,000 stadium do it?
Amiga can probably stand as retro, the Minimig, if real, is a great step in that direction, small is good. But again outside of retro what will bring people back? A cute OS? I spend all of 10 minutes a week worrying about my OS, I use it to load programs. I code in Dreamweaver and test it in Safari. Who cares what the OS is or does. Yeah I'll open a terminal to use grep once in a while but not that often.
Harware development is expensive, ACK is one person, and he can't even deliver a $499 system that wouldn't have been state of the art in 2000. Sadly there's no way forward, Amiga is an outsourcing company, that's it. Time to move along and remember the Amiga as it was, cutting edge and building the future, this sad rump in the corner bears it's name but that's it.
