The explanation I got was that Hyperion is building up the market, by porting to new motherboards, someone can make the mobo (Acube), someone can sell it (AmigaKit) and someone needs an OS to (Hyperion), so they all make money and a new Amiga market is built.
The(ir) problem is that we don't need these OS4 dongles (read os4 outdated-slow-expensive hardware slower) because hardware that is both faster and cheaper exists. They should care about increasing the small userbase instead of trying to sell us things we don't need.
Supporting Mac Mini was possible butthey decided to milk users to sell us something we don't need.
I can understand some people prefer to buy new hardware but then a release for Mac Mini won't cause any harm if people is really interested in this expensive&slow new hardware.
Others may claim that if existing hardware is cheaper users won't buy slower new hardware. The solution is releasing better hardware (at least better than the hardware sold FIVE years ago) instead of forcing users to buy an outdated machine.
Sam440/440EP and others are another attempt to sell us some technology from 5 years ago at prices higher than 5 years ago... and we don't want/need that hardware! we want/need te OS!
Anybody could notice the excitement when Moana was discovered... they would have sold more units of OS4 and those who think sam440 is great could have bought a sam440 still.
It seems Ben Hermans thinks milking users is fine. Hyperion was a small software company and it's software what they should produce and sell us, not hardware.
But to be totally honest, a port to Mac Mini makes the most sense, no?! Just think about the userbase and all kind of awesome programs that could be programmed by the new userbase?
They could have released OS4 for Mac Mini G4, Latest powerbooks/ibooks g4 and G5 machines but instead it seems Ben Hermans and company are more interested in making cash flow to their pockets than in increasing the userbase.
Ben Hermans is destroying AmigaOS milking the small userbase.
Instead of fixing problems caused by hardware like a1/sam440 they should have ported it to x86-64 machines or at least Apple PPC hardware.