B00tDisk wrote:
These are, IMO, crap opinions. The closed up console-like case design of the A500 kept people from bothering to expand it, and it hobbled Amiga development for years. It was the target platform and nobody bothered to upgrade, except for those dreadful little trapdoor 512k expansions, so no-one bothered to develop beyond it. [. . .]
Just to counter this statement factually: There were tons of sidecar expansions for the 500. GVP had plenty, as did other manufacturers, and the prices weren't unreasonable.
The only thing is that some of the hackish internal expansions were even more reasonable (no need for custom plastics or large PCBs to seat the edge-connector, just use wire-wrap sockets and slide in under the 68000 or whatnot), and the 500 was a budget machine, so maybe that's what some users remember...
The fact that game developers catered to unexpanded systems was sort of a separate problem, since any platform will have nontechnical users who won't expand their machines. In retrospect, marketing the 500+ as some sort of sweeping "second generation!" hardware to target (instead of "just another 500") might've kept some momentum, but that's getting off-topic.
Edit: See Apple putting "incrementally" improved hardware in a different case every few years for a good example of that kind of momentum. They have so many product releases that people who still have white plastic kind of understand that they won't have as much software support as if they had shiny metal.
