New Hyperion Entertainment Website http://a-eon.com/ - The Mystery Continues

[EDanaII]

Unfortunately, you won't be. All of this is being approached from an idealistic standpoint rather than a practical one. If they were being practical, they'd be producing a machine that fans can buy. Not a empty "dream" machine with a price range that's out of reach.

The Amiga curse continues...

[MskoDestny]

certainly at two full PCIe x 16 slots (well, at least they tried on that... they have two full lenght PCIe slots, but they degrade to x8 if you use them both... so there's really only one x16 slot).

Lots of PC chipsets do the same thing. I'm not sure what the point of having two x16 slots is though. I doubt OS 4 is going to support CrossFire/SLI anytime soon and given the relatively slow CPU (compared to a PC) you're likely to be CPU bound even with a single GPU anyway. I suppose it could be useful for multi-head setups (though the Radeon 5700 and 5800 cards support three displays per card these days). Does OS 4 support that?

[Zac67]

I can't imagine how this is going to be anything but overpriced and underwhelming.

And I'd love to be proved wrong.

Couldn't have said it better. I'd like to be optimistic, but it remains to be seen what is going to happen...

[hazydave]

I've said that what Hyperion needs to do is at least become price competitive with Apple, selling mobile phone spec hardware for over over €1000 is not being price competitive.  Nobody expects them to get down to PC range, but can they get down close to Apple range?

Well, it's very different, cellphones vs. PCs. The cellphone industry has blown the price of phones way out of line with most any other sort of consumer electronics. Mush of that's due to many countries (USA, Canada, for example) always buying subsudized phones.

But chew on this one: you can buy an iPod Touch here for about $200. That's almost exactly the same thing as an iPhone... it leaves out the cellular modem, Bluetooth, and a microphone. What else? GPS? In much smaller quantities than Apple's doing, that's less that US$40 worth of parts. So an iPhone ought to run around $300 unlocked, unbundled. But they start around $600. Why? Because they can, pretty much.. everyone else is doing it (the retail price for the Motorola DROID is $599, too).

Apple's a bit out of line with PCs, but Macs are, precisely, just plain old PCs today... I guess you could add "with casework some people consider pretty, and without a frickin' removable battery, too, if you look at the laptops. I bought an HP laptop two years ago for US$1280... a Mac laptop with identical memory and CPU, and virtually identical everything else, ran US$2999.

But don't discount that last bit... identical CPU and other features. You might justify paying twice as much to get the same computer with MacOS.... I'm pretty sure I won't be paying $1719 for an OS in this lifetime, but plenty of people did. The problem is, these guys may very well be asking you to pay twice the high-end price for something with netbook-class performance. And think of this... even modern netbook-class performance would be a new thing in the post-Commodore world of Amiga. None of the "Amiga" hardware so far has even made it that far. In fact, today's cellphones probably have faster CPUs.

And hey, I do realize CPU speed ain't everything to every person. The problem is, doing the things that really made the Amiga the Amiga, like video and other multimedia, CPU performance pretty much IS the live or die thing. That's why I have a Q9550 CPU here, 2.83GHz, Quad Core, 8GB of really fast DDR2 memory, nVidia 8800GT graphics, etc. I don't play games, and you don't need this hardware for electronics CAD... it's all for doing multimedia on my desktop. If you can do this on "Nemo", than they ought not to call it "Amiga"... there was a time, at least, when that name really meant something, and something good.

Not to be all Davie Downer on you all, but you know this is a well-traveled road, big promises followed by same-old, same-old disappointments.

[hazydave]

I have to disagree that the Amiga never competed on price. It always did. Comparing it to the Spectrum/64 - still available at the A1000 introduction is unfair. You have to compare them to the 8-bit machines at the introductory price of those older machines, and to contemporary mac/pc hardware. I paid about $1500 for my 1000 in 87 or so... That was only a little more than my Atari 800 setup in 79. The Amiga was cheaper than the MACs and PCs available at the time, and more powerful, especially for multimedia stuff.

I agree... you can't really put the A1000 up against the Spectrum or C64... its initial competition was really the Macintosh and the PC/PClones.

At the time it shipped, the A3000 was about half the price of a comparable Macintosh. When the A500 shipped, it was faster and about half the price of the cheapest PCs could could buy. But time does march on. And as well, no real billion-dollar consumer electronics company has made anything with an Amiga brand on it since Commodore... well, you could count the brief time of Escom. But other than that, it's been glorified garage shops. They just cannot built comparable hardware in the 100's or 1000's of units and price them against machines made in the 10's of millions or more (since, after all, even the big PC companies rarely make their own motherboard... they buy from the guys in Taiwan, same companies that make the motherboards you buy at Newegg or MicroCenter if you build your own).

[hazydave]

EON definition...

An eon is an indefinitely long period of time. In geological time it is the period of time that includes two or more eras.

Could the EON reference to two or more eras refer to legacy amigas and new OS4 or OS5?

hmmm

I think its an allusion to how long it might actually take before a real Amiga hits the market again.

[arnljot]

In the end, before the bankrupcy in 94 it did not compete in price. At that time I was an Amiga user because "it just worked". A sales pitch that Apple have learned from main stream computer users that has a big appeal.

Most apple users would tell you if you ask them why they want it: "it just works, right out of the box". Now, that it's not entirely true is another thing, just like it was with my Amiga. But never the less, it feels like it for the most part.

Perhaps it wasn't Commodores fault that Amiga couldn't compete on price, perhaps it was Phase5, Village Tronic etc etc. But it still means that I paid more for my Amiga4000 setup than I would have for a comparable PC set up.

But I wouldn't have AmigaOS then. And I wanted to use Amiga hardware with Magellan II back then, still wants to :-) lol

[redrumloa]

Not to be all Davie Downer on you all, but you know this is a well-traveled road, big promises followed by same-old, same-old disappointments.

I think you are mostly preaching to the quire.

[hazydave]

When A1000 released 1985 it cost around 1295$
Recalculated into todays value should be around 1950$

So either cheaper then 1295 or 1950.
If that is with a case you got a deal

No... because that's only looking at the value of money, not the value of computers. In 1985, the typical entry-level home computer cost about $500... because it was a Commodore 64, before the last few price cuts. By the mid 1990s, it was up to $1500 or so, as everyone moved to PCs and Macs. Today, it's back about $500, though it's a full PC, complete with monitor and probably printer.

If you had something as groundbreaking as the Amiga 1000 was, that might really sell for 2.5x-3x the going rate of the typical home computer (both Amigas, Macs, and PCs took on the typical home computer, before they became it, of course), you could start at around $1500.

But that's a pretty big IF... The A1000 was better in every single way than the $500 home computers and even the $3000-$5000 PCs of 1985. Faster computation, better graphics, much more capable and sophisticated OS, etc. Everything was groundbreaking.

Anyone REALLY expecting that here?

[arnljot]

I'm expecting an Amiga that is $1000 to $1500 which performs like the lsat high end PPC Macs.

Other than that I want Hyperion to contunie to improve OS4, I don't care if AmigaOne X1000 is the last PPC amiga. What I care about is having PCIe, DDR2 ram (would like it to be DDR3 but that's not doable). There are more things I'd like to have, but you eat an elephant one bite at a time.

[Hell Labs]

I'd actually really like it if they'd let us run OS4 on anything with a ppc and supply our own drivers. If someone had made that decision in the 90s we wouldn't be in this situation, and it's not too late now. I can get a G3 mac that'll keep up with the first round of amigaones performance wise for £40. All this farting about pretending the amiga will ever be a hardware platform again is a joke, and they need to swallow their pride before it kills them. And us.

That said, if they throw in An amiga Keyboard and mouse, and maybe (long shot) have an amiga branded Monitor available they can have my money faster than i'll earn it. Any chance of a desktop case? I'll throw a fat CRT on it and be old school again.

[persia]

It's old and talked to death but the only way to be price-performace compatible is to go intel, otherwise you can't compete on cost.  Power PC has nothing that can compete in terms of raw computing power with the chips being turned out by Intel and AMD.  Apple realised that and switched.

If you have a spare billion US I suppose you could develop better faster chips, but you'd have to charge a million US a piece to recoup the investment....

[wiser3]

Is there any chance Hyperion would let us ask for what we want in OS5?

I'd like to see web site set up with polls and comment areas designed to give the community a chance to tell them what we want. I know there will always be a few a55hole5 that try to hijack anything productive but overall i think our community is well behaved and would provide valid feedback.

I like the motherboard they announced (not sure about this "Xena" co-processor, but will wait and see what it can do) and i expect OS4.2 to mainly be support for the new hardware. Certainly planning for OS5 must be going on now or very soon.

We often talk about needing memory protection to improve stability and give the user a list of running applications where they can select one and close it at any time. Why only duplicate what others have? It needs to go a step further.

The average user doesn't care what applications are running. They care about their work and their games. The average user wants to know if they could lose two hours of typing or that awesome high score from Bubble Bobble level 99. Give us a list of each running applications/games open documents, showing whether each has changed or not, and let us save, close, or switch to each document from the list. The system could also have a preference setting to save everything from time to time and warn us if we forget to save something before shutting down.

The original Amiga OS was way ahead of it's time and OS5 must be to. We must think beyond what is already out there and the more minds we have working together in an orderly fashion the better the system can be.

[Hell Labs]

Yeah, but getting the buggers to actually do it is the hard bit. PPC apps can be ran the same way 68k is on a PPC, but getting 68K running on x86 is apparently hard. And Porting AmigaOS without the Amiga software is pointless, you might as well throw in the towel and make a whole new OS.

[tone007]

you might as well throw in the towel and make a whole new OS.

..or use one of the already existing and well-supported ones!

[arnljot]

Rogue says in the interview that Intel is the only real CPU alternative. But he also says that he's not talking for Hyperion and that it's not in the cards as they don't have the time or resources to do it. That's why it's not a topic for discussion.

For all Amiga Intel fans, they should put their energy into AROS for now. Not into nagging MOS or AOS4 devs.