Some thoughts on this new board:
Granted, I was not following the reveal puzzle very closely, but it's signifance was a bit lost on me. Was there a point to the gold/black color theme? Did the puzzle make it anywhere outside the community other than OSNews? I thought the big reveal was timed to coincide with CES, but did anything happen there? Then to announce the complete system with no CPU and only a peek at the case, wow, that killed a lot of momentum. And frankly, I thought the "Don't worry your pretty little head about it" regarding the CPU was extremely patronizing.
That being said, this does look like a fine board. Plenty of modern slots and ports. Slightly disappointing they didn't go full bleeding edge with USB 3.0, but not a dealbreaker. I've seen a lot of "What the hell is the XMOS chip for?" postings, but I think the XMOS is kinda nifty. Clearly drawn from the "if it's there, people will use it" school of logic. It's a new tool that I hope will see some creative programming. Disseminating Amiga-centric dev kits for it will be key; hopefully a full SDK will be available with the OS install, not "in a few weeks".
At the same time, I'm interested to see what software changes will be made to OS4. I suspect that the so-called 4.1.1 will be what 4.1 should have been (instead of a hasty commercial response to MorphOS2). I've criticized the Unix-y direction Hyperion has been taking OS4, maybe the new release will start to clean things up.
With the rumor mill suggesting the Apple tablet will be $1000+ and not run OSX, my interest in it is vastly diminished. Since it might not be too much more expensive than a Mac, maybe the new A1 will get my money instead (though I've got to save my pennies for a Powerbook for MorphOS as well)
