I liked all Amigas for the OS and it's capabilites, not for the hardware cases. I thought almost every Commodore case made was junk. Terrible layout, hard to access the inards and poor designs. The only exceptions where they came close to getting it right was with the 3000T and 4000T. Why did Commodore find it so hard to make an easily expandable and well ventilated case?
Just on looks alone, I though the 4000 desktop toaster looked the best.
Plaz
I think you have to seriously consider the target market and the planned expansions, not those expansions which were later dreamed up by third parties.
Now there is also the reality that this was at a time when engineering, marketing, software and finance departments within computer companies were starting to distance themselves from each other. Remember that early on the companies were smaller and the hardware and software guys were close if not the same people. Heck looking at most of the products out on the market today, I think you could make the case that these groups do not even talk to each other anymore. (well, there is facebook and myspace)
As long as were bashing expansion, let's be fair, It seems to me that serious expansion of many of the Dell, Compaq, Mac and IBM systems presented the same or even greater challenges than the Commodore products. I'd stack the expandability and modularity of an A2000 up against almost any computer of the past or today.
In one sense you could say that the design of the A500 was stifling, but on the other hand you could expand it according to the amount of room you had on the left side of your desk.
