For 2000-3000$, I can build a 16 core x86 beast that would absolutely
smoke anything the x1000 can do. Kinda hard to decide instead, I'm
going to buy a 2ghz ppc with amiga os, oh and only one core will
be useable by my os... ? They are joking right?
You miss the point. Nobody buys Amiga/AmigaOne for the performance anymore. Nobody. And from a e/perormance point of view, even picking up classics or Minimigs or buying accelerators off Ebay etc. would be lunacy.
The X1000 is not competing with PC's on price. They are not expecting to take people who worry about the performance. They want to deliver "fast enough" for people to justify buying an experience.
As an example, my current laptop cost about 1/3 of my wifes Macbook. They have the *exact same CPU*. Mine has more memory and a bigger disk. None of them are particularly fast, but they are fast enough we could both easily do with a slower machine if we had to. People buy into the Apple experience.
First of all, there's a substantial subset of Hyperions and Aeons potential customers that really, really don't want x86 for whatever reasons. Secondly, there's a group of people like me, that, if the X1000 was just another x86 box would need something exceptional to consider it, but that are willing and able to pay a substantial premium for something that is *different*. The combination of PPC and OS4 makes it fit the bill nicely.
People spend money on things because they are different all the time. I spent as much on my Minimig as I did for my laptop, despite how much less capable the Minimig is (my laptop can easily outperform it with UAE in far better screen modes, for example, and it has HDMI output). Because it was fun and different.
The second core thing is annoying, but irrelevant: This model would be mostly as appealing with a single core, but going dual core makes very little difference in price these days and creates the expectation that "soon" we'll see support for it, and hence make the machine faster for people. And at least some users will be interested in running Linux on it too.
If this was intended to be a mass market product competing on price/performance, you'd be right. As it stands, they are competing only for a very small, very specific segment of people for whom price/performance is not going to be the primary consideration. Time will tell whether that market segment is big enough to bring them enough of a profit to survive, and hopefully to be able to aim bigger next time.
