The A1200 was NOT marketed as a "half assed" (which is clearly what it would have been, had they even tried) portable machine here in the States as you're projecting.
I'm not saying it was marketed as a portable machine ala a "laptop", but it nevertheless was easily portable, and as TV screens were ubiquitous, it was a very portable computer. Its market was the home user/game player not the power user who wanted to start a branch of Industrial Light and Magic in their bedroom. The problem here is that this user wasn't you or me or everyone else still mad enough to be on a forum like this all these years later. We were fanatics, who wanted the power of an A4000 at the price of an A1200. And the reason it came out with 2 meg chip was that RAM was very expensive at the time of the A1200's release and Commodore wanted to encourage third party hardware development of RAM boards and accelerators.
It was supposed to be an evolutionary step up from the A500. And are you kidding about the A1200 and A4000? Umm.... remember the cost difference? Totally inexcusable. Even worse than the A500 and A2000. Commodore simply didn't know what they had or how to even price it. The Amiga was left to monkeys after the A1000 was designed. Pure and simple.
+10 Digiman!
Well how does the price compare say when Apple turned things around for themselves with their fruity iMac (even less expandable than an A1200) and the Tower Power Macs? AFIR $1800 versus $3500 (sans monitor). The difference is the market perception: Apple users who bought the iMac knew what they were getting and didn't ask for more. They weren't tinkerers, applying patches and hacks to get that last drhystone out of the machine.
From my reading there are differences in markets between countries as well: The UK were mostly low-end users, the US pro-video users, and Germany probably a mix. It tends to explain people from the UK saying they couldn't get hard drive machines easily: was that due to Commodore not wanting to sell HD A1200's or people not wanting or not being able to afford to, and then being given what they want/can afford? Here in Australia, every A1200 I ever saw on sale when people were getting out of Amiga had at least a 40 mb hard drive, many had RAM cards.
Many of the relatively few Amiga users who upgraded to an A1200 knew that they wanted the capabilities of an A4000....and bought an A1200. The rest stayed on their A500's, so that remained the base for games programmers even after AGA had been out for years. If more people upgraded to AGA, then that would have been the base, and with software ever pushing the limits if hardware and with economies of scale, later 68030's and even 68060's could have been affordable enough to make games like doom and ridge racer feasable, until AAA came out.
In general-and the people here are an exception, we'd have to be to still be even thinking about Amiga- Amiga users were the biggest tightwads. Yes Commodore made horrendous business decisions, but whereas PC users plonked $3,000 on a 486 PC to play Doom, Amiga user complained about the price of a hard drive!
