PC vs amiga pricing in the 80s and 90's. Were PC owners getting screwed?

[kedawa]

People don't mind paying exorbitant prices when they're spending someone else's money, so it's no surprise that computers designed for business use were over priced.

[Digiman]

Still is. I know people in the private sector that sell and write proprietary business software. This is still a huge industry. Think POS retail systems and support here. People are still getting gang-raped on software written for and designed for inferior systems that take the piss every chance they get.

I work in this industry

[Digiman]

business software £ were so over the top...
A1400CD would not have made a difference, AGA was a lame duck, and everyone knew it by '94. The specs you've mentioned should have been the A1200
As for £800 PC in '94, I dunno about that. I bought my first PC in '97, a no brand no hope piece of crap. Bloody thing cost me £900. And wasn't the sx25 the past for PC users by '94?

Pentium came out just around 94 and cost maybe 2000? I got my 486SX cobbled together no-name 4mb system in Sept 92 for £999+VAT but once you add a half decent CD/SOUNDCARD/VIDEO CARD it becomes expensive. Xmas 95 time sub £1000 PC was still probably 100mhz 486DX4 etc but I was thinking Xmas 93/Jan 94 timescales not Xmas 94.

AGA was good enough that you needed a 50mhz 486 to play arcade games Stardust/Lotus etc same as CD32 versions. Games like TFX though....

A1400CD was what WE all wanted not the slow over spec'd A4000/030. If it had made it out it would have been good for software houses playing with texture mapping at the time too.

[runequester]

Our first PC was a piece of shit and cost around 1100 US dollars equivalent in the very late 90's. I remember being disappointed that things didn't look much better than my 1200 and sounded worse.

We've had the AGA discussion before.
I still don't really buy it much really.
Yeah, 256 colour workbench was pokey. For applications, it seemed to work well enough, and you needed an expensive machine to do something comparable to HAM modes.

People point to doom on a cheap 030 and say AGA wasn't strong enough, but they are usually comparing to Doom running on a 486 or pentium. THat has far more impact than AGA vs VGA in my experience.

[Khephren]

@Runequester

I guess what i'm saying is: we were the top dogs chipset wise and price wise with the A500. With AGA we still had the price advantage (for a while) but a decent PC could be decked out to do things faster than we could. It does not matter what you wrap around an Amiga, the chipset is the most important.

"Yeah, 256 colour workbench was pokey. For applications, it seemed to work well enough"
True, but as a graphician, you quickly ran out of chip. And it was very slow, and you could not upgrade it.

"but they are usually comparing to Doom running on a 486 or pentium."
Also true. But an A500 could run software comparable (often better) to PC's of it's own era. An A1200 could not. That's why users and devs left in droves. In the A1200 era you could pay more for a decent PC. In the A500 era, you'd pay god knows how much more, and it would still be deficent in many area's.

[runequester]

Thats a good point Khephren.

[Khephren]

..still love my A1200 though! (before the knives come out!)

[runequester]

..still love my A1200 though! (before the knives come out!)

haha, I'll let you off... for now

[the_leander]

So throughout the 80s, PC stuff was wicked expensive compared to buying an amiga. This persisted well into the 90s.

By 1994 for the price of an 040 A4000 you could pick up a PC that spanked it seven ways from sunday for the same price. Sure, the OS may well have sucked balls compared to AOS, but it got the job done.

I don't know about other markets, but by the time AGA Amigas came out, the market had already made huge strides both in terms of performance and value for money here in the UK to the degree that the Amiga really wasn't relevant any more.

I know amiga upgrades were pricey, but is there something I am missing, or was PC owners just being robbed?

New things cost more, as they become less of a niche the larger market drives costs down. Consider that you can now pick up GSM phones for £7 new in supermarkets here in the UK, to get the same capabilities 10 years ago when pay as you go cell phones first started getting popular you'd be looking at £60+.

[Khephren]

I don't know about other markets, but by the time AGA Amigas came out, the market had already made huge strides both in terms of performance and value for money here in the UK to the degree that the Amiga really wasn't relevant any more.
.

Well I was here in the UK, and that did not seem to be the case. Everyone I knew who owned Amigas were waiting for AGA, expecting to leap frog the PC again. It was a massive market that only dwindled after AGA, not before. Magazine circulation reflects this as well. I'm pretty sure CU and AF had their biggest circulated figures in the AGA period. I'd like to hear what others in Europe think about the decline. (I know in the US Amiga was never dominant to begin with).

[lsmart]

I think it is funny that so many of us look too much through the boing ball glasses.

How would a PC person describe the time:
"IBMs PC was released about five years before the Amiga. The original Amiga was not as affordable as the A500. When the A500 became popular there were PCs that had harddrives and they were only about 25% more expensive than an Amiga 2000. And while they had yesterdays CPU and only CGA graphics the printouts PC and Mac were generating and the features of the business software were superior to anything you could do with an Amiga.
"So if you actually lived in the 80s and had to use a computer professionally, the PC wasn´t such a bad deal unless you were into Multimedia - which of course nobody had heard of at the time.
"When the 90s came into full swing PCs overtook Amiga in CPU speed, color depth, resolution, mass storage and most importantly CD-ROM support and AOL. While you could do everything on an A1200, it wasn´t a superior machine by any benchmark. Of course the PC had a lousy architecture, a crappy OS and some of the components were regulary failing, but they also came dirt cheap."

It is a perspective. It actually comes down to what you expect to get for your money. The Mac perspective may be:

"The Amiga started out as a Macintosh killer: They had specialized coprocessors that let the machine do incredible gfx & sound and they had copied the Mac system software well enough that you could work with files and folders in an intuitive way, but the applications were mostly toys and constantly crashing. They were pricing the boxes agrssively and sold many of them to children in Europe."
"Amiga tried to ride the DTP wave a few years after the success of the LaserWriter but never really took off. When the 90s were coming they took too long to get the new OS and hardware out of the door so that the competition was able to outsell them even in their main market: computer games."

Well, I know they are both wrong, but if you lived at the time, some of it was hard to argue.

[the_leander]

Well I was here in the UK, and that did not seem to be the case. Everyone I knew who owned Amigas were waiting for AGA, expecting to leap frog the PC again. It was a massive market that only dwindled after AGA, not before.

I'm not saying it didn't dwindle until after AGA's release and for sure, AGA was much anticipated by everyone within the Amiga scene. But despite the gritted teeth reviews, the fact was to anyone looking at the two platforms on their relative merits, it was blatantly clear the hardware in a PC was more than a match for the 040 A4000 and that was at launch. The 4000T only made the disparities all the clearer.

 Magazine circulation reflects this as well. I'm pretty sure CU and AF had their biggest circulated figures in the AGA period. I'd like to hear what others in Europe think about the decline. (I know in the US Amiga was never dominant to begin with).

I've no doubt that the biggest circulation happened with the release of the A4000 and especially with the A1200. But at the same time PCs were being introduced into schools as standard, replacing mainstays such as the Acorn Archimedes in the education sector. Amiga was nowhere on the landscape by the time of the release of the CD32 as far as the wider IT industry was concerned.

[sperrett]

But wasn't the Amiga more fun to use? The reason My Amiga is out now is because I bought Med Soundstudio for the PC, and wanted some mods from my Amiga. Instead of just copying those mods, I find myself working on upgrading the old A1200 with a CF card, CD writer etc. and I am just enjoying using it!

[Khephren]

@Sperrett
Course it was, that's why we are all still here

@Ismart

definitely, software is strength, as well as hardware. Business, DTP and MIDI were dominated by other platforms. As a gamer, 3D/2D artist, and someone who liked listening to music on his computer I  felt well catered for on Amiga-and dare I say, in a dominant position for quite a while. no "boing ball glasses" just facts.
   Of course price has lot to do with it too. It took a lot of saving and selling old bits of kit to buy my A500. A Mac or PC were well out of my price range.

[coldfish]

I guess I'm lucky, I missed the price gouging of the late 80's -early 90's.

I didnt get my first PC until about '97ish,  a used 386 for AUD200 with Word.

The first new PC I bought was in about 99-2000 when the prices had come down to sane levels.

[fishy_fiz]

Markups where pretty small from the retailers end, but th actual hardware vendors themselves had much larger markups. That said though by the early-mid 90's prices had started to drop considerably. In '95 I bought my 1st pc, a pentium133 for about $800, with a 4meg virge s3 card, 16 meg ram, an an awe32 soundcard. This was pretty much the dawn of pc gear getting cheap and powerful. Prior to this though the 486's were still price competitie with anything amiga of the day. You really have to go back to the 80's to find a time where the Amiga had any sort of distinct price advantage, although until about 93 there was arguements to be had for the amiga still. Wasnt until about 95 that the amiga was pretty much completely outclassed for all but enthusiasts. Ironically its those same "argements" that make the amiga an enjoyable machine even today.