And, btw, I've been following this really close so if you think I'm taking this too seriously its because if the developer take outside advice too seriously they may make a mistake that costs us the future of the OS.
I'm just aware of a few things you aren't that are going on behind the scenes right now.
You really need to leave this topic alone and let the MorphOS developers decide how to continue forward.
OK, you are in the loop, you know the secret handshake and all that. Good for you.
It's great if the MorphOS developers are thinking about the future. Otherwise there won't be any, rest assured about that. I won't "just happen".
Because whether you like it or not, nobody has been making viable PPC desktop or laptop systems since apple quit doing it more than *half a decade ago*. That changed the entire focus of the PPC architecture. Forever. There is no need for you to "hush" me about this, it's perfectly obvious to everyone with half a brain, and talking about it, or not talking about it, isn't going to change a thing.
Nobody is going to make viable desktops or laptops based on PPC ever again. A-eon spent $400,000 in making a $3,000 system using a dead-end CPU performing like a $150 second hand Mac from 2005. I have a list of the about the 50-70 known owners of that system. 99% of them already had an OS4 system. Acube is making HW in batches of 30 units; they have one product performing like cell phone *two generations ago*, and one product performing like *last generations*. Without all the fancy accelerator controllers for multimedia that cellphone CPU's has, of course. A "cheap" system is still $1,000 including tax etc, and you can't even play a common HD video clip on it. Some OS4 dreamers are looking at various recent PPC chips, with 4-12 cores or whatever, made for routers etc (designed with a totally different scope than desktops) which will make really good (NOT!) sense for a single-core only OS, especially when put on custom motherboards produced in batches of 30 units, costing you your right kidney and your first born. This is all the "future" you can hope for when *not* going "mainstream", hardware wise.
So OK, you were right, you
were perfectly "on topic", which is "Mainstream HW vs. Custom Niche HW": No matter how you twist and turn it, you will (at some point, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but
inevitably at some point) have to face the two options I mentioned above:
- Diminish (and eventually die) on current aging/dying Mac HW, or on some kind of custom niche PPC HW made by Acube or A-eon, with less and less users and developers (as long as they even bother making new HW, where is the OS4 netbook BTW?)
- Take whatever measures needed to move to some mainstream platform that is still advancing. That would probably indeed mean a drastic change to the OS "under the hood", especially regarding the current Amiga compatibility we are enjoying today (it would probably mean a "new" OS, even if it will look and feel the same), but it could also mean a lot of positive things that simply aren't possible today
There aren't any other options! Sure, the current Mac platform is great! I like it a lot, I can't stress that enough! It's cheap, fairly powerful, and good quality. Any Amigan should get one, MorphOS truly is Amiga done right, and it shines on those Mac's. I am looking forward to MorphOS 3.2, and then 3.3, etc, for it. But like it or not, this HW platform can only go in one direction, and that's not forward. A G5 port would perhaps be cool, but it would only delay the inevitable. And neither Acube nor A-eon (or any similar) can provide the answer to the problem.
And hey, that is not *my* fault, it's just the way it is, so don't hit me for merely stating out the obvious, which most people sees clearly anyway!
Now hold on to your hat in that storm, Iggy!
