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PPC Amigas Go On Sale
nastyphil writes "After a wait of almost 10 years and passing through a series of owners' hands, new Amiga hardware is on sale. G4 processors at up to 800 Mhz.
Development of AmigaOS 4.0 has been continuing at a steady pace by Hyperion and will be ready for release early 2003."
The prospect of being able to buy an inexpensive PPC system from another vendor (besides apple, et al), is great news in purely technical terms - it's another option for replacing legacy x86 hardware, for example - but what are the broader implications?
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Will there be enough interest in PPC-based platforms for a consumer PPC market to take off? In what areas does PPC in general (as opposed to MacOS, AmigaOS or LinuxPPC in particular) offer signifigant benefits? Apple has certainly found their own way of using this architecture, but I'm sure we all remember Power Computing
Apparently you can do this using Mac-on-linux but it is against Apple's EULA. Anyone know how Apple feels about this? Is there an "official" position from the Maconlinux people? I imagine as long as no company starts selling Amigas with OS X pre-installed that Apple would "look the other way" at a bunch of geeks putting OSX on Amigas. It gives Apple more underground geek appeal and promotes OS X more widely. It's not like they would support X on Amiga but I wonder if they would really get upset if a visible group of Amiga-OSX users appeared, along with a few HOWTOs, if there are any secret incantations required to get mol running properly on AmigaPPC. Then again, Apple lawyers have gone apeshit over much less....
Is it just me, or does anyone else thing we really need this? The original Amiga was a strange beast, originally developed as a pure games machine, then retooled as a "business computer" it had the genlock device (video could be pumped through and mixed with the machines graphics). It was always an "odd" machine. And I guess that's why these people love it, how can you categorise it? Good at games, useful for video and able to do things like DTP, it was very exciting as a machine.
Now I don't know about everyone else, but I for one get a bit bored these days - machines are dull - really dull. Sure they have whizzbang new CPUs and there are some amazing graphics cards, but they don't quite capture the excitement of those earlier machines.
I for one am glad to see the Amiga haul itself out of the past, maybe it's nostalgia, but whatever if these things can help capture any of the excitement of the Amiga1000 or the Amiga2000 (you could put a PC card in one of those - so you really could "have your cake and eat it") then this will be worthwhile.
Sure I don't think the PC is going to become an endangered species or that this thing will even make much impression over the Mac, but does it have to? If they can make a profit out of these and a few nostalgic geeks can have some fun, it all sounds good to me.
I for one need some excitement!