Amiga Returns With Lackluster Linux-Powered Mini PC

crookedvulture writes "Commodore has revealed the Amiga mini, a small-form-factor system that runs a custom Linux distro dubbed Commodore OS Vision. A trailer for the OS hardly inspires confidence, and the rest of the system doesn't help. While the Amiga mini features a high-end Intel desktop CPU and modern conveniences like Blu-ray, USB 3.0, and 802.11n Wi-Fi, it's stuck with one of the slowest graphics chips Nvidia makes. Some of the other specifications are head-scratchers, too. The mini comes with a whopping 16GB of RAM but only a terabyte of storage. You'll have to pay extra to get an SSD, which makes the $2500 asking price particularly onerous. The case, Blu-ray drive, and power supply are being made available separately, but at $345, they're hardly a bargain. Add this to the list of nostalgia-baiting remakes that don't live up to their inspiration." Update: It looks like Commodore has dropped the price after receiving a lot of negative feedback.

Comments

It goes without saying

[suso]

This is not Commodore, this is not the Amiga. This is a fucking bastard.

Re:It goes without saying

[dintech]

Also, a the end of the trailer it says "Commodore OS Vision coming 11.11.11".
I suppose they were planning to release it but then they took an arrow to the knee.

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

Fool! Atari know what right. Atari make Linux Desktop. 2012 - The Year of Linux Desktop!

Re:It goes without saying

[crazyjj]

This pseudo-Commodore company (this is NOT the original Commodore company, which went out of business a long time ago) did the same thing with the Commodore 64 a while back, releasing a supposed clone of the classic machine that was basically just a custom case fitted around a PC running Ubuntu. The world was underwhelmed, to say the least.

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd have thought the closest thing to a new amiga just now would be the amiga x1000, http://www.amigakit.com/x1000/

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

Also, a the end of the trailer it says "Commodore OS Vision coming 11.11.11".
I suppose they were planning to release it but then they took an arrow to the knee.

You're able to grab an early beta... which is just a bastardized version of Linux Mint with a godawful ugly shell and cheesy robot voiceover... i thought maybe it would have some goodness centered around C64 emu, but nothing more then you can get from the FOSS community already...

http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_OS_Vision.aspx

Re:It goes without saying

[amiga3D]

I wish they'd just let the poor Amiga rest in peace. Far, far, far ahead of it's time and an early death due to morons in the HQ. Mehdi Ali and Irving Gould....the anti-Jobs. Together they wrote the manual on how to mismanage a billion dollar corporation into bankruptcy in just a few short years. Towards the end the small investors grouped together to hire a Private Investigator to find out where the clandestine stock-holder meeting was being held so they could show up to give them hell. If anyone had ever compared a pitiful late 80's early 90's pc to an Amiga they'd never have believed how things turned out.

Re:It goes without saying

[amiga3D]

The Amiga was defined by it's custom chipset. The way it handled graphics and sound in conjuction with the CPU coupled with a really sweet multi-tasking system that directly banged the hardware. This ultimately lost out to the much cheaper to build open architechture of the PC when Microsoft finally put out windows 95 that sorta did most of the things the Amiga had been doing for 10 years. It didn't do them nearly as well but it was, as MS usually is, good enough to get by. Coupled with dirt cheap hardware there was no way for the people who bought the Amiga rights to compete with it so there was never a chance for a new Amiga and there never will be. Due to the fanatical user community however some people have played on the desire for a new Amiga to bilk money from the faithful.

Re:It goes without saying

[tripleevenfall]

Know what else has a Core i7 processor? a Mac Mini.

They only have 4GB of memory by default, but at $999 you can get one with dual 7200rpm 500GB hard drives, Intel HD 3000 graphics, and a copy of Lion Server. There's no bluray, but it's also less than half the price of this Amiga DOA box.

When your product is a less attractive knockoff of an Apple design and somehow you manage to more than double an Apple price... I'm guessing your future does not include being filthy stinking rich.

Re:It goes without saying

[jandrese]

Amiga was also hobbled by the brain dead management at the time. Even if you have the best product in the world it is an uphill battle if your management is insane.

Re:It goes without saying

[dave420]

You're a bit out of touch with reality. But judging by your username, it's probably a bit of a stretch to expect you to be objective in this discussion.

Re:It goes without saying

[Phreakiture]

I had three Amigas. I really enjoyed using those machines. I loved the fact that it was a true plug N play platform while my PC-using friends were still fucking around with interrupts, DMA channels, shared memory slots and jumpers. I loved the fact that they had not only video acceleration but also audio acceleration. I loved the fact that colour video and stereo audio were in all models. I still think HAM was a pretty cool compression algorithm, especially in that it was implemented in the hardware and could be decompressed as the monitor scanned, reducing the amount of video RAM (or, chip RAM as it was called in the Amiga paradigm) needed for a full-colour picture (remember, RAM was expensive in those days)

Ultimately, though, it is necessary to face a few facts. Commodore was run by a bunch of asshats. They effectively killed off this beloved platform. The platform is dead. Slapping the name on a LInux computer will never bring back what the Amiga was, and it will certainly not make the so-named computer what the Amiga could have and should have been. As much as I love Linux, I am not interested. It is like one of those modern radios that has a plastic enclosure designed to look like a classic cathedral radio. It isn't, it can't be, and it won't be what was lost to time. Enjoy the nostalgia, but eschew the exploitation.

Amiga is dead like Elvis. Mourn and move on.

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe they're inspired by MS and the development team gets paid in pizza parties

Re:It goes without saying

[suso]

You're one to talk dave420. ;-)

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not Commodore, this is not the Amiga. This is a fucking bastard.

ROFLMAO...

You got THAT right..

Re:It goes without saying

[defnoz]

Not only not an Amiga, but not remotely in the spirit of the original Amiga platform.

Sticking some off the shelf hardware together and running Linux on it is nothing special in the slightest. The Amiga was special because it was designed as a coherent whole - it had lots of co-processing going on (Fat Agnus, Denise et al), powerful graphics abilities and a multitasking, inherently GUI-based OS which was for the most part an absolute pleasure to use.

Also, although AmigaOS was loosely based on UNIX type systems in the way the filesystem worked, it feels much more transparent somehow - largely because the hardware was controlled by Commodore so that there was no need for the layer upon layer of abstraction of modern Linux (NB: I'm not a programmer so this may well be bollocks). Of course this also meant that upgrades could be a pain - notably graphics cards which were not supported by 95% of programs which did not run on the Workbench. FTR, I now use Linux which I enjoy but I do miss the simplicity of AmigaOS.

Re:It goes without saying

[hawguy]

You're a bit out of touch with reality. But judging by your username, it's probably a bit of a stretch to expect you to be objective in this discussion.

So what is the real story?

Re:It goes without saying

[nurb432]

ya, but what would you expect these days?

To be fair, not sure what use it would be if it was *really* AmigaOS, there would be nothing current to run on it, and be damned expensive not ruining on a commodity architecture.

Unfortunately for people who loved the Ataris and Amigas, the time for 'special' has long since passed. ( and we lost.. )

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy smokes!

The world has started spinning in reverse because the Apple product is a comparatively better buy.

The sky is falling!!!!11!

Re:It goes without saying

[doston]

Dave420 is one to talk? He was referring to a username that contains 'Amiga' during a discussion about Amiga computers. How does '420' have anything to do with objectivity during an Amiga discussion? Duh?

Re:It goes without saying

[amiga3D]

Out of touch? How so? I'm not the one trying to pass off a crippled linux distro and way overpriced hardware as an Amiga computer.

Re:It goes without saying

[hairyfeet]

Its just someone who bought the brand trying to cash in, is anyone surprised?

I'll get hate for saying this but here goes: you will NEVER see anything like the Amiga ever again so give it up, okay? We are talking about a machine filled to the brim with custom designed chips with a custom built OS to run on top of it. To build something with THAT level of customization today would probably cost north of 100 million and would virtually guarantee that Windows would never run on it which would be the kiss of death due to the lack of apps. Now with Linux providing plenty of source code one could compile custom versions of many apps but again that would raise the price and today you either race to the bottom (MSFT) or you have enough brand loyalty and cool factor to allow one to charge high prices (Apple) and sadly Amiga would have neither today.

Lets face it guys what made Amiga so fucking cool was back then one could actually afford to breadboard an entirely new chip design and hire enough coders to build an entire OS just to squeeze every drop of power you could out of those chips. Hell theoretically you could do that today, can you imagine an OS that was built mostly in ASM to squeeze every last drop of power out of say an AMD 6 core and 7950 GPU? It would be so insanely fast and powerful it would make everything else look like bad jokes! But unlike when the Amiga came out PCs today are so damned overpowered that frankly it doesn't matter how much bloat and bling MSFT and Apple add to their OSes as we have cycles to spare everywhere. We have multicores hitting crazy speeds, assloads of RAM, and GPUs with hundreds of stream processors. That is the exact polar opposite to what we had when the Amiga was released, where machines were lucky if they had enough oomph to run a GUI at all and slow was pretty much taken for granted. All that customization made Amiga so damned much faster than everyone else it was just insane, it was a multitasking monster in the days of shitty single tasking DOS.

Look, I can understand why there are some geeks that secretly pray for the return of Amiga, I really do. I hung onto OS/2 for waaay longer than i should hoping and praying IBM would get their head out of their ass and market it right, but they didn't know what to do with it and totally killed it, same thing here. Commodore was a "cheap prices above all" kind of company and Amiga was this expensive badass ubercomputer that they really didn't have a damned clue how to sell and corporate stupidity killed it. But as much as we'd like to go and hit the reset button, as much as many of us wish it would have ended up Apple VS MSFT VS OS/2 VS Amiga, sadly things didn't work out that way. so let the old gal rest in peace, she had a good run, was ahead of her time, but that time is past. Companies like this just trying to ring a few more pennies out of the property are just a sad cash in, hoping there are enough geeks with money and a bad case of nostalgia they can make a quick buck.

Re:It goes without saying

[jedidiah]

> Know what else has a Core i7 processor? a Mac Mini.

No it doesn't. This box outclasses a Mac Mini in every respect.

Still got a good excuse for that price tag though.

OTOH, these are all standard parts and you can build your own Mini stomping machine for a lot less.

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

This is just as annoying as George Lucas putting his penis into Star Wars again and again.

Can't these old fucks stop raping our memories?

Re:It goes without saying

[amiga3D]

Sorry about that. I hope it didn't cause you too much distress.

Re:It goes without saying

[petermgreen]

Know what else has a Core i7 processor? a Mac Mini.

The chip in the Mac Mini is a mobile chip while the chip in this thing is an unlocked desktop chip. Don't let the fact that they share the i7 brand fool you into thinking they are the same thing.

Re:It goes without saying

[realityimpaired]

so... what does that make me? ;)

Re:It goes without saying

[noh8rz3]

*takes hit. spaces out. unplugs from reality. blows smoke over your head. it goes wooosh!*

Re:It goes without saying

[realityimpaired]

Actually, by the mid 90's, wintel had caught up with Amiga for most uses. Amiga was definitely ahead of its time (compare a game like Fire & Ice on Amiga against its PC counterpart), but with a bigger market for PC (from the open platform and cheaper commodity hardware) it didn't take that long for it to catch up and surpass Amiga.

Re:It goes without saying

[arikol]

http://store.apple.com/us/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_mini/select

The one on the right.
i7

Sure, a mobile i7, but an i7 nevertheless.

Re:It goes without saying

[Samantha Wright]

That is the real story. Amiga3D made a slight mistake (the base Amiga system was behind by the time of the release of 486 sound and video cards, not because Microsoft released a new OS), but it was because of a mixture of managerial incompetence and aggressive competition that it lost. And there are most definitely still rabid Amiga fans; they supported the original systems for years and years with PPC-based expansion cards, gradually moving on to new hardware like the Eyetech AmigaOne and Genesi's MorphOS/Pegasos ecosystem.

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

I like that as a MS slogan, "Good enough to get by."

Re:It goes without saying

[ILongForDarkness]

That is fantastic. Are you saying than that everything ships late to maximize the free pizza per project ratio? :-)

Re:It goes without saying

[ILongForDarkness]

I found the iMac 27" a better deal a year and a half ago when I was looking for an all in one. At the time the only thing I found really worth comparing with it was a HP model but it only had a 19" screen, and i3 and less graphics for I think it was ~200 less. So for 200 I got 9" more of a higher res display, an i7 quad, and a better graphics card. Made sense to me at the time. It all depends on what you want sometimes apple is a bit more but gives you a better screen and a little boost somewhere.

Re:It goes without saying

[cpu6502]

If it's running Linux instead of AmigaOS, it's just a PC clone. Nothing special. The "real" Amiga is PowerPC-based and runs the original AmigaOS (updated from Commodore's Workbench 3 to 4).

Re:It goes without saying

[Bert64]

All these half assed linux distros, especially those that used to ship with netbooks give linux a bad name...
They need to use a mainstream well known distro with a decent package repository available.

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

A mac mini has a mobile chip and mobile hard drives (2.5") and that's why it doesn't have over 1TB available. It's also the reason I won't buy one.

For $2500 you can get a really nice refurbished Mac Pro or an entry level model. The mac pro has 4 drive bays and xeon chips. It blows out the new "Amiga" system.

I don't think it's fair to compare what you get for 1/4 the price, but rather at the same price. Look at what Dell and HP sells for $2500 too. They're much better systems. A Dell alienware would knock this things socks off.

Re:It goes without saying

[geekopus]

They weren't emulating the Amiga. They were emulating Commodore. Looks like they nailed it too. Very Commodore-like..... :-)

Re:It goes without saying

[fnj]

>> Know what else has a Core i7 processor? a Mac Mini.

> No it doesn't.

Yes it does. From Apple, right hand column: "2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 ... Configurable to 2.7GHz dual-core Intel Core i7, only at the Apple Online Store." Of course ten seconds of checking would have told you that.

Re:It goes without saying

[tripleevenfall]

Agreed, we're all saying the same thing.

It's a struggle to find the best analogy to explain what a poor value this Amiga thing is.

Re:It goes without saying

[washu_k]

While you are technically correct that the Mac Mini has an i7, it is a mobile i7. Only has two cores and significantly lower clock.

This thing has a desktop i7. Quad core and higher clock. It handily outclasses the Mini, but still way overpriced.

Re:It goes without saying

[Belial6]

The "real" Amiga was 68K based. PowerPC was just a hacky add on. Commodore never made a PowerPC-based Amiga. They did ship Amigas with x86 processors though.

Re:It goes without saying

[luis_a_espinal]

While you are technically correct that the Mac Mini has an i7, it is a mobile i7. Only has two cores and significantly lower clock. This thing has a desktop i7. Quad core and higher clock. It handily outclasses the Mini, but still way overpriced.

Potaytoes. Potahtos. Rihanna. Schmianna :)

Re:It goes without saying

[0x537461746943]

What do you expect when you have a computer with Fat Agnus? Oh how I remember the days my friend and I took turns playing with her blitter and sprites. And then sometimes inviting her friends Denise and Lisa to the party. She finally started smoking so we had to part ways.

Re:It goes without saying

[jomcty]

...I hung onto OS/2 for waaay longer than i should hoping and praying IBM would get their head out of their ass and market it right, but they didn't know what to do with it and totally killed it, same thing here.

Me too, I tapped out when Windows 2000 was released.

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

I second that opinion. I know the Amiga, and you, Sir, are not the Amiga.

Re:It goes without saying

[unixisc]

As a PPC box, it could have run Linux, but I RTFA and you happen to be right - it's based on Core i7-2700K. So yeah, it's not much different from an average PC one might have that happens to run a Linux distro. The fact that Commodore makes it doesn't make it an Amiga.

Re:It goes without saying

[msobkow]

Amen to that. While I enjoyed my years of programming and using an Amiga, I have no desire to return to those days of assembly code and hardware manuals, trying to eek out every shred of performance from the hardware.

I wish they'd just let the old name rest in peace. I'm sick of vultures trying to scam people into thinking the crappy Linux distro variant of the month is going to be anything as new and innovative as the Amiga was in it's heyday.

It stinks like it would for Ford to try to bring back the "Model T" name. No one would be fooled except a few suckers. Maybe enough suckers to be worth ripping off, but not enough to "resurrect" a brand.

Re:It goes without saying

[Provocateur]

"Mainstream well known distro". Slackware FTW! Oh, were you thinking of something else?

Re:It goes without saying

[Master Moose]

Agreed!

I am a die hard amiga lover. Up until a few years ago, I held onto hope that Amiga could once again be a player. . but this is NOT Amiga!

Re:It goes without saying

[AvitarX]

I just purchased a 13 inch macbook pro. Like you, it was for the screen.

1280 by 800 vs 1366x768, I wanted the height, as I always feel height limited when computing.

And the 1366 was on a 14 inch laptop, buy the time I get a small laptop with a good screen, it's big money either way.

Re:It goes without saying

[sl4shd0rk]

This is not Commodore, this is not the Amiga. This is a fucking bastard.

I don't really see it that way. Commodore is taking the Apple route.

    1) Build your own hardware
    2) stick *nix under the hood
    3) profit.

Re:It goes without saying

[ILongForDarkness]

The two mac screens I've had (24 inch cinematic and 27 on my iMac) have been the two best screens I've had on any computer I've used. That said I wouldn't have dropped the ~1k or so that the 24" cost at the time but my work did :-) They also didn't mind if we used their 155Mbps symmetric connection to download things to watch after hours, both good perks :-) My current employer on the other hand is cheap, 19" screens everywhere with max res 1280X1024. To get anything bigger than a 20" you have to get senior management approval. The seem to not get the fact that a developer spending even 5 min a day fiddling around with a crappy screen costs more in a month than the cost of a 24" monitor.

Re:It goes without saying

[The Archon V2.0]

This is not Commodore, this is not the Amiga. This is a fucking bastard.

No one cares, sadly. I complained about Escapist Magazine's managing editor abjectly fucking up the history of the Commodore 64 in an article they wrote, got no response. For those who don't want to click:

Commodore's amazing 64-bit computer dominated the 1980s and I'd be willing to bet there's not a nerd over 30 who doesn't have fond memories of playing or even programming games on it. To capitalize on that nostalgia, Commodore has released a new version of the computer that maintains the look of the original but packs it with modern components. The stylish taupe exterior might look ultra retro, but this is a modern PC gaming machine, complete with a 3.3 GHz processor, 4GB of memory, a DVD drive, wireless n wifi, and every possible type of connection you could want. Commodore will even be releasing a new version of its classic OS Vision, which allows you to really dig into the 8-bit awesomeness that made the original system the best selling computer of all time. (...)

It's a great item to play a spot-the-errors drinking game with. By the end of the paragraph you're too drunk to care.

Re:It goes without saying

[Ibn al-Hazardous]

You mean to say it should be backed by, say, the Ubuntu repo? It is.

Re:It goes without saying

[jgrahn]

The fact that Commodore makes it doesn't make it an Amiga.

The fact that the company has bought the name "Commodore" doesn't make it Commodore. This tedious crap has happened over and over, since -94.

Re:It goes without saying

[jgrahn]

Amen to that. While I enjoyed my years of programming and using an Amiga, I have no desire to return to those days of assembly code and hardware manuals, trying to eek out every shred of performance from the hardware.

That was not the only way to use it, though. I did most of my Amiga programming in C, using the official APIs. Quite similar to high-end embedded environments like VxWorks today, except you could also do GUI programming.

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

If you looked at the Apple site like the parent said, you would have seen the 'actual' specification which is...2.0GHz quad-core Intel Core i7. So no, it's not a cut down dual core chip.

Re:It goes without saying

[jedidiah]

That's the "server version" of the Mini and it's still running an inferior processor.

So the "running circles" remark is still perfectly accurate.

Re:It goes without saying

[Bing Tsher E]

This tedious crap has happened over and over, since -94.

It happened a lot long before then. Any time somebody started ranting about the Amiga, back in the day....

Re:It goes without saying

[Bing Tsher E]

The Amiga was defined by it's custom chipset.

Yes. That is the thing that Amiga enthusiasts can never seem to figure out. Custom chipsets don't 'scale up' during Megahertz Wars, which is what that era of personal computing ended up being all about.

Also, it's kind of dismaying that so many people rant about the merits of a single-sourced machine made up out of very very closed hardware. The original PC-AT was made almost entirely with off-the-shelf Intel chips, and even early '386 motherboards from some suppliers were made that way. Compare that to plastic-cased closed-hardware boxes and for some reason people get all frothy about the closed boxes... Just doesn't make sense.

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

amiga3D is actually correct ... I've been using an Amiga 3000 w/ OS 3.x AND a PC w/ a Pentium CPU at that time in 1995 when Windows 95 was first published, and the multitasking and desktop were much smoother and slicker on the Amiga (no glitches, no hangs, no delays) than on Windows. The only time when you noticed the superiority of the Pentium CPU was in raw number crunching. But the Pentium ran on 90 MHz, and the Amiga 3000 on a 25 Mhz 68030 CPU (+68882 FPU). But I had the same impression that Microsoft was only beginning to catch up with Windows 95 after 10 years of picture-perfect AmigaOS performance. And FWIW, Windows 95 wasn't a stable OS yet b/c of unprotected DOS support, so system crash wise, it wasn't better than AmigaOS in that regard. On AmigaOS, a single faulty program could crash the box (i.e. IF the problem didn't trigger a CPU exception that was caught by the system as non-critical), so programmers were far more careful and cautious, especially those who wrote applications above the system layer (not games that were taking over the machine). After C= went bankrupt (about during the same time), the OS wasn't maintained at regular intervals anymore and the hardware wasn't updated, so Amiga computers quickly began losing ground to other platforms. Personally I think that C= USA is doing the right thing -- we've followed various PowerPC-based hardware developments over the past 17 years, but nothing usable and/or affordable became of that, so going standard Intel PC system architecture is probably the best solution.

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I'm quite happy w/ my Fedora 14 Linux ... I rarely have to use Windows anymore. Custom OSes *DO* have a chance, and Linux is the living proof for that ... and yeah, fsck IBM for killing OS/2 ... I loved that as well ... at least they still have AIX ...

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn right ... had C= prevailed and the Amiga been maintained properly, things would've been MUCH different. We'd probably have much more advanced computers now, and AmigaOS would be in the position that Apple now has, probably. I knew a guy who told me in 1991 already that MS would win the OS wars -- and he was right. The decisive factors were the foothold in businesses and industry that MS had secured very early on. Had C= been managed properly, they could've prevailed. But C= also made a few mistakes with OS 2.x/3.x after expelling the original developer crew: The 'graphics.library' should've been retargetable right away (by way of using a device and/or resource like 'ocs.device' and/or 'ocs.resource', 'ecs.device' and so on), before graphics hardware manufacturers invented their own incompatible software interfaces. Also, nowadays, with the web going retro design, AmigaOS 1.3 doesn't look all that shabby anymore. The "3d" look of OS 2.x/3.x was a clone of what was happening in OSF/Motif (back in 1989/1990), or Windows 3.x perhaps, and many OS 1.3 users were offended by that (myself included). Also, the guy who wrote the 2.x/3.x stuff made some pretty ghastly changes in the system that were an obvious testimony of his absence of knowledge about the OS. The Tripos subsystem (dos.library) should never have been rewritten in C for example, the mutual exclusion gadget field never been reused (b/c it was used for radio buttons on 1.3). The BOOPSI system not ever been shipped and much more ... AmigaOS 1.3 was the final proper system release for me ...

Re:It goes without saying

[Man On Pink Corner]

Also, it's kind of dismaying that so many people rant about the merits of a single-sourced machine made up out of very very closed hardware. The original PC-AT was made almost entirely with off-the-shelf Intel chips, and even early '386 motherboards from some suppliers were made that way. Compare that to plastic-cased closed-hardware boxes and for some reason people get all frothy about the closed boxes... Just doesn't make sense.

A lot of it comes down to Microsoft Derangement Syndrome. People who still mutter about how great the Amiga was and how Bill Gates painted the steps at the nursing home with nitrogen tri-iodide back in junior high shouldn't expect entire markets to form around their personal hangups. Yet they expect just that.

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

I loved the fact that they had not only video acceleration but also audio acceleration.

Er, no, it didn't. It had ~30 KHz 8-bit sample playback with no acceleration features. Don't get me wrong, that was pretty cool in '85, but there was no acceleration as such, unless you count DMAing the samples from memory as a form of acceleration.

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll get hate for saying this but here goes: you will NEVER see anything like the Amiga ever again so give it up, okay? We are talking about a machine filled to the brim with custom designed chips with a custom built OS to run on top of it. To build something with THAT level of customization today would probably cost north of 100 million and would virtually guarantee that Windows would never run on it which would be the kiss of death due to the lack of apps.

You don't seem to have noticed that someone (Apple) has done it (iPhone, iPad), and the kiss of death never came. (And seems somewhat unlikely to come any time soon, either.) Apple's chips aren't "custom" enough for you?

Hell theoretically you could do that today, can you imagine an OS that was built mostly in ASM to squeeze every last drop of power out of say an AMD 6 core and 7950 GPU? It would be so insanely fast and powerful it would make everything else look like bad jokes!

Actual result: it would be horribly backwards because building everything in ASM would radically reduce programmer productivity and nobody would ever be able to deliver all the features expected of a modern OS. Oh, and it would have lots more bugs (it's much harder to code bugfree ASM, and much harder to debug large systems written in ASM). Oh, and it might not actually perform better either!

(That's because writing everything in ASM makes it much more difficult to restructure code to change algorithms, or easily change how one system works in order to improve another. Contrary to the intuitions of people like you, these things tend to be far more important for optimization than writing everything ASM. Especially in large systems like an OS. The way you want to do it is to code in a HLL first, use the flexibility to get the algorithms right, and only once you're done with high level optimization do you consider converting anything to ASM. And even then you keep it down just to small inner loops, because 95% of the code isn't performance critical and you don't want to spend a ridiculous amount of labor on converting it just to get a 1% or less realworld speedup while destroying maintainability. Some of the greatest minds to ever optimize ASM code agree wholeheartedly with this approach, this isn't just some AC making it up. Look up what John Carmack and Mike Abrash did with the Quake engine, for example. It was mostly ANSI C with a little bit of ASM for rasterizer inner loops.)

Re:It goes without saying

[Osgeld]

there is no such thing as a real amiga with a power pc cpu

you could get a 3rd party accelerator card after commodore died, hell I dont even think PPC was available until a year or 2 after Amiga vanished, or you could get some bastardized 4 grand hacked up IBM motherboard with chip emulation in software in the early 2000's but Amiga never left the Motorola 68k arena from the factory

Re:It goes without saying

[Osgeld]

the mac was always a better buy, unless you wanted a 2500$ computer that did the same things as a 199$ SEGA Genesis

even back in the day (watch computer chronicles) Amiga struggled with what you actually did with the computer ... multitasking OS awesome, now this game shows off the sound and graphics, and this game blah blah blah. They really never did have a super strong selling point to the computer user, it was just another home computer with limited software, tons of games, some niche uses at the same time mac was dominating the desktop publishing and workstation scene, and x86 was dominating the "its ugly but its doing a great job" scene.

course things would change drastically, atari and amiga vanished, apple tried to fill that home void that they once held with horrible results (reason why our second computer was a pc and not apple, cause they treated us like we were stupid with their per store modeling and somewhat random pricing) , and the x86 platform seemed to fill in all its holes all at once.

hell by the time amiga died you could pick up a pretty cheap PC with more horsepower, better sound and graphics, color inkjet printer and a fat monitor and 15 years of backwards compatibility.

Re:It goes without saying

[bryan1945]

Exactly. Amiga OS made the Amiga the Amiga (that was powerfully redundant). I still got my 1000 stored away with a big box full of discs... good times, good times.

Re:It goes without saying

[bryan1945]

I remember a story about one of the first vendor shows the Amiga crew went to. They had a ton of custom chips handwired together, sitting under the table, and they said they just prayed that no one would accidentally kick the boxes. Truly the wild west days of the personal desktop computer scene. I'm glad I was (just) old enough to understand what was going on then. But you're correct, we probably won't see something like that again, until we do.

Re:It goes without saying

[master_p]

That's not a good way to built a custom computer. You don't want to compete on features the current machines offer, you have to go beyond that.

You know what would sell? a machine with thousands of cores, that is able to do real time ray tracing in decent speeds, as well as natural voice recognition and synthesis and a programming language that could easily program all those cores.

Let's say that tomorrow, a company releases such a machine for, let's say, $10000, and the only program that runs on it is a 3d game with mind blowing never seen before graphics, thanks to ray tracing. Wouldn't you save money to buy it? slap a PC emulator on it so as that existing Windows and Linux programs run, and you are good to go.

If the Amiga inventors in the 80s thought like we are thinking today, the Amiga would have a 80286 cpu, graphics that were a little better than EGA, and a DOS clone for the OS. It would never have been the jaw-dropping machine it was.

Re:It goes without saying

[drinkypoo]

It stinks like it would for Ford to try to bring back the "Model T" name. No one would be fooled except a few suckers. Maybe enough suckers to be worth ripping off, but not enough to "resurrect" a brand.

if they just rebadged a Mazda like they did when they made the Courier then they'd have no takers. But if they built a super-stripped vehicle for use in markets that don't demand airbags and seatbelts they could probably sell something called a Model T, and mop up. However, the F-Series is the second-most popular vehicle in the world when taken collectively; historically I believe it's still #1.

Re:It goes without saying

[drinkypoo]

Some of us don't want to merge the computer and the screen, though. I certainly wouldn't ever do it without a standards-based motherboard, unless I just had money pouring out of my asshole.

Re:It goes without saying

[drinkypoo]

Let's say that tomorrow, a company releases such a machine for, let's say, $10000, and the only program that runs on it is a 3d game with mind blowing never seen before graphics, thanks to ray tracing. Wouldn't you save money to buy it? slap a PC emulator on it so as that existing Windows and Linux programs run, and you are good to go.

Actually no. Historically $3000 has been about the limit of what most people will pay for a new computer, just as $300 is about the limit of what most people will pay for a games console.

Re:It goes without saying

[ILongForDarkness]

Forget the motherboard (looks pretty standard to me :-) http://techon.nikkeibp.co.jp/english/NEWS_EN/20060119/112488/?SS=imgview_e&FD=-313234702) other things are issues with the design: like you have to use special tools to disassemble the screen in order to get at the harddrive. The only thing that is user maintainable is the RAM, you can get at that and replace it. But I had/have money pouring out of my asshole as at the time at least I was getting 100/hr as a contractor with a one year contract so wanted a nice machine but also wanted something I could fit in one checked bag for when/if I moved somewhere else. Doing linux based dev work on a 27" screen unix-like OS is a bit better than the 19" windows box HP was offering. Nobody else I looked at (Dell, Lenovo) seemed to have anything that was less of a piece of crap than the HP, they'd have 2GB of RAM, a underpowered (even for them) integrated video card, 500GB laptop format harddrive or whatever.

Re:It goes without saying

[lowtekk]

That is one ugly mac Mini knock-off.

Re:It goes without saying

[dave420]

Because Microsoft had nothing to do with Amiga's eventual downfall.

Re:It goes without saying

[Urkki]

It had hardware mixing of 4 8-bit channels, fed by DMA. Since the CPU didn't really do anything much, I think it's fair to call that hardware-accelerated audio. I mean, just compare to playing same audio files with PC+Sound Blaster. PC players had code for doing computationally intensive stuff, which on Amiga was done by hardware. Non-CPU hardware doing computationally intensive stuff is hardware acceleration.

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm...no? The Mac Mini uses a MOBILE 'M' version of the Intel Core i7 which is far slower while the Amiga Mini uses an i7 quad core 2500-2700K DESKTOP chipset. The difference in speed is between Heaven and Earth.....the Amiga is MUCH MORE POWERFUL overall!

Also the Amiga full spec Core i7 16GB pricing is now $1995...Core i5 for $1755 and $1495 for the Core i3 with 4GB RAM.

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

As several others have pointed out, the Mac Mini Server with a quad-core i7 is $999. Of course, that's only 2.0GHz, with 4GB of RAM and 2 500GB drives, and no Blu-Ray. The "Clarksfield" mobile i7 is no slouch - it's close to desktop i7 performance, and beats some older desktop i7s.

If you want to beef it up, you can get it with 8GB RAM and 1.5TB of drive space for $1749. Whether that's a "better buy" is up to you to judge.

http://www.apple.com/macmini/server/

Re:It goes without saying

[Anonymous Coward]

Try reading AmigaOS 4, AROS and MorphOS articles on Wikipedia, just to discover Amiga outlived Commodore.
And yes, this is exploit to make more money on commodity PC with Linux anyone can assemble for about $1000

2500$ for that thing ???

[yvesdandoy]

Who said Macs were expensive again ?

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[durrr]

Everyone, just because you find a worse offender doesn't mean the lesser one if redeemed.

This is stupid though, $2500 for generic mini-itx hardware with a retarded OS? Is this a joke or something?

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually nobody that has a clue calls mac's expensive.

The irony.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Aaaah...another person who thinks there's magically unique super-special higher quality hardware in a mac.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

They should put an Apple logo on it... you'd fucking buy it. Admit it.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[cbope]

I see the reality distortion field is still capable of reaching from beyond the grave...

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Nadaka]

Yea, now that mac's have abandoned PowerPC, the hardware is not really different than a mid level standard pc.

Depending on what you are looking at, Mac hardware can easily have a 10% to 40% markup for hardware on the base model. And it gets worse for upgrades.

Mac OS and pretty packaging "may" be worthwhile at that markup for some people, but it is mostly subjective.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Theophany]

And a Mac is expensive compared to an 386 I picked up at a yard sale - did I miss something or are we churning out meaningless comments?

This abomination is ridiculously expensive compared to a Mac if for no reason more than any sucker who buys it and needs some form of support in 18 months time will probably be shit out of luck, given how often the Commodore and Amiga names have changed hands. That _won't_ happen for a Mac. Peace of mind doesn't come cheap.

Mac pricing isn't about hardware costs, it's about the quality that goes into everything they create - the R&D, the development, the ongoing service, the bundled software, the bundled infrastructure (iCloud etc).

So when you compare that to a Dell Shitspiron XXXX that comes bundled with a bottom-of-the-barrel version of Windows 7, several tonnes of bloatware and a tech support service that has the value add of simulated brain damage Macs _are_not_ that expensive. Unsurprisingly, you get what you pay for.

And, FYI, I built my system last month for the sum of £2,500. THAT is expensive.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jellomizer]

The problems with Macs isn't that they are expensive but you only have a small selection of models to choose from.
If you take a Mac and Price spec for Spec (Every spec even if you don't think it is a big deal such as glowing keyboard with light sensor or weight and thinness) You will find that the Price of the Mac is the same as any other new Commercially built system out there of the same quality. However the Mac may not be a value to you because a lot of the stuff that comes with the Mac you may not need and for the feature that you do want you may have to get extra stuff that you will pay for that you may not use...

So if you want a Laptop that is Light, and Fast. For PC's you have a bunch of options many without too many extras. For Apple you have only a couple of models if that to choose from.

It isn't that Apple is gouging customers (the Apple Tax) you are getting what you pay for. The crux of the matter is you may be getting more then you need or want.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

All Macs are overpriced by about 30% based on their hardware specifications. That's why I've never owned one and AAPL is printing money.

ASUS and Dell shouldn't be classed together. I have a 4 year old ASUS laptop (the big brown kind, not an eee) that's still running fine. It came with a 1GB graphics card, DVD burner, and (somewhat) decent CPU for its day. I can't say the same for my Dell or HP. They both died prematurely and had anemic graphics cards. Both had motherboard failures. ASUS is known for one of the lowest failure rates in the industry.

For quality and performance in a laptop, I'd rather have a Falcon Northwest DRX, but I'm accustomed to having two kidneys. Those can run $5000+, especially if you go SLI.

Desktops on the other hand, I self-build. None of them offer as much upgradability as a DIY box.

My desktop ran around $2500, but has the following:

3 screens - 2x22" 1x24" all 1920x1080 resolution
GeForce GTX 590 3GB - quad SLI capable
2.5TB storage (1x1.5TB / 1x1TB)
DVD burner
16GB ram
2.8Ghz 6-core Phenom x6 (waiting on the 8170...)
1250w 80+gold power supply to allow for quad SLI

Nothing I've tried slows it down.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[gabereiser]

Mac hardware (Case, display, backlit keyboard) is superior to the plastic crap most consumer laptop companies put out... but the guts (motherboard or "logic-board"(way to be different apple..), cpu, memory, hard drive) is identical to anything you can buy off newegg... So that's what I do... I buy the case with the "logic-board" (idiots) and add my own cheaper, more performant hardware off newegg... Apple can suck it if they want me to spend $400 on 4gb of SODIMM ram... when it's $40 on newegg...

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[yvesdandoy]

Damn, I should have mentionned ... but, wait, was that sarcasm or irony ?

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

Find me a PC as small as a Mac Mini with comparable specs for $599. Not "also small", not "almost as small, but still double the size", but "as small or smaller". You can't. I've asked people here before; I got a bunch of links to small PCs that were still three or four times larger than a Mac Mini.

People have this strange idea that macs are overpriced, but then when they try to get something comparable (not just in specs, but form factor), they quickly find that they're either paying more, or it doesn't exist at all.

That said, I'm still a PC user who hasn't owned a mac in almost twenty years.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Joce640k]

And only people who can't use apostrophes call them cheap.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Macs are only more expensive relative to cheap PC hardware.

Historically speaking, Macs have never been cheaper. I paid $2000 for a Power Mac in 1995. A Mac Pro Tower at $2500 today is the equivalent of $1700 in 1995 and it's 1000x more powerful.

Yes, PCs got a lot cheaper (economy of scale and all that) but it 15 years ago a mid-high-end PC cost upwards of $2000, and that's not even adjusted for inflation.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Nadaka]

You are not disagreeing with me.

Like I said, a pretty package may subjectively be worth the extra cost.

The smallness of the mac mini is part of its pretty package that you pay a premium for.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[tripleevenfall]

It's true, I used to have the parent post's gripes, but after using a macbook for a while now you notice these kinds of things. The laptop does not run hot, there's for the most part nothing but silence from the hardware (no noisy fans coming on all the time), the batterly life is good, the keyboard is very nice, and the display is also very nice. Performance, for the hardware it has, is remarkably good.

There's a lot to quality that doesn't come across on the first three lines of a spec sheet.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[dave420]

Who cares about the size? A couple more centimetres for less money is a bargain.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Who said Macs were expensive again ?

Plebians. Plebians say Macs are expensive, because they're, well, plebs.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[wisty]

That's kind of true, but in the category I'm interested in ("ultraportables" - reasonably powerful, lightweight laptops) everyone overcharges by 30%; and Apple has the best screen, best touchpad, best speakers, and runs an OS I kind of like.

I considered a generic lightweight laptop (which I'd load with Ubuntu or Mint), but I couldn't find any that were good enough. There's finally a few coming out which don't get blow away by the Macbook Air. Maybe next upgrade.

Now, if you are talking about performance laptops, "all-in-ones" (yuck - laptop parts, desktop portability), small forms (why bother?), desktops (which Apple doesn't even make), workstations, or servers then Apple makes a bit less sense.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jedidiah]

> Actually nobody that has a clue calls mac's expensive.

Nonsense.

Macs represent a bogus set of engineering tradeoffs. That escalates prices for dubious benefit. It also makes the hardware LESS RELIABLE.

Been bit by that myself.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jedidiah]

> Find me a PC as small as a Mac Mini with comparable specs for $599.

Any Sandy Bridge Mini ITX system. The parts in the new Mini could not be any more generic if you stamped them with the Walmart private label.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jedidiah]

Dell sells a very respectable Alienware rig that is the same size as an Xbox or PS3. Sure it's not "tiny" but it doesn't really need to be. It's not up to Apple to set the engineering requirements for the rest of us.

Stuff doesn't need to be cute or microscopic or any other artificial requirement that a fanboy might dream up. It just needs to be suitable and get the job done.

In that respect, you can dump the Minis for IONs.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jedidiah]

> And a Mac is expensive compared to an 386 I picked up at a yard sale

A Mac is expensive compared to a similarly priced PC available from a wide array of vendors that can run circles around the Mac.

This silly Amiga is a good demonstration of why.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jedidiah]

Plebians?

No. It's the connoisseurs that think Macs are overpriced.

The people that are excited about Macs are just conspicuous consumers that are distracted by the logo and the most superficial "shiny shiny" aspects of the product.

Fanboys are just deluded plebians than don't know their place.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[gabereiser]

I'd gladly pay a premium on silence... no whirring fans, no loud noises (unless you use the crappy dvd drive, but I removed mine to fit a SSD along with my internal sata HD)... the only time I hear any fans is when I'm doing heavy HEAVY operations and I have it sitting on my bed with little to no airflow...

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

Not even remotely close... Mini ITX will result in systems many *times* larger. The first Mini-ITX case on newegg (Foxconn RM233) is seven times the volume. Even Micro ITX is still going to be multiple times larger.

I'll repeat the challenge. Find me a PC that is as small with comparable specs for the same price or less. Because your first attempt is laughable.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

>It isn't that Apple is gouging customers (the Apple Tax) you are getting what you pay for. The crux of the matter is you may be getting more then you need or want.

Exactly.
Although I'd add that a similarly spec'd PC will cost MORE than the Apple. Apple actually designs their own hardware - not just prototypes and mockups - but the complete and final manufacturing spec. Apple knows how to leverage the supply chain to get the best parts and the best price.

The old HP made quality parts, but now the new ones have crappy touchpads whose MTBF is length of warranty plus one day (the high-spec HP laptop I bought my wife already has failed trackpad... which HP wants $200 to fix!)

So PCs have lower initial cost, but look at any 3 HP or Dell laptops and you won't see common use of keyboards, case shells, track/touchpads, etc. The REASON is Dell and HP etc. DON'T design their hardware... they largely just select from a catalog of existing hardware designs provided by nameless Chinese ODMs who focus on that one model only, and don't give a rat's ass about customer satisfaction or strategic leverage of the supply chain. This lowers their initial cost to get something to market, but they're choosing parts that have the lowest cost (and not necessarily the highest quality). There's nothing in common with their range of models.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

No, I am disagreeing with you. In your first post, you suggest that Mac hardware tends to have a 10% to 40% markup from, presumably, comparable PCs. In your reply, you're now claiming that the *form factor* has a markup. That's completely different. My 3 pound ultraportable laptop costs more than a 15 pound desktop replacement, but that doesn't tell you anything about the cost premium of my Toshiba ultraportable versus an ASUS ultraportable.

I'm not saying the form factor doesn't have a premium; it clearly does. I'm saying that the assertion that the basic desktop Macintosh has a premium over comparable PCs is completely unfounded, particularly since nobody can actually show me a comparable PC.

Put it this way: I live in a tiny, tiny apartment. Space is at a premium. Doing more in less space is valuable to me regardless of who makes my hardware. I don't own a mac, I've got a monster desktop PC in a P-183 case, and going that route a few years ago turned out to be a huge mistake.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[noh8rz3]

another thing to consider is that macs have better resale value. I bought a $1500 mbp that came with a free ipod touch. flipped my *five year old* mbp on craigslist for $500 and the ipod for $200, which brought the new computer purchase down to $800. not too shabby, eh?

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

Who cares about size? People who are not rich and do not have giant houses to fit stuff in. People who DO care about size are those like me who live in tiny one-room apartments where space is at a premium and buying a DVD involves the value judgement of "can I fit another bookshelf?"

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[AshtangiMan]

I don't know. I was searching for a computer a while back . . . wanted a quiet desktop machine that I could use for coding, autocad (I actually use ProgeCad), graphics (AdobeCS) design work, and some website creation. I liked the mini because it is nearly silent and very small, and I already have a good monitor (a 16:10 samsung that does not watch you) but was concerned that I would be spending too much money. So I went on newegg and put together the same package (except instead of paying for 2GB of RAM and upgrading to 8GB I could just go straight to 8GB) as the 2.3GHz mini with intel 3000 graphics. I could get the price to be comparable (within 5%) but with a low end mini-atx case and mobo that would almost assuredly not be quiet. There was no way that I could build my own system that equaled the mini. After adding the SSD and upgrading RAM I spent $800 on it (Intel 120GB SSD, 500GB HD, 8GB Ram, mobile core i5). This was about 9 months ago, so I guess it's possible that I could do it now, but I doubt it. If I wanted a more powerful machine then perhaps the minis are not the way to go, but I did the same comparison with the Mac Pro tower, and while I could beat the price, it was with a lower quality case that I know from experience is noisy.

Maybe you can build a system for less that is just as good, as I am not a connoisseur and it has been a long time since I built my own PC (the last one was for windows 2000). If you can I would be interested in the parts list, as I spent a large part of a week scouring new egg for various configurations and could not get it to work.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[noh8rz3]

a reasonable post about apple on slashdot... how dare you! are you socialist or something?

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

An ION computer is a joke, mainly due to the Atom processor. Even the entry-level Mac Mini will wipe the floor with four or more ION machines.

The Alienware X51 was pretty interesting, except for two major flaws. At first glance, it does look like a nice option for those of us where space is a premium (yes, sometimes it DOES need to be tiny), but that is ruined by the non-flat top surface (prevents it from being placed under a monitor) and the lackluster GPU (max GTX 555). They use a custom graphics card form factor that vents externally, so there doesn't seem to be any reason to limit the GPU like they have unless they were unable or unwilling to ship the thing with a more powerful power supply. On that subject, the 330W PSU they put in the thing doesn't really look any smaller than the 500W PSU you can find in a high-end Shuttle XPC.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

> Mini ITX will result in systems many *times* larger.

Yes, but they won't be using a mobile CPU like the Mini does. The proper form factor comparison for a Mac Mini is a laptop.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[PiratePete1911]

That whole argument falls apart though when you go to add a hard drive to your mac pro and its a generic 100 dollar western digital and they charge 400+ for it. Even if they use good quality parts for the machine the large markup still exists.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[tripleevenfall]

What sort of imbecile buys the upgraded hard drive from Apple instead of buying one from newegg?

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Nadaka]

You are not disagreeing to me.

You can put together a machine with the internal specs of a mac mini for less than $599 (2.3ghz dual core i5, 2gb memory, 500mb hd, intel 3000 graphics) including a small media center case and power supply.

I am not "now claiming", I always claimed. Right there it says "pretty packaging". I am not trying compare laptops to desktops as you infer. I am comparing two mini PC's. the mac mini squeezes in at an 1.5 inches, I can put the same hardware in a readily available 2.75 inch thick case, and I might be able to shave that down a bit more if I didn't stop looking at the first website that I checked. The comparison between larger mac desktops and similar pc desktops are similar. The comparison between mac laptops and similar pc laptops are similar.

To you, saving an inch in a mini pc is worth the extra price you pay. To others, it isn't. It is entirely subjective. What you are saying is exactly the same thing that I said, except you are getting an attitude about it and trying to act offended for no reason.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jellomizer]

Lenovo ThinkPad x220(t)

It has a fairly modern Intel Graphic Chip that is said to be much better then the other systems. However if you want a 12" or less screen you are not usually needing a high end graphics card, unless you plan to spend most of your computing with the Laptop hooked to an external monitor.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[datavirtue]

Indeed, they are somewhere between those laptops you find in Wal-Mart and a Lenovo Thinkpad.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Nadaka]

Volume is a nearly useless measurement of a computers size.

Size often does not matter at all if you are within an order of magnitude or so.

And most of the time it does matter, only 1 dimension matters, either height (can I fit it in this vertically narrow space) or width (can I fit it in this horizontally narrow space).

Sometimes you might care about 2 dimensions.

And it is a very rare circumstance that all 3 have any impact unless you live out of a suitcase. And then you want a laptop, not a mini desktop with separate monitor and keyboard.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[durrr]

E-450 mini-itx mobo($180) + 2gb ram(~$20) + 500gb HD(~$50?) + picopsu 90W($50) + powerbrick(free to $40).

The e-450 can be substituted for a FM75+APU combo, add a low profile heatsink and you'll still have atleast $200 to get that fancy pantsy super important form factor totally generic case. Why you could get it custom 3d printed with an apple logo in case you feel you're not metrosexual enough without one.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey that mac mini is pretty small! How'd they get the optical drive to fit in that? Is it the cool slot loading one?

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

I usually do. I have a netbook (10.1" screen) that I carry when I'm out and connect to my 21" CRT (doubles as a feline-approved napping spot), kb/mouse, DVD, etc. when I'm home. (audio gear, mostly. Hence the need for a real CPU) I don't want to carry anything much larger, since I travel by bike and extra weight ends up on my back. My complaint with the Intel gfx is that the drivers suck. With compiz enabled screen updates are actually slower. This is really noticeable in DOSBox, for example, where it makes a difference of several FPS. It's S3 ViRGE all over again. :/

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[vagabond_gr]

So if you want a Laptop that is Light, and Fast. For PC's you have a bunch of options many without too many extras. For Apple you have only a couple of models if that to choose from.

I just happened to be looking for a thin laptop, so let's compare the 13" MacBook Air and the Dell xps 13 ultrabook (the basic model for both).

- MBA has a bit higher resolution (1440x900 vs 1366x768)
- MBA has SD card reader (but you can get a tiny usb reader for $10)
- XPS is smaller (less width/depth, same height/weight)
- XPS has USB 3.0 (MBA has Thunderbolt)
- XPS includes 1 year on site repairs

MBA: $1299
XPS: $999

So I'd say Apple charges 30% more for (at most) equal value (I personally find on site repairs a big plus).

PS. To be fair, the XPS just came out, MBA is 7-8 months old.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Jmc23]

umm, no. Compare a Samsung series 7 to a 15" macbook pro. Double the memory, higher res screen, and $1000 cheaper, thinner, and lighter.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[fnj]

>> Find me a PC as small as a Mac Mini with comparable specs for $599.

> Any Sandy Bridge Mini ITX system.

Bull. Wrong. Absolutely wrong. You can't jam an off the shelf Mini ITX board with core i3/5/7 CPU and CPU cooler attached, plus power supply, plus hard drive, plus optical drive, into the current Mac Mini outline. Not even close. You couldn't even do it using an external brick power supply. The current Mac Mini form is much too thin, and the previous one was too small in all three dimensions. I actually tried to see how close I could come, and the smallest Mini ITX system I could make which could actually cool itself adequately enough not to burn up, without sounding like a jet engine, turned out to be comparatively gigantic.

A single company that I know of, Aopen, has made very nice minis the size of the ORIGINAL Mac Mini (which I think was a much more impressive form factor than the current one). But they couldn't do it using Mini ITX or anything else off the shelf. They had to engineer their own custom shrunken-laptop-like board inside and cooler, just like the real Mac Mini. I've had both, and they are both triumphs of practical engineering that no mini ITX piece of garbage can come close to. And the cost reflects it.

If you look at Aopen's Mini ITX offerings, you'll find that they have TWICE the enclosed volume, and crappy Atom CPUs. There is a REASON for that. These guys know how to make beautiful minis, but not using that kind of antiquated tech.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

The slot-loading mac mini had roughly the same volume as the newer optical-free ones. The original one was taller, but had a smaller footprint.

In short, the "mini-itx is many times larger" thing isn't changed by that.

You're also assuming that I need an optical drive in my desktop. I can probably count the number of times that I use an optical drive on a PC in a year on one hand. Movies? Those go in a bluray player. Games and software? That comes down the tubes. This is the kind of thing where a portable USB optical drive stock in a drawer somewhere that I pull out every few months is good enough.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

So, you're going to suggest to me a CPU that has about one third the performance, and imply that a case of similar size exists without actually suggesting one? That's not very convincing. If you want to do a proper comparison, you need to:

1) Replace the CPU with something roughly three times faster (e-450 versus i5-2467M)
2) Suggest an actual case that is roughly 85 cubic inches in size or smaller

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

Something the size of a mac mini can be put in all sorts of places that my giant desktop computer can't. Stuff that small can often be mounted on the back of a monitor, for example. I'll grant you that the footprint is probably more important than the height, but the height is still relevant in terms of how tall of a shelf it can fit on.

Laptops, I find, even small ones, tend to require as much space as a large desktop and keyboard. I've got a full-sized keyboard and 27" monitor, and replacing that with a laptop wouldn't really save me much space, since it's still going to dominate the surface of my tiny desk. It would, admittedly, save me the giant box NEXT to the desk.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

OK, but all you can say is that smaller computers cost more, not Macintoshes cost more. And I would fully agree with the "more compact tends to mean more expensive" thing, but you can't derive anything about the relative pricing of Apple hardware from that.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[StikyPad]

If you take a Mac and Price spec for Spec (Every spec even if you don't think it is a big deal such as glowing keyboard with light sensor or weight and thinness) You will find that the Price of the Mac is the same as any other new Commercially built system out there of the same quality.

For the very low-end models, maybe, but when you look at the price of the higher models and upgrades -- literally comparing Apples to Apples -- it's readily apparent that their prices are way off, and egregiously so.

Let's compare two "base" iMacs, the only noted difference being the processor and HD:
21.5" Core i5 2.5GHz & 500GB -> 21.5" Core i5 2.7GHz & 1TB [$300 difference]
Core i5-2400S 2.5GHz $184 & Seagate Barracuda 500GB $84 (Total: $268) -> Core i5-2500S 2.7GHz $205 & Segate 1 Barracuda TB $109 (Total: $314)
Actual Difference: $46 Apple's Markup: 552%
Sources: Intel's price list 500GB @ NewEgg 1TB @ NewEgg

Component upgrades for the second iMac:
2.7GHz Core i5 -> 2.8GHz Core i7 [Add $200.00]
Core i5-2500S 2.7GHz $205 -> Core i7-2600S $294 Actual Difference: $89 Apple's Markup: 125%
Source: Same as above

4GB -> 8GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x4GB [Add $200.00]
4GB 1333MHz DDR3 $25 x2 = $50. Actual Difference: $25 Apple's Markup: 700%
Source: The most expensive laptop 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM @ NewEgg

4GB -> 16GB 1333MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 4x4GB [Add $600.00]
4GB 1333MHz DDR3 $25 x4 = $100. Actual Difference: $75 Apple's Markup: 700%
Source: Same as above.

1TB -> 2TB 7200RPM Serial ATA Drive [Add $150.00]
Seagate Barracuda 1TB $109 -> Seagate 2TB $130 Actual Difference: $11 Apple's Markup: 1263%
Source: 1TB @ NewEgg 2TB @ NewEgg

And then there's the whole issue of using mobile components in a desktop. Why would they do that? Not to provide value -- mobile components are generally more expensive and lower performing then their desktop components -- but to cram them into a retarded form factor. Sorry, Apple's tax is alive and well, and it's insulting to an informed consumer. You can throw together a *better* system for well less than what Apple charges for its iMac and as a bonus, you don't have to buy a new your monitor when you upgrade your entire system. And for $28 and a little pre-planning, you can even throw Lion on it or run it in a VM. Yes, you have to learn or know how to do it, but as they say, ignorance can be expensive.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

Sure. I won't eliminate laptops from the challenge. Can you suggest a laptop with a similar price and specifications/performance that fits in a 60 square inch footprint similar to the Mac Mini?

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with this in part, but some of the things I noticed about the MacBook Air I bought was that it did run hot, its keyboard was inferior to a ThinkPad keyboard, and that the trackpad was progressively harder to push the nearer to the top your fingers were. Yes, I am aware of and used tap-to-click. I originally thought the problem concerning the trackpad was a hardware defect in my laptop but it turns out to be designed with a hinge near the top. The display was quite nice.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Nadaka]

No, I am saying that all macs cost more than their closest performing PC competitors, the raw numbers bear out that indisputable fact. And the primary and often only advantage a mac has are subjective qualities like the feel of the operating system and the shape, material and finish of the packaging.

A PC in a small htpc case that is functionally identical to a mac mini costs less than a mac mini. The mac mini comes in a smaller package than is readily available, a subjective advantage that won't matter to everyone.

The same holds true across the board for mac products. There are android phones with specs similar or better than iPhones at lower costs. There are laptops with similar or better specs than macbooks available at lower cost. There are large desktop PCs with similar or better specs than an iMac available at lower cost. There are compact htpc computers with similar or better specs than a mac mini available at lower cost.

I am not saying that Macs are worthless junk. I am saying that they cost more than functionally similar competitors. And that their worth is subjective and mostly depends on how much value you place on the packaging.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not saying that Macs are worthless junk. I am saying that they cost more than functionally similar competitors.

So you're saying that Apple doesn't compete on price?

That is amazing news. Coming up next: man walks on moon and Elvis Presley has died.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[durrr]

1: reread my post where i suggested an APU instead. although arguably you'd need to search long and far to find a neat low profile heatsink for one.
Although any and all intel GPUs are so shitty that a E-450 is probably ten times better at graphics.

2: use those $200-$300 spare monies to design and 3d print one from print-on-demand-services. You won't find an off the shelf case of that size because if it's made to precisely fit only one set of hardware it's pretty fucking stupid to not simply bundle it with the hardware and skip the part where 1000 angry customers complain that their MSI mini-itx doesn't fit because you specced it for an ASUS model.

And please use a volume unit that is not completly fucking retarded. given that all mini-itx boards(the apple mini one included) are ~17x17cm square footprint the only real issue here is height, and while the latest and greatest mac mini have managed to slim down it's height a rather impressive amount it's like what? the 5th generation one, the first were a lot more brick-ish in size.

As for your fascist demands on size: no one gives a fuck for a HTPC if it's 1cm high or 5, or if it super-specced CPU wise, it'll spend most of the time sitting next to your TV, playing back movies and series anyway. And if you use it as a stationary work computer, you're not going to use any particularly CPU intensive programs anyway, so a E-450 would most likely be sufficient.

The mac mini is just an optimized case for a mini-itx board, if you want to sell this as some world shaping revolution then feel free to join the cult of apple and stand screaming at the street corner to inform the unwashed masses of the fabulous world of apple, but don't attempt to pass it off to people of technical inclination as something other than a nonexistant-to-marginal benefit of what is DIYable without the ridiculous apple tax.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[tripleevenfall]

I've noticed the issue with tapping at the top taking more force than tapping at the bottom. It's a bit of an annoyance.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

The Apple tax comes from the fancy design, not the hardware. Apple hardware is actually kind of low to mid-end and I have more broken Apple's than generic PC's.

The price difference comes from the Apple slick design and that's it. You're most definitely not getting better than average hardware even though Apple tries to make it seem that way. The iDiots eat that shit up too and perpetuate the myth. I'm always amazed at how Apple fans ignore the obvious quality issues when they're telling me about how this or that stopped working and they had to send it in for repairs. They're like damn Ferrari owners.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not assuming that YOU need an optical drive in your desktop. You can do whatever you want with your desktop. I, on the other hand, DO use an optical drive pretty regularly.

And I'm guessing your blu-ray player plus an external optical drive (even if it's sitting in a drawer) increases the size of your hardware footprint considerably more than the difference between the mac mini and the mini itx case. That also increases your price point by what, an additional $150?

No thanks.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Nadaka]

The mac mini also has the footprint of the keyboard, monitor and mouse pad.

Besides that, a laptop can take up 0 desk space by using it on your lap.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

My bluray player is not on my computer desk, nor was it an additional item to purchase; my existing PS3 takes care of the task rather well. Which, if you want to argue it that way, means the bluray and DVD player cost $0 and has zero footprint.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

So, Llano? The Mac Mini's CPU has a TDP of 17W, the coolest desktop Llano is 65W... Right off the bat that would seem to disqualify it as comparable, but let's ignore that for a minute, and pretend you can find a heatsink and cooling solution for it that may not exist, the problem remains that, as far as I can tell, Llano is still significantly slower in anything but heavily multithreaded workloads.

As for your second point, if your alternative to buying a mac mini is "design and build your own hardware from scratch", allow me to proceed to laugh at your ridiculous suggestion. I barely have enough time to build my own computer out of pre-assembled parts these days, and you're suggesting that I should instead fire up autocad and design it all from scratch? Riiiight.

In terms of finding a mini ITX computer of comparable sizes, even if you ignore the height, it's still not easy. The Mac Mini has a 7.7"x7.7" footprint, and mini-itx has a 6.7"x6.7" footprint, and yet it's still virtually impossible to find a mini ITX case with a footprint as small.

As for all your HTPC and "E-450 is fast enough" ranting, I never said anything about an HTPC (I don't need one), and it's rather presumptuous to tell me I don't need more than an E-450. Is your assumption that nobody but gamers need fast processors? That's a ridiculous assertion.

I'm not claiming the mac mini is a "world shaping revolution" (you love your hyperbole, don't you?), I'm simply stating this: "The Mac Mini is not overpriced when compared to PCs of a similar size and performance, if they exist." That was all I ever tried to establish, and nobody has yet proven me wrong by producing an example of a cheaper PC of similar size and performance.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Alan Kay left Macs once he got taste of Panasonic laptops. Yeah, you'll probably pay more than for Mac, but they are well built and higher quality.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

The problem is that your definition of "functionally identical" and "functionally similar" ignore a whole bunch of categories that I would consider to be very important. If you're going to ignore size and integration and every other advantage of buying a well designed pre-built computer, then you could say that any pre-built computer made by anybody, be they Dell, Asus, HP, etc, they're all overpriced. Because I can build something cheaper. Well, sometimes we don't want to build something ourselves cheaper, and sometimes you can't actually build something yourself cheaper.

There is more to a computer than the price and the raw performance.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to clarify, the one he's using is not sold by Panasonic in USA.

Here's the Japanese lineup: http://panasonic.jp/pc/products/lineup/

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Nadaka]

Everything that isn't price and performance is subjective. And you keep ignoring that fact.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jedidiah]

No whirring fans either means you are severely limiting the performance of your machine or COOKING it.

Neither of those options are really anything to brag about.

Fans are annoying but they keep the hardware from cooking itself.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jedidiah]

What an idiot.

This Amiga is nothing more than a Mini ITX case and motherboard. It's all standard parts that you can get at Newegg or Amazon.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jedidiah]

> An ION computer is a joke

It's fine for HTPC use. It's all about what you intend to use it for.

Beyond HTPC use, the whole "size" advantage of a Mini is of dubious value. With a lot of the smaller quieter PCs, it represents a lot of marginal cost for limited marginal value.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jedidiah]

You don't have to make something fit in the profile of an ATV1. That's just the usual "spec fixation" nonsense that Fanboys like to engage in but disavow any time anyone else does it.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jedidiah]

I have a Dell made for office use that's pretty close to the size of an S1 Tivo and very respectable in terms of noise.

So all of fixation on the criteria set by Apple fanboys is pretty much nonsense.

I don't need to be limited to the lack of imagination of Apple or it's users.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

Price and performance are subjective too, but they're still concrete numbers, much like weight and size.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

Huh? When did I ever say anything about the Amiga?

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jedidiah]

> Maybe you can build a system for less that is just as good

There are ready made systems that have been mentioned in this very thread that are more suitable for the tasks you described. This includes the silly overpriced "Amiga" that started it all.

You don't have to build anything. There have been custom builders around for as long as PCs have been around.

If you know enough about the product to understand what you are buying, then you can have a box built to whatever requirements you want.

I always get a chuckle out of fanboys gushing over the current Mini because I was contemplating the mini-itx equivalent 6 months before the Mini came out.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

ION computers are of limited use even for HTPCs. Their CPUs aren't fast enough to decode 1080p video content in software, so you're limited to using only specific software that supports DXVA or CUDA acceleration, and even then you are only able to play back files and codecs that are specifically supported by that. Basically, they're so slow that you have no choice but to use hardware acceleration.

We tried to use ION boxes for screening computers for our large convention, and found that getting acceleration working was too unreliable for us to be able to count on it. We ended up having to do all the decoding in software. We could only guarantee that all 480p content would play, and that the vast majority of 720p content would play (some 720p content was still beyond the capabilities of the processor, even with multi-threaded decoders). 1080p content was more miss than hit.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[durrr]

It's overpriced compared to PC hardware of _similar_ size and performance. Your argument basically runs like "It's not identically matched by any PC so therefor the mac mini at it's ridiculous pricepoint is an affordable device!" What if they only offered their slighty/barely noticably improved version that runs at $799? still worth it? Perhaps they could turn it up to 2500$ like these amiga morons are trying and you'd still think it's worth it because it's marginally unique.

Only when you enforce the volume, TDP and performance limitations at the same time will you single the mac mini out. And that's because no(or few, seems zotac have something similar to offer for a similar price) other manufacturer thinks they'd get away with stripping away screen, battery, and keyboard from a laptop and still charge the same as a fully fledged one for it.

But sure, if i were 35 year old, with a fulltime job and couldn't tell a CPU from a PSU I'd buy it, because I wouldn't know better.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

If placed under a monitor, that might work, but otherwise that's pretty large. Let me put it this way; a series 1 Tivo's footprint is almost one percent of my apartment.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[RocketRabbit]

I don't think anybody actually buys ram or hard drives from Apple. Of course it's a ripoff. However, Dell charges $375 for a 1.5 TB 7200RPM drive upgrade from the pathetic 250 GB 5400 RPM models that come stock on their high-end (!) Precision models.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Bing Tsher E]

not too shabby, eh?

Possibly. But you can get a pretty nice wintel laptop for $800 and still have the old mbp to kick around.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Bing Tsher E]

Even back in the Mac Plus era, anybody who wanted their Mac to run reliably added a third party fan. And they were expensive. Really expensive, for just a shroud and a little AC muffin fan that pushed into the handle hole.

Jobs didn't think a fan was needed. He apparently worked in an air conditioned office.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Nadaka]

Price and performance are not subjective in this comparison.

You are being ridiculous. Let me rephrase that. You have earned ridicule.

You are nothing but an apple fanboi so self deluded that you can't even accept faint praise, or a paid schill to stupid to see that I am saying that Mac's have some redeeming qualities and should not be discounted out of hand for having higher prices.

Thank you for changing my mind. Mac's really are worthless shit, if no other reason than because people like you value them. And I will never again consider buying one, just so I don't risk being associated with people like you.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

>I don't need to be limited to the lack of imagination of Apple or it's users.

Of course you do. Your entire online life is defined by Apple trolling. I've never observed a person with a less imaginative existence. At least fanboys enjoy their obsession. You're like a Rick Santorum on gay sex. It's quite the internal demon you've both got.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[AshtangiMan]

Ready built systems that meet the specs of the mini are either in horribly non comparable boxes or are just as much or more money. Which is the issue I am addressing.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[smash]

No, the high quality hardware is on the OUTSIDE. You know, the stuff you touch, look at and listen to all day. It makes a difference.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[smash]

Actually, no one has really put out anything that works as well as the macbook air for similar price yet.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[smash]

Ahaha. So true. Any time apple is mentioned, jeddiah is there to have a whinge. :)

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

I'm willing to drop TDP, and even relax part of the volume. Drop it to footprint and change height from "same or less" to "no taller than it is wide/deep". But still, I can't find anything with similar performance.

I've used a variety of Zotac's SFF boxes. The ION ones, specifically. The form factor was nice, they seemed to be pretty darned well built, and they were dog slow. As I said in another post, they're not even fast enough to play back HD video without hardware acceleration. We tried that (hardware acceleration), since we were renting the things specifically for screening video at a large convention, and had to give up on hardware acceleration for being too picky and unreliable. If I had to put numbers on it, it was capable of playing 100% of 480p video, 95% of 720p video, and 50% of 1080p video. We were (and sadly still mostly are) screening mostly 480p content anyhow, so it wasn't that big a deal, but I wouldn't have actually bought one of them if we weren't renting them for next to nothing due to a sponsorship agreement.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

How can I be a Mac fanboy when I don't own any Macs? I've got two Windows 7 machines and a Linux server. I've never owned a Macintosh computer, and haven't even regularly used one since the early 90s. But apparently, in order to believe that a specific Apple product is competitively priced, I must either be a "fanboi" or "paid schill"... What a wonderful example you set for the rest of Slashdot.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Only when you enforce the volume, TDP and performance limitations at the same time will you single the mac mini out.

Oddly enough, that's what the guy you're arguing with said all along! He told you (and all the other dipshits arguing with him) that no, you can't actually get something which meets all those criteria other than a Mac Mini. You admit this, yet you keep arguing against him as if you're somehow scoring points against what he said.

Really, all you're doing is indulging in a favorite pastime of basement dwellers. You know what you like, and you don't understand why anyone else might like something different, so you'll argue to the death that there's no real reason to consider a set of preferences other than your own. It's boring and it makes you into a stupid childish poopyhead. Stop being a childish poopyhead!

But sure, if i were 35 year old, with a fulltime job and couldn't tell a CPU from a PSU I'd buy it, because I wouldn't know better.

Hey mr. smug "I am l33t3r than you!!!one!1", you want to know who is known to buy Apple hardware from time to time, including the Mac Mini?

Linus Torvalds. Yes, that Linus Torvalds. Yes, he runs Linux on them.

You want to know why he originally bought a Mini? Because it was... wait for it... ultra small, nearly silent, he could install a SSD in it, and (thanks to Apple's choice of CPU plus the SSD) it had more than enough performance for him to use for Linux kernel development and maintainership tasks. I remember reading his blog posts about it. IIRC, he tried other things, and decided they all sucked compared to the Mini. They were larger, louder, and not as fast.

In other words, you are not the wizard you think you are. You are, in fact, a pathetic luser.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Mac hardware (Case, display, backlit keyboard) is superior to the plastic crap most consumer laptop companies put out... but the guts (motherboard or "logic-board"(way to be different apple..), cpu, memory, hard drive) is identical to anything you can buy off newegg...

Actually, no, it's really not identical to anything you can buy off newegg. Apple has never used standard form factor motherboards in any Intel Mac.

Ironically, they used to make a lot of desktop PPC G3 and G4 machines with motherboards that were reasonably close to ATX compatible from a mechanical standpoint (and sometimes even close enough to use ATX power supplies with minor hacks). I used to take advantage of this and frankenstein G3 and G4 Macs into ATX cases (mostly to gain more internal HDD bays). But that all went away with the G5, and didn't come back in the Intel era.

These days they're really different. It's not just the form factor, it's also a totally incompatible PSU (Mac Pros use a single-rail 12V only PSU, for example), plus a lot of non-generic hardware on the motherboard. Yeah, the CPU and Intel chipset are the same things you can get on any PC motherboard, but the rest is fairly custom.

(Note: not saying that the custom stuff they do is super high tech, either. Mostly it's just their own way of doing things like fan control, temperature sensors, etc. They design the case and motherboard and PSU and cooling as one integrated system, and that means they need some customization.)

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[bryan1945]

Oh Christ, here we go again...
Who the fuck cares how much something costs unless you're buying it. If I want to go off and blow $10K on 1MB of Apple RAM, why the hell do you care?
And why do Apple fans need to go around justifying their purchases.
Everyone just stop the dick waving. If you're talking about business purchases, fine. For personal use, no one cares if you can build an awesome system that is 30X better than an Apple for $5, or if the Apple will take your system out to dinner and spank it that night over a pile biscuits. /rant

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Andtalath]

No one is saying that buying an apple computer is as cheap as it's components.
If it where, they wouldn't make a dime.

What people are saying is that if you compare Apple to Dell, HP or any other company which sells whole computers for personal use, they aren't more expensive if you buy the same thing.

This is pretty much true, buying decent pre-built system IS hard.

One of the main reasons the argument is flawed though is that the main reason that it's so bloody hard to match a system on all aspects since, well, the market is extremely limited compared to the whole "build your own thing".

Otoh, I got a 15.6" inch laptop, the same basic weight as a macbook 15.6" with a matte full HD display and a good graphics card (not as good as the macbooks though) for about half the price.
Knowing what you want and need are more important than the other factors.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

There is more to a computer than the price and the raw performance.

Actually, no, there isn't.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate to break this to you, but nobody uses software 1080p decoding any more. Any media player that supports system codecs can easily use hardware decoding.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[drinkypoo]

The main reason the argument is flawed is that most people don't think making the thing 150% of the price and 75% of the performance so that it can be made 80% of the size is a fair tradeoff.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jellomizer]

Well the question is how much more will it cost if the XPS matched the Resolution. And a SD Card Reader.

I am not saying you didn't make the right decision for choosing the XPS. However it isn't a 1 for 1 match. There may be other bells and whistles that you are not looking at or really don't count as a major feature.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[durrr]

Now there's a shitposting troll if i've ever seen one.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Guspaz]

Really? Try getting hardware accelerated video decoding working on Linux on a non-nVidia graphics card. Or getting it working with ffdshow, one of the most popular decoders on Windows. Or decoding Theora or VP8/WebM in 1080p using software that does support hardware acceleration.

If you're playing back a bluray with PowerDVD, then yeah, you'll get your acceleration. Anything else, it's hit or miss.

That said, the reliability of DXVA support in Flash and Media Player Classic these days does seem to be significantly improved from when we had those ION boxes a few years ago.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[StikyPad]

No one is saying that buying an apple computer is as cheap as it's components.

Nor did I say it should be. However, the priced I quotes are *retail*, not wholesale. There's already a profit margin built-in to those prices. Even if that margin alone isn't sufficient to pay for Foxconn to assemble them and for the board and C-Level to get rich in the process, I would argue that existing markups are still excessive.

What people are saying is that if you compare Apple to Dell, HP or any other company which sells whole computers for personal use, they aren't more expensive if you buy the same thing.

Sorry, no. Here's Dell's upgrade prices (excluding the fact that their base prices are also about half that of the iMac because, as GGP argued, it doesn't come with a shiny keyboard and built-in monitor).

500GB -> 1TB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) [add $100.00] (Same upgrade from Apple: $150)
4GB -> 8GB Non-ECC,1333MHz DDR3,2X4GB, (2 DIMM) [add $80.00] (Same upgrade from Apple: $200)
Intel Core i5-2400 3.1GHz -> Intel Core i5-2500 3.3GHz [add $70.00] (Similar, actually smaller (100MHz) upgrade from Apple: $200)

Apologizing for Apple doesn't change the facts.

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[jedidiah]

They are quite comparable. You're just unrealistic clinging onto a highly extreme notion of a requirement that isn't terribly important to most people.

Even those of us that have some real reason to be concerned about "volume" aren't terribly impressed by your "issue".

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

are you sure about that? i'm posting from a late 2007 macbook 3,something, and, at this moment(not by choice), and it's fans are blasting away like the whole thing is going to explode. the bottom of the case on the back-left is ALWAYS hot, so much so that, when i'm using it, i have to place it precariously over an edge to let that hang in the air just so the fans won't kick in constantly (which they still do at anything over 20% cpu usage.) the dumb tray-less cd drive is unbelievably loud when loading and unloading discs, and it just recently failed, so that every time the case moves it acts like it's loading a disc, accompanied with the obnoxious sound. on start up, the dumb startup sound plays out of the speakers regardless of whether or not headphones are plugged in. the case is a nice texture, but it has cracks simply from opening and closing the lid, and the edges of the face have easy-to-catch on edges, almost as if someone _wanted_ them to bend back... oh, and the fracking power cord for this thing has gotten so hot that it melted itself... twice (it's on the third replacement.)

Re:2500$ for that thing ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple don't compete with component assemblers. You need to look at Dell and HPs offerings in the same range and take iLife into account.

Resurrected Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

Amiga used to have an extremely dedicated fanbase. But now? This doesn't seem like anything special, especially considering the price.

So... Amiga. Is it good or is it whack?

Re:Resurrected Amiga

[robthebloke]

So... Amiga. Is it good or is it whack?

I can't see a port for my video toaster, or a place to insert the lightwave floppies, so it's definitely not as good as the A500 imho. It's almost as though they took the A600, and then removed the last remaining keys. It was hard enough using Deluxe Paint on a computer without the keypad, but it will be completely impossible with no keys at all. I can't see it catching on. I think the smart money will be on Atari this time around.

Oh wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

_Only_ a terabyte of storage?

Since when is that a little amount of storage?

Re:Oh wow.

[stoolpigeon]

at that price point it isn't much. my $400 acer desktop came with a terabyte drive in it.

Re:Oh wow.

[realityimpaired]

_Only_ a terabyte of storage?

Since when is that a little amount of storage?

In a $2500 computer? You can get a 2TB drive for about $15 more than the cost of a 1TB drive. The upgrade to 3TB still adds about $50 to the price, and 4TB even more, but in a system that's got a base price of $2500, it seems like a really bad decision made by beancounters to scrimp on something like the hard drive, especially when the *retail* difference in price to double the storage is less than 1% of the list price of the device.

Re:Oh wow.

[nitehawk214]

_Only_ a terabyte of storage?

Since when is that a little amount of storage?

When you ask $2500 for the computer. For that price you should get a computer with 1TB of SSD.

Re:Oh wow.

[niftydude]

Currently internal SATA3 one terabyte drives are less than $100, so yeah - on a $2500 computer it doesn't look like much storage.

Now if it was 20 years ago, I might agree with you.

Re:Oh wow.

[BlastfireRS]

Terabyte drives (or close to them) are practically a standard in new desktops. It would have been much more practical to lower the absurdly-high 16 GB of RAM (c'mon, does it need more than 8 as the baseline?) and use the cost savings there to beef up on storage, either through more space available or SSDs.

Re:Oh wow.

[robthebloke]

You can get a 2TB drive for about $15 more than the cost of a 1TB drive.

That upgrade costs about 12 thousand pounds on the apple store.

Re:Oh wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

This setup probably takes a 2-1/2 inch (laptop) drive, so a terabyte is actually large. Mainstream laptops still usually only have a 500 or 640 in them. At that price though, they could have included a solid-state drive.

Re:Oh wow.

[Nadaka]

16 gigs of ddr3 cost me about $115 last year from newegg. Not that expensive.

Re:Oh wow.

[tudsworth]

Now, be fair. It's available for the low, low price of one thousand pounds or thereabouts, last time I checked. Bargain.

Re:Oh wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

Shocking considering the same upgrades cost the same amount from every major computer vendor. HP, Sony, Apple, Dell, etc.

Stop the presses....

Re:Oh wow.

[jellomizer]

I only have 160gb drive on a brand new laptop...
Granted it is a solid state drive. But in depending on your use we now have a culture where we don't always need the super sized drives anymore.

160gb is great for normal use. If you are not going be doing movies. If you are going with storing movies. Or excess of music then you will need more storage. But if you are going to browse the web, write software, and run normal applications then 160gb is good enough.

Re:Oh wow.

[TheRaven64]

Actually, it costs £122 (in the Mac Pro - the laptops can't be configured with more than 750GB), irrespective of whether you upgrade the single 1TB disk to a 2TB disk, or you add a second 2TB disk. Adding a second 2TB disk is £245. The cost of buying a 2TB hard disk yourself is about £80-100 at the moment, and it takes under 5 minutes to fit into a Mac Pro, so Apple is charging about £2000/hour for someone to do the installation for you. By coincidence, this is about the same amount as that person earns in a year...

Re:Oh wow.

[Cid Highwind]

Or about $150 on the US Apple store (just checked). As usual, exchange rates in Apple land are a bit... different than elsewhere.

Re:Oh wow.

[TheRaven64]

Desktop RAM is also very cheap. My laptop has 8GB, and that only cost £45 almost a year ago (I bought the RAM separately). If you've got 4 DIMM slots (pretty normal in a desktop) then you can buy 16GB for about $40 more than 8GB. If you've only got two, then it will be $200 more. Not very much in comparison to the price of the system.

Pricepoint fail

[talexb]

Guys, welcome to 2012. Now, about the price on your unit .. way, way too high.

Twenty years ago, a Cadillac PC was three to four thousand bucks. These days you can get an amazing PC for under a grand. I got a used Dell for $600, including tax, with dual core, 16G RAM and a 1T drive.

I don't even care what it does -- it's too much money. So, good luck with that.

Re:Pricepoint fail

[NJRoadfan]

How about $250? I built a friend a Newegg shell shocker deal machine last week. Admittedly it isn't top of the line (Biostar MB, flimsy case, Pentium G850, 4GB RAM, 500GB HD, DVD burner), but its pretty darned fast for what he uses it for. If it wasn't for the floods, it likely would have come with a 1TB HD instead. Desktop parts are pretty cheap right now.

Re:Pricepoint fail

[realityimpaired]

Twenty years ago, a Cadillac PC was three to four thousand bucks. These days you can get an amazing PC for under a grand. I got a used Dell for $600, including tax, with dual core, 16G RAM and a 1T drive.

Case in point, I put together a Core i5 2500k (overclocked to 4.7GHz), 16GB of RAM, a Radeon HD 6870, 16GB of RAM, 1TB drive w/ 60GB SSD for cache (using the Z68 motherboard) for under $1000, less than a month ago. I did salvage the optical drive, monitor, keyboard, and mouse from an old system, but everything else was new. Even if you pick up a *really* nice 24" monitor, it's still under $1500.

For $2500, you can buy a *really* nice iMac, and get better technical support. (as much as I loathe Apple's business practices, their customer service is *really* good, and I'd recommend them to anybody that actually needs customer service/tech support).

Re:Pricepoint fail

[jellomizer]

"a used Dell"... Ok... you are really going into an Apples/Oranges comparison.
It is like saying that a new Honda Fit is expensive because it cost more then getting a used 1990 Honda Civic.

We don't really have Cadillac PC's anymore, mostly because PC's arn't cool anymore. A laptop (where a high end system could still set you back 3k) is more common.

Back in time Gateway 2000 use to make the Cadillac of PC's Until the late 1990's where they reached the peak of people who wanted the high quality PC's sure getting a Gateway cost more but you got a PC with solid components and wouldn't fail then they started to cut corners so they can compete with Hewlet Packard and Compaq... Quality began to suck...
Dell came in Sure they costed a bit more but they were better made systems. Then they did the same thing around the early/mid 2000's. By this time of the Dells decline Desktop/Tower PCs where getting out of fashion, and moved towards laptops. Where Dell still had some advantages in that market. However Apple and Think Pads (By IBM then by Lenovo) really started to take the High End/Quality Laptop markets Apple for consumers and the Think Pads for Business.

This Amiga price is due to the fact that they are selling the OS and the computer and they are not popular enough to mass produce them.

The standard PC you buy Windows OEM for like $100 per PC. Apple sells enough of their Macs to support the cost of hardware in bulk and their OS. For the Amiga they cannot buy the hardware in bulk and they need to still recoup the cost of the OS development. There may be free software however making software isn't free.

Re:Pricepoint fail

[JaredOfEuropa]

Ok, forget comparison to used PCs then. What you say about the company lacking economies of scale may be true as well, but the real question remains: what market do they possibly hope to enter with this thing? Media PCs / Media players / DVRs? Gaming rigs? Small, quiet general purpose machines? Cool looking computers that are fit for a place in the living room? Machines that come with loads of geek cred? On any of these markets, this device will lose out to cheaper, better and better known alternatives. Hell, on that budget you can probably buy several machines to cover all of these categories, even if you throw Apple devices into the mix.

The only market demographic I can see for this device is the "affluent, insane Amiga fan" group. Not much of a market I would think.

Re:Pricepoint fail

[DrgnDancer]

They didn't develop an OS though. It's a Linux Distro. I'll grant you it's not free to put together a Linux distro either, but it's a Hell of a lot cheaper than writing an OS from scratch. Even buying the components at retail cost, they're essentially charging around $1500 for a roll-your-own Linux and some ugly case graphics.

Re:Pricepoint fail

[FrkyD]

Mass produce? Don't you mean mass assemble? It looks like a collection of off the shelf hardware and software that has been branded and badged with Amiga. Upgrading the internal HD from 1 to 3TB adds nearly 500 to the price. That's almost a current Mac Mini. Sorry, but these prices are just absolutely stupid.

And I'm saying that as a mac user.

Re:Pricepoint fail

[mcgrew]

The OS is Linux-based and couldn't possibly cost much. There's no way one of these is worth the price of an iMac. An earlier poster noted how he put together a comparable one of far less than half the price, paying retail for the parts, and I'd bet it took him less than a half hour to assemble.

No, $2500 for one of these is rediculous unless you make $2500 an hour.

Re:Pricepoint fail

[idontgno]

And since we know the ugly case graphics* (with the case, the blu-ray drive, and the power supply) will cost you only $350 by itself, that means the ultra sweet Linux distro is $1150.

Ouch. I sprained my brain on that thought.

*You know the weird thing? My first thought when I saw the picture of the case design was "How'd they stamp an Amiga trademark into the front of a Mac Mini?" And that wasn't a happy thought at all.

Re:Pricepoint fail

[shadedream]

Worth pointing out in this comparison is that that 27" iMac is also going to include a 27" IPS display (~$1000 separately from about any vendor I've seen). Not that I'm saying it's the better option because of this, just factoring that into the price comparison here.

Now what Apple charges for RAM/Drive upgrades is a different (very ludicrous) story... anyone who buys into them is silly.

Re:Pricepoint fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Is "rediculous" some sort of combo of "red" + "ridiculous"?

ENGLISH. SPEEK IT RITE PLEAZE.

Re:Pricepoint fail

[sqldr]

Or, you could spend about £16000 on one of these way-over-the-top-babies...

https://secure.scan.co.uk/aspnet/forms/swordfish/

Re:Pricepoint fail

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. I wish their customer service was really good. "Mail it in and we'll fix the DVD for you and then get it back to you in a month" fucking blows. In fact I don't even want to bother with it, I just put up with a DVD that doesn't work.

NOT AMIGA OS

[JoeCommodore]

Note these aren't the same guys working on the Amiga OS

The Amiga mini they use their own re branded Linux Commodore OS. Amiga OS is a totally different animal.

Re:NOT AMIGA OS

[suso]

Yep. Its basically no better than those eBay sellers that try to sell open source apps like Blender, Gimp and Audacity like its commercial software.

Re:NOT AMIGA OS

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm almost wondering how they're even able to use the "Amiga" name & logo, but given the retarded and incestuous nature of the Amige post-Escom, I'll just assume they have a license written on a napkin by a drunk guy who claimed to work for Amiga Inc. this one time.

Re:NOT AMIGA OS

[Anonymous Coward]

They sure aren't.

http://www.kappamaki.com/grr.html

Re:NOT AMIGA OS

[Provocateur]

Note these aren't the same guys working on the Amiga OS

Looking at the price, I'd say the guys that managed the old Amiga and ran it into the ground, are back and in charge of THIS asylum.

Re:NOT AMIGA OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, no Amiga OS and no Amiga hardware. The only thing it makes it related to Amiga it is the name.

Where cant I get....

[Lumpy]

The KDE skin they are using?

That is the coolest KDE setup I have ever seen. Most of them look like crap, and that one looks great!

Re:Where cant I get....

[SmilingBoy]

http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_OS_Vision_Download.aspx

Re:Where cant I get....

[qwertyatwork]

With the exception of the menubar in the application rather than the top of the screen, that is OS X you are looking at.

Re:Where cant I get....

[bwintx]

".aspx" -- so the Commodore site is running on IIS?

Hmm. <raises_eyebrow>

Re:Where cant I get....

[alci63]

So they are hosting their site on a Windows settup (aspx)... they really deserve a nasty guru meditation.

Re:Where cant I get....

[Hatta]

You can't get that KDE skin almost anywhere.

Re:Where cant I get....

[Anonymous Coward]

You're joking, right? That thing looks absolutely amateurish.

Re:Where cant I get....

[FrkyD]

And the hardware actually looks like the last generation Mac Mini. With badges.

Re:Where cant I get....

[synapse7]

I like how they are glamorizing compiz effects and the games that have been available in most default repositories for how long now? yeah way to be late to the party.

Re:Where cant I get....

[idontgno]

AAAAGH! The ironies KEEP PILING UP! And none of them are funny, "make you chuckle", ironies. They're infuriating, "you obviously don't get it", "HULK SMASH" ironies.

Amiga. Denied dignity, even in death.

Re:Where cant I get....

[Deag]

No, in this case ASP stands for Amiga Server Pages.

Re:Where cant I get....

[Noughmad]

I would say this is being marketed towards Windows users, who don't know that 3D desktop effects even exist. So that's actually a good thing, an expensive computer that shows off common features of Linux.

Re:Where cant I get....

[sqldr]

No, in this case ASP stands for Amiga Server Pages.

Is it written in aREXX?

Amiga?

[SirDice]

If it doesn't run AmigaOS it's not an Amiga. Heck, AmigaOS 4.1 was released not too long ago. http://www.amigaos.net/

Re:Amiga?

[mister_playboy]

Unlike almost every other niche OS circa 2012, that Amiga OS is closed-source.

So to hear there is some computer running GPL'd Linux, of all things, that is being called an Amiga amuses me.

Forget the names please

[sTERNKERN]

Back in the old days Amiga, C=64, ZX81, etc. names meant something.. just let them die peacefully, do not tread on their graves by naming a plain today's PC as one of those.

Re:Forget the names please

[lennier1]

The PC they put inside an imitated C64 shell at least had some decorative value.

Re:Forget the names please

[Anonymous Coward]

ZX80 is where its at, not the black one, I have a working boxed WHITE ZX80, the ORIGINAL.

ZX81 came after.

Oldtimer cars are expensive too

[captainpanic]

Even if they are completely refitted and tuned, an oldtimer will always be an expensive and slow car. Still, people buy it.

And they sometimes have a blu-ray installed in it.

Re:Oldtimer cars are expensive too

[dejanc]

True, but this is not an old-timer. This is an equivalent of "2012 Abarth Mini" which looks like Peugeot 307 and costs like Porsche Panamera... It's neither Fiat 500 Abarth or Mini nor it has the value of Panamera and looks and feels like it was made this year (which it was).

Pixel aspect ratio

[Anonymous Coward]

A problem that I have with Amiga emulators on my PC is that they distort the Amiga's pixel aspect ratio. That's not too much of a problem with PAL graphics, but with NTSC it is. Does the new Amiga preserve the original pixel aspect ratio?

Basic stuff

[jones_supa]

It seems to be pretty much a standard mini-ITX build. Even the case is a Streacom F1C, with the Amiga logo etched on it.

Re:Basic stuff

[AshtangiMan]

Thanks for that . . . it seems that there are no north american sellers for the Streamcom cases :( I suppose I'll have to have one shipped from the UK or something.

So...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good CPU and RAM, horribly bad graphics card and completely overpriced? Sounds like they are trying to reinvent the Mac.

The anti-slashvertisement!

[teslar]

Notice how that summary is about a product yet it is almost exclusively filled with negatives? Ladies and gentlemen, we give you the.... anti-slashvertisement.

I wonder what happens if the next story is a slashvertisment and the two touch?

Re:The anti-slashvertisement!

[oodaloop]

They would probably annihilate each other in a flurry of dupe-onic posts.

Re:The anti-slashvertisement!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder what happens if the next story is a slashvertisment and the two touch?

It gets moved to a new parish.

Wanted... Stupid people

[clickclickdrone]

Who will see the name and want to buy it for the nostalgia fix. There's going to be some.

Re:Wanted... Stupid people

[Anonymous Coward]

It's even directly marketed to them. The video would look like a joke to most people.

Do you remember
when you loved
computers?
Saying that and then showing pictures of an ancient WIMP GUI is going to attract only the hardcore fans.

(Or hardcore idiots)

GPU

[dirtyhippie]

Serious question: what do people need a beefy GPU for on a machine with an alternative OS? You already can't run the latest PC/windows games, and you don't need a spec-tastic GPU for running 99% of other applications. Am I missing something, or is this just hardware lust?

Re:GPU

[silanea]

I am running a large number of my Steam purchased games on Linux through Wine. So yes, I do need that beefy GPU.

Re:GPU

[dreemernj]

Take a look at some of the games that work on Linux thanks to Wine.

Re:GPU

[jedidiah]

It's almost like we're the 1%. '-)

Don't worry. We are "geeks". We can find something to completely swamp that CPU with.

Re:GPU

[Anonymous Coward]

Cycles

Re:GPU

[CronoCloud]

Besides games through WINE there's also some native Linux applications like Second LIfe, which really likes a nice GPU. The only reason I have a cheap ass GT220 in this thing to upgrade the integrated 6150SE is SL.

Re:GPU

[jedidiah]

All steam games on MacOS huh?

Sounds like a sad little Fanboy with no clue at all.

Re:GPU

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause the computer is not a console, it's a work tool which can also be used for entertainment.

Commodore history of a name

[basotl]

Commodore International went bancrupt in 1994. It was bought by Escom which also went bankrupt in 1996. In September 1997, the Commodore brand name was acquired by Dutch computer maker Tulip Computers NV. In late 2004, Tulip sold the Commodore name to Yeahronimo Media Ventures. Yeahronimo Media Ventures soon renamed itself to Commodore International Corporation. On June 24, 2009, CIC renamed itself to Reunite Investments. CIC's founder, Ben van Wijhe, bought a Hong Kong-based company called Asiarim, and Asiarim purchased the Commodore brand from Reunite. Asiarim then changed its name to Commodore Holdings Corporation.

Ownership of the Amiga line passed through a few companies, from Escom of Germany in 1995, and then to U.S. PC clone maker Gateway in 1997, before an exclusive lifetime license was made to Amiga, Inc. in 2000. On March 15, 2004, Amiga, Inc. announced that on April 23, 2003 it had transferred its rights over Amiga OS to Itec, LLC, later acquired by KMOS, Inc. On March 16, 2005, KMOS, Inc. announced it's change of corporate name to Amiga, Inc.

Commodore USA, LLC was founded in April 2010. Commodore USA licensed the Commodore brand from Commodore Licensing BV on August 25, 2010 and the Amiga brand from Amiga, Inc. on August 31, 2010.

TL;DR This is not the Commodore International you knew and loved.

Re:Commodore history of a name

[coldsalmon]

...the Commodore brand name was acquired by Dutch computer maker Tulip Computers NV...

Well that explains the price: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

Re:Commodore history of a name

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you can TL;DR your own post... That makes no sense whatsoever.

Re:Commodore history of a name

[MMC Monster]

At this rate, just about every tech company's going to have a share of those trademarks.

Can we just get it over with and say that the names Commodore and Amiga have entered the public domain?

Seems like that's where this is headed, anyway.

Re:Commodore history of a name

[thoromyr]

wow. lots of shell games apparent in those sales and corporate name changes...

Wrong OS

[Stormwatch]

A custom Linux distro? What's the point of calling it Amiga then? They should have made a PowerPC machine, running the actual AmigaOS, then they could call it an Amiga. Hell, if you install AROS on any regular PC, it will be far more truly Amiga than this junk.

Re:Wrong OS

[Stormwatch]

Wait, someone is making an actual next-gen Amiga, and it's not those dolts. See here.

Re:Wrong OS

[crazyjj]

What's the point of calling it Amiga then?

To make money off the nostalgia factor.

Re:Wrong OS

[Stormwatch]

Then they should have made something that at least looks like an Amiga, not a Mac mini.

Re:Wrong OS

[Anonymous Coward]

I would rather call the natami the next gen amiga.
The natami has more in common with amiga arch than the X1000 wich is a generic power pc.
http://www.natami.net

again?

[sixsixtysix]

i swear they tried to re-enter the market like 8-10 years ago, also to lackluster reception. wtf is wrong with these people?

Re:again?

[Anonymous Coward]

again... It's not the same folks. These people just bought the name and are trying to make some money off of it.

Re:again?

[sixsixtysix]

that's what i meant. wasn't the re-entry before some other company licensing the name with the same bullshit facade?

"Lackluster Linux"

[majesticmerc]

Where can I download Lackluster Linux, and how do I install it on my mediocre laptop?

Re:"Lackluster Linux"

[zevans]

I would quite like a Lacklustre KDE, if that's one where they don't remove features with every "upgrade." (Panning, and now CPU scaling)

Sounds like the same ol' Commodore...

[meburke]

I first sold Commodore in Minneapolis back when they were making calculators in 1968. They came out with a 30-lb., programmable calculator that used magnetic strips to hold the programs. It only held 30 instructions, but it had recursion so it outperformed Friden and Marchant's competitive products. (One was 60 lbs and had two units connected by a thick cable, the other needed to be reprogrammed by performing the operation so it could be memorized before starting to produce any useful work.) I sold a bunch to Bell. With no printer (nixie-tube readout) an office of 30 people was practically silent. Bell had open rooms filled with clacking and clanking calulators in those days. Now we complain that the person next to us has a loud keyboard... Well, I made some money, but you should have heard the owner complain about the money he had tied up in Commodore. I didn't really know what he meant at the time.

Jump to 1978: I'm the first one selling Apple II and Commodore PET computers in Anchorage. I had to order 5 PET units at a time. My cost was $999.00 and the selling price was $1499.00. As long as I had a $5000 deposit with Commodore I had a $5000 "line of credit". But the manufacturing was lousy. I typically had shipments come in with two or more units DOA (and one where 4 out of my 5 units were DOA), which I had to RMA and wait for them to be returned. I needed stock? No problem: Commodore would gladly take another $5000 deposit and let me order 5 more units...

Jump to 1988: I'm selling computers to NASA in Houston for a store that also carries the Commodore Amiga. And guess what?..My manager is complaining about the same lousy manufacturing and policies that I did 10 years ago.

Jump to 1993: I helped set up a computer department for BizMart (now OfficeMax) and they are trying to deal with the same lousy stocking problems from Commodore. Right around Christmas time we sold a lot of Commodore Amiga and associated products. After Christmas the returns started coming in: It seems that we had all the marginal units dumped on us to make the Commodore numbers look good for some type of joint venture or purchase deal.

I believe in my heart that Commodore would have gone out of business if they didn't have the CMOS manufacturing to keep them afloat. I pity the vendors stuck dealing with Commodore, but it will probably be someone clueless like Best Buy anyway. The commodore products were somewhat innovative, but the company was not consumer or vendor friendly.

Re:Sounds like the same ol' Commodore...

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you tie an onion to your belt as was the style at the time?

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

Re:Sounds like the same ol' Commodore...

[Nethead]

I too worked at a Commodore shop. Our "RMA" policy was to buy a good C64 from Toys-r-Us and swap the bad part (very often the power supply) we got from Commodore and return it to Toys-r-Us.

I remember on the SX64 the power supply would die if you just looked at the 9VAC pins on the user port wrong. The case mounted fuse wouldn't blow, the little diode sized one wrapped up in the supply transformer would. I made some nice spare change replacing that fuse with a bit of wire.

Still, the first portable color computer, that was a sweet box.

Re:Sounds like the same ol' Commodore...

[meburke]

Did you do this with Toys 'R Us co-operation? If not, you are a crook and exactly the type of vendor that honest people shouldn't deal with. I hope your kids are proud of you.

Re:Sounds like the same ol' Commodore...

[Nethead]

No, the guy I worked for was a crook. A real piece of work. But I was young and foolish and dazzled by working with computers. Soon after that episode I left and went to work for a company making telemarketing machines. That felt less dirty.

WTF

[rossdee]

So what makes this machine an Amiga?

FWIW I owned amiga computehttp://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/03/22/1241200/amiga-returns-with-lackluster-linux-powered-mini-pc#r(s) from July 86 until July 02 (At which point I moved to the US, so sold them or gave them away.

Completely Missed the Decade

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one to think Amiga OS completely missed the last decade? For a bigger quantity of decade than one?
The web site of Amiga OS is fancy, yes, but the actual screenshots of the system? Apple desktop married with widget set circa '85...
Notice how the demo video never stops for a single second on any frame, you have to actually pause the video to get real samples of this OS.
Even more to come:
- Crappy UI;
- Not a single innovative idea -- everything was borrowed from either Mac OS or Linux;
- Strange marketing;
- Rebranded OSS applications and games;
- Highly overpriced.
How any of the above delivers value? This is dead before it even ships anywhere...

Commodore USA...you're funny!

[unics]

I nearly died laughing at the $2495 price tag.

Commodore and Amiga died decades ago

[DrXym]

Every thing since has been the warmed over remains. I'd love to know what value the Commodore brand has any more. I don't believe many people under the age of 30 would even recognise it and those over the age of 30 would have the sense to know that usually it's slapped on some crappy OEM rebadged piece of shit.

What's the point of the Amiga name, now?

[damn_registrars]

The "new" Commodore company is selling PCs under both the Amiga and Commodore badges, but they are functionally interchangeable. They are based on the same hardware, and run the same software. They just fit in different form factors, and carry slightly different price points, as far as I can tell.

It seems like they resurrected the Amiga brand name just to see who they could see who they could sell it to with a fancier badge. Very reminiscent of the Lexus ES / Toyota Avalon / Toyota Camry situation where people think they're getting a better car just because it has a luxury badge even though its all the same parts.

full production? hmmmmmm....

[Anonymous Coward]

As a commadore owner of the 80's with the 64 and Amiga 2000, I appreciated the capability of those machines more than ever for the time. The price was right for what you got for graphics $ 299 for a commadore 64 was a deal. I paid $350 for my first Amiga in 1988 and it was fine for the time, especially for gaming. This Amiga sounds like a different group of engineers put it together under new ownership ? hmmmmm... If the graphics card is not it's strong point it has 16 gb of ram and a bluray player one has to wonder if it could even render the data, 1tb hard drive that isn't solid state for that price ? Just a guess but it sounds like they have 1-2k of these in production and 3rd party costs are at a high price point because they are not in full production quite yet.

  $2500 says it....

Linux with an Amiga emulator

[na1led]

I bet I could build an Amiga for far less and make everyone think it's an Amiga. I actually prefer the look and feel of the old hardware. Wish I could get my hands on an Amiga 2000 system real cheap.

Re:Linux with an Amiga emulator

[shippers]

My thoughts entirely - apart from the emulator I can't see what else makes it an Amiga. Coincidentally I've just been getting back into Amiga stuff through WinUAE, with artificial floppy drive noises turned on for added nostalgia. If only I could remember how to swing Workbench...

RAM disk

[Pandur77]

Guess I'm not the only one that used to run software from a ram disk on my Amiga. That would at least be a decent explanation for the 16GB of ram. :o)

Could the real Amigas please stand up

[Anonymous Coward]

Please, please, please check out the "real" Amiga descendants that carry on the spirit of Amiga:

Amiga OS4 from Hyperion, MorphOS from, er, the MorphOS team and AROS from the, er AROS, team.

The first runs on custom built/designed PPC based machines - expensive, but unusual

The second runs on PPC-based MACs - cheap, but oldish

The latter is an open-source AmigaOS re-implementation and runs on x86, PPC and ARM.

ALL of them have far more to do with Amiga than this Linux on an expensive box nonsense.

This is retarded.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, why do people think they are doing something special and unique by making crap like this?

Mini, without the computer.

[tverbeek]

$345 for just the box, BluRay drive, and power supply? For another $250, Apple will give me pretty much the same thing, but with a computer and a bunch of software inside. (OK, only DVD instead of BluRay, but who still uses optical media these days?)

Uninspired junk.

[MaWeiTao]

It's a bit pathetic that the case for this "Amiga" is essentially a bad Apple Mini knockoff with some Commodore and Amiga logo photoshopped on.

Couldn't they have invested effort in getting a custom case designed that evokes the original? The Amiga 1000 had a cool looking case which could look awesome as a modernized, compact unit. I wish the Apple aesthetic would just die. Not that it's a bad design, but most companies, outside of Japan anyway, seem too uncreative to come up with their own designs.

And they have the gall to charge $2500 for this generic crap?

Wow, this thing is sad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Without the IR remote in the specs on their site you can build this exact system in a more generic iTX case for around $1000 which would leave you with $1500 to upgrade that crappy video card. Heat generation would likely be a problem if you do, but the unit is obviously meant for being used as a home entertainment PC not as a game or general purpose PC. Driving 1080p is a lot easier than driving higher resolutions so the card doesn't need a lot of power. This thing also comes without any interface equipment except the IR remote. $2500 makes Apple look cheap. A somewhat comparable Mac Mini with 8GB and only 750GB HDD is more than $1000 less than this and that's with the Magic Mouse and the Wireless keyboard. A Mac Mini server with the Super Drive is also still $1000 less than this thing and you really only give up the crappy (want to use more definitive exclamatory word) OS and 8GB of RAM.

The legendary luck of Amiga

[idontgno]

Even in death, the poor franchise can't catch a break. It keeps getting reanimated zombie-style by people whose goal seems to be:

Manage and market a computer product WORSE the the original (record-settingly bad) crew?
Challenge Accepted.

And we can add mediocre engineering to boot!

Seriously. The one huge technological advantage the Amiga had over its market competitors "back in the day" was high-performance graphics hardware. Labeling a generic Mini-ITX with a low-performance Nvidia chipset an "Amiga" is like pasting a Lamborghini badge on your bottom-of-the line Civic. The irony would be risible, if I didn't have this illogical sentimental attachment to what "Amiga" is supposed to mean. As it is, it's just sickening.

And angering, too. It's an insult to the intelligence of the Amiga fanbase by cynically plucking at that those heartstrings to fob off mediocrity with the right trademark at some kind of "sentiment premium" price.

It's almost enough to make you believe in anti-Amiga conspiracy theories.

I'm not gonna comment much on TFA's criticisms of the OS's visual design. The video does present some screenshots that make the GUI look like it was frozen into a glacier in 1992 and just got thawed out, but it's hard to argue about how AmigaOS and Workbench would have evolved if it the product hadn't died, and the desktop look & feel are probably designed to specifically hearken back to that earlier aesthetic.

Re:The legendary luck of Amiga

[idontgno]

but it's hard to argue about how AmigaOS and Workbench would have evolved if it the product hadn't died,

I take this precise statement back. There is an extant example of the evolution of the Amiga Desktop, and it's here. And frankly, it does look (to me) like the "proper" evolution of the classic Workbench.

the desktop look & feel are probably designed to specifically hearken back to that earlier aesthetic.

OTOH, this statement I stand behind, and now actually feel more strongly about. This Linux distro's desktop design is probably a deliberate choice to reinforce the nostalgia for the Workbench 3.x look and feel on platforms like the A1200 or A4000, with a touch of Demoscene aesthetics. Maybe a cynical attempt at manipulation, maybe an honest homage to the old sk00l.

Buy a Macbook Air

[tkrotchko]

Has almost everything here, with i7 and full SSD, you get it for about $1,600.

What's the name of the second game?

[Errtu76]

Anyone knows what the title of the second game that's been played? I remember it from a long time ago and would like to play it again. Even more if it's in Linux.

..but wait...there's more!!!

[gregarican]

Looking at their website, they also have the C64. And they even go further back in time. Reminiscent of my old VIC-20 I used to tape-load games on (only to have the tape be wrinkled and encounter load errors) they have the VIC. Although it looks suspiciously like the "reissued" Amiga they are trying to sell.

Lemme see...beta-status operating system. Check. Way overpriced hardware. Check. Free Linux distro. Check. Taking a brand name and using it as snake oil (much like Guns 'N Roses is doing now). Check. Where do I sign up????

Why all the bitching?

[liquidweaver]

Is it overpriced - most definitely. But this is Slashdot, and you have a company trying to make a commercially successful PC with Linux on it. Why is this a problem?
The original article had an obvious hard slant against it - let's try and think for ourselves a little here.

DISCLAIMER: I type this on a Windows box, but I have a vt420 connected to an Arch VM sitting next to me :)

Re:Why all the bitching?

[idontgno]

Alas, the point of the article wasn't "OMG THE YEAR OF THE LINUX DESKTOP IS FINALLY UPON US!".

The point of the article is "OMG HERE'S ANOTHER CLUELESS FAUX-AMIGA PRODUCT."

It's not a Linux story. Don't be hatin' because of that.

BTW, if this is your idea of a "commercially successful PC with Linux" breakthrough, the Linux community must be in exceedingly dire straits. I would certainly not want this particular system to be MY representative in the "desktop product of the future" pageant. What it lacks in class, it makes up for in overpricedness. It successfully combines "loud and tacky" with "amazingly expensive" and tosses in "poor performing" for a bonus.

This is exactly what Burberry was afraid of chavs doing to its mindshare.

Re:Why all the bitching?

[Anonymous Coward]

1) This obviously won't be commercially successful with that price point.
2) If you look at the customizations to the distribution - it's not winning anybody over
3) The parts are just a poor selection of off the shelf parts anybody could buy and put together themselves. Even the case is just a Streacom F1C with some stickers on it...

Mac Mini

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me, or did they just slap AMIGA on the front of a mac mini, put in some extra RAM, and call it a day?

Seriously, $2,000+ ??? Who do they think is the market for this?! Crap graphics card means you can't game with it, you can't modify it, so it isn't a console PC, it isn't a form-factor pc, this is some kind of crappy black box computer. But then, if that was the case, you'd think it would be BUDGET price, not MORE expensive than a desktop.

So I guess their market is rich businessmen who don't need a very powerful computer and are willing to spend more money to get a crappier computer, so long as its smaller?!

Apple totally beat them to market on this one.

How This Abortion Came to Be

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Self-described nerdy high school student makes a "product" for some pathetic class. Hears father talk about how great the Amiga was, decides that's it. Wants to redesign it to be "modern". Doesn't actually understand what an Amiga was, just writes up a quick design.
2. Gamer dipshits want to make it "leet", fill it with useless amounts of RAM, crappy video card, and "Linix (sic)" because that's "leet".
3. Business school dropout catches wind of the idea, sees dollar signs. "Wow, that's cool, it's like a Mac Mini. I can hire some Asians to build this for $300, and then sell it for $2500! Silver things are worth more money!"
4. Business school dropout hires Tron-obsessed nerd from #1 to make shitty video.
5. ???
6. Profit!

Why not build your own box at Newegg?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't get it - a ridiculously overpriced box, when you can buy your own best-of-breed parts at Newegg and have the same box cheaper? (Or I'd love to have $2500 to spend at Newegg building a system! Wow, I thought my $800 system in December was a spending spree.) Anyone old enough to remember Amiga or Commodore would be just the sort of person who would build a DIY system and put Linux on it. Who is the target market for this thing?

Indiana?

[Weaselmancer]

Let it go.

That hole across the top front

[Skapare]

What's that big hole across the top front? I hope it's an SD/SDHC/SDXC slot.

Nice to see hardware with...

[future assassin]

a factory Linux distro BUT $2500? I guess they're taking a cue from Infinity and Accura and slapping a "Upscale" brand name logo onto a standard product and charging more.

Does this include a monitor, mouse and keyboard?

Got a laugh from the video

[ddd0004]

Some of tasks that they we're promoting are and have been standard computer fair for 10+ years. "Work, Search Internet, Edit Sound, Create Graphics"

And I think I would have said "Search the Internet" if possible, that sounds too much like my parents asking "Can this computer do Internet?"

ignore this "Amiga", the real platform is elsewher

[amigabill]

Understand that this has nothing to do with what people know to be or remember having been an Amiga. The "True Amiga" and the name have gone in somewhat different directions. Amiga the company licensed Amiga the name to these Commodore people to stick on whatever they want to stick it on. it has nothing to do with "Classic" Amiga computers, AmigaOS, or what the remaining Amiga user community is interested in. Most of us feel that this Amiga the name thing is nothing more than Amiga the company flipping us all off and doing everything it can to cause confusion and harm to the user community and AmigaOS platform. We the community use computers now called "Classic" Amigas running AmigaOS (the old M68K/PowerPC based Amiga 1000, 500, 2000, 3000, 4000 models), more modern AmigaOS4 or MorphOS computers called AmigaOnes or SAMs, Pegasos(1 or 2), Efika, or some Powerbook models for MorphOS, or nearly any PC running AROS or WinUAE.

AmigaOS4.x is the current "True Amiga" OS platform with the officially licensed name and source code origin, and is PowerPC based. MorphOS is also PowerPC based and at one time was considered as a candidate to become the "True" AmigaOS, not it is an -alike competitor. MorphOS recently suggested they are considering switching or adding support for ARM and/or x86 at some point in the future. AROS is an open-source clone and runs on x86 and other processors.

This "Commodore Amiga" thing is an annoyance to many in the Amiga user community. It's not the return of anything Amiga other than a stupid sticker. The "Real" Amiga platform is elsewhere. You all on slashdot probably wouldn't like that either, as it's also expensive and a nanoscopic market (Though expensive at least makes more sense in the non-mass-market hardware scale of economy, though that's still difficult to accept at times)

The Commodore name went a different direction than the Amiga platform long ago. This company seems to want to bring the two names together again for some reason, but they don't seem at all interested in anything resembling the Amiga platform. Their Amiga 1000X (likely yet another lame PC running Linux Mint) product name seems to be an attack on the existing AmigaOne X1000 motherboard (Runs AmigaOS4 on a PowerPC chip) They even say that the free and open-source AROS is of no interest to them. I really don't understand what genuine purpose this company offers to the Amiga community. I don't really care about the sticker at this point. Give me a Quigibo 4240 running AmigaOS (or an -alike) and I'm happy. Give me a Linux box that says Amiga on it, and without anything -alike, it's just a Linux PC like any other.

Actually, Amigas weren't expensive

[Radical Moderate]

Don't forget that in the late 80s/early 90's, PCs ran $2000-3000. On a price/performance ratio, Amiga totally handed DOS/Windows its ass. But MS owned the enterprise, and the "creative types" market was barely enough to keep Apple alive, much less a third player that didn't have a clue how to market its product.

Re:ignore this "Amiga", the real platform is elsew

[amigabill]

To get an idea of what the Amiga community thinks of this, look here:
http://amigaworld.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=6305&start=0

Re:ignore this "Amiga", the real platform is elsew

[amigabill]

I forgot to mention in my initial post, there's also FPGA based hardware clones of the "Classic" Amiga computers to run the old M68k based OS on. Minimig is an open-source one available for a variety of FPGA boards such as Terasic's DE1 and Minimig-branded boards for some time now. Natami is a proprietary one that's been produced for their FPGA code developers only so far but have been seen on YouTube and such doing demonstrations of what's working so far. Even without the Amiga name at all, they to many of the community are more "Amiga" than the official name licensees like this Commodore thing.

OS/2

[unixisc]

You were an OS/2 fan? I never owned it (was a student @ that time w/o a PC of my own) but I read about it and was rooting for it to succeed. Since I learned my Computer Engineering on a PPC 601, I was rooting for OS/2-PPC to come out. It never did - IBM was building Workplace OS on top of the Mach 3 microkernel, and unfortunately, the Mach 3 was a dog - every OS built on it has been a disaster. Finally, IBM pulled the plug on it, and there was no special non-Mac OS for PPC alone other than BeOS for a brief while. That's part of what made Motorola/Freescale lose interest in the CPU.

Actually, there is a project called OSFree - which is just like Workplace OS was supposed to be, except that instead of Mach, they're using the L4 microkernel, which is one of the most advanced microkernels out there and supported on several CPUs. Like ReactOS, I'm rooting for that one to succeed as well. But I agree w/ most of your points above. As somebody who admired CPUs - particularly RISC CPUs (except ARM), I was disappointed by the demise of CPUs like the Alpha, the PA-RISC and the decline of SPARC and MIPS. You are right that none of them are likely to see widespread support on them. And Itanic was a travesty in the CPU market - never really brought any value, but just contributed in sinking PA-RISC and Alpha through hype alone, but never really succeeding them.

As for Amiga, it's dead - like NT/RISC, Irix, VAX, and so many other platforms. I actually think that the commoditization of the entire computer industry on Intel and ARM has been tragic, since a lot of these platforms didn't deserve to die.

Re:OS/2

[hairyfeet]

Dude, go download a copy of OS/2 Warp and fire up a VM and then realize when it was out you were in the Win95 era and be prepared to just have your mind blown. when Windows was 'LOL two programs at the same time? just try it and I'll BSOD your ass" I could run nearly a dozen apps on a meager 16Mb of RAM and when I maxed that old box out to 32Mb of RAM it was just insane, i could be running a dozen programs AND watching a video and it would NEVER freeze or hang or BSOD, it just wouldn't. you might crash an app but the OS was a fricking tank, just solid as steel.

As another poster it was Win2K that finally got me off because when I was handed a copy of Win2K pro in 99 it was obvious the writing was on the wall for OS/2, the apps simply weren't there and even IBM wasn't really pushing it or supporting it It was a damned shame too as it truly was a thing of beauty, just a solid stable multitasking monster. i shudder to think what OS/2 would be able to do in an era of hexacores and 8Gb+ of RAM. I could probably mix a 64 track song with a dozen effects a track WHILE surfing AND having messenging AND running a video to inspire me. it really was THAT awesome at multitasking.

What i had high hopes for and am probably REALLY dating myself was co-processing, remember that? Hoe the promise was sockets that would let you drop just about any chip? Imagine a machine where you could have a 6 core X86 AND a cell chip AND a GPU with 800+ cores AND custom ARM chips for DSPs and have them ALL be able to interact on a super high speed interconnect like hypertransport. Then you could literally customize the machine for ANY task simply by adding the right chip to it.

I have to agree though on ARM, I just don't get it. pretty much the only thing it has going for it is power, and even the lowest end bobcat chip can stomp it in IPC, much less a more powerful CULV like the Intel i series. I'd rather carry my 3 pound netbook with a brazos dual core where I can get serious work done at decent performance with 6 hours of battery than sit all day with those extremely limited ARM chips. Hell on most of those units you turn on something like Wifi and you can watch the battery life just go to shit and any kind of heavy lifting and the battery is toasty. What is sad to me is they are having to add all these DSPs for thing like HD video which not only eat into the battery life but are SEVERELY limited in function! Its not like my Brazos unit where I can use it for HD or for gaming or even use it as a GP-GPU with OpenCL, nope its this proprietary as hell limited function chips that can only do one thing and that's it. I just don't get it, the screen is too small, the battery life is too lousy if you aren't doing EXACTLY what they have tested for, zero customization, all proprietary, to me this whole "ARM revolution" is one big meh.

wow...

[Anonymous Coward]

This makes the Mac Mini look cheap in comparison.

Irony on a stick

[freeze128]

My memories of the original Amiga were from Infocom games. I myself had an Apple //e with a monochrome monitor. When I went to the local software store to pick up the latest Infocom game (a text-only based adventure), there would always be several there for the Amiga... A machine that was widely known for its graphics capabilities.

Funny that Apple turned out to be the richest company ever, and Commodore turned out to be the Flying Duchman....

See instead: VIC-Slim

[Anonymous Coward]

While this... thing... is a bit of a failure I am intrigued by at least one other thing they have to offer: The Commodore VIC-Slim.

They should focus on that instead.

Lower Prices After Massive Out Cry

[hhawk]

Understanding that not everyone will be excited by this, I am happy to announce that CUSA CEO Barry Altman just lowered prices and issued refunds... "FORT LAUDERDALE, FL. March 22, 2012 – Commodore USA, LLC announced today the revision of the introductory price of it’s latest offering, the AMIGA mini, as well as the addition of configuration options, allowing for the selection of both CPU and memory.

Due to an overwhelming outpouring of customer comments, along with those posted on the major tech blogs, the company has listened to the thousands of requests for both lower prices and more choices, and responded today with prices and options that most respondents indicated was in line with other current offerings..." The new prices for the Commodore Amiga mini are here -> http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_AMIGAmini.aspx

The full price release is available on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CommodoreUSA

Toaster?

[Anonymous Coward]

My first thought was "Does it include a NuTek Video Toaster?"

My second thought was "Video Toaster? For that price, it should have a REAL toaster built in."

so uh

[smash]

... even at the reduced price, why in the world would I buy one of these over a mac mini? Oh wow, 16gb of RAM! That's worth all of about 150 bucks these days.

Re:It goes without saying, Going back to basics

[Anonymous Coward]

They need to go back to what made the Amiga a power house, I do not understand the need for the shit Intel, nor why they want a Nvidia GPU. They had there own CPU's and GPU's. It is a shame they that this computer company could not take off, but when you have monopolies like Apple and MicroSoft these guys pretty much killed the Amiga.

Coprocessors

[unixisc]

Talking about co-processors, Apple once had a PCI card that had a Pentium on it, which could be plugged into the PCI slot of a PowerMac. Its goal was simple - any Wintel apps that one wanted to run on the Mac would run on this card. I thought that was neat - and something that other workstation vendors could have done. Or even have some PCI/VESA cards w/ Sparcs or MIPS on them w/ the appropriate extra RAM, so that they could have run the specialized apps for that purpose.

Re:Coprocessors

[bryan1945]

Yeah, wasn't it called the Orange Card or something like that? IIRC, it was just a tad too pricey for me to get one.

Re:Coprocessors

[hairyfeet]

I still have a B&W PPC Mac in my closet, damned if I know what to do with it but I just can't bare to throw such a lovely design away. Sadly it won't work with a USB to PS/2 adapter and my nice KVM is PS/2 so I can't run it or I would drive it now and then as panther is really nice on it. Those designs really were works of art, just a damned shame they don't make such lovely cases anymore. Meh maybe one of these days I'll slap that Pentium D board I have in the closet in it and make a Hackentosh out of it.

What a new Amiga should be like.

[master_p]

Indeed.

The Amiga was quantum leap in graphics and sound, for home computers, in the 80s, thanks to its custom chips.

If a new Amiga was to be in todays world, it would have to be an equal quantum leap as it was in the 80s.

And, in order to be that, it would need:

-real time raytaced graphics at 60 frames per second.
-natural voice synthersizer.
-natural voice command.
-thousands of CPU cores.
-a special multicore version of the C language.
-a truly advanced O/S that ditched the concept of filesystem and went with a database.

Now that would be a quantum leap! if they could price it at around $5000-$10000, as the original Amiga costed (roughly adjusted for inflation), it would be a new era for computers, just like when the original came to existence!

Re:What a new Amiga should be like.

[drinkypoo]

The Amiga was not that much more powerful (overall) than the most powerful PC that you could buy. So actually, all you need is to be a little better and a lot cheaper. You do, however, have to be better at something. The Amiga was provably better at sound than anyone else because of their fundamental architecture, and a bit better at video. A video card that would get decent graphics out of a PC was staggeringly expensive and not particularly fast.

Unfortunately, as it developed, none of this helped Amiga anywhere but the games market. It didn't process common PC file formats early on, so you couldn't interoperate with other professionals if you tried to do work on it. And the machines weren't powerful enough yet for non-linear video editing; that didn't really happen until the very late days of the Amiga, and the machines were anemic for that purpose anyway.

Re:What a new Amiga should be like.

[master_p]

The Amiga was a lot more powerful than the most powerful PC of the time in one department: graphics blitting. Amiga scrollers regularly had multiparallax scrolling with multiple sprites at 60 frames per second. It wasn't until the first video cards with custom chips that the PC could do such games.

i think you bitch 2 much

[Anonymous Coward]

"$2500 computer" - 'nough said

Re:It goes without saying (3)

[Anonymous Coward]

Aparently, there's an Amiga .. Called Amiga coming around the corner in 2013 , but that's when All the drivers get updated on the Graphics card side.

Hope All the Amigo-s make the 31 milestones of each version count... i.e. between 0.1 and 3.1415926535 ... Unfortunately these O/S guy's don't get it (V 4.1) http://www.amigaos.net/

x1000?

[Anonymous Coward]

if there's one thing which can call itself amiga it's the x1000 imho. It even has custom chips :)
I'm not sure if it's a recurring april's fool joke but i'd surely love to get one of these.

It isn't an Amiga

[Anonymous Coward]

Commodore does not and will not represent Amiga and the spirit of the Community any Amigan knows that.

Next - bring back the Atari ST?

[ebvwfbw]

Wondered if this was a gag post. Seems crazy. If they brought something back, it should be the Atari ST. I guess the old Atari guys like myself have too much sense to bring it back. Seems the crazy Commodore guys are still fighthing that fight. "We weren't wrong, it was better! See, it's back again!" - Yes, under Linux.

A particular movie scene comes to mind, here.

[petrus4]

"Die! Why won't you die?!" (shooting repeatedly)

Amiga: "Behind this mask is an idea, Mr Creedy...and ideas are bullet proof."

"affluent, insane Amiga fan"

[Anonymous Coward]

"affluent, insane Amiga fan" know what this is and don't want a bar of it, its got nothing of interest to them except some misused names.