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

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

[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.