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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.
This is not Commodore, this is not the Amiga. This is a fucking bastard.
Who said Macs were expensive again ?
_Only_ a terabyte of storage?
Since when is that a little amount of storage?
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.
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.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
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!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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/
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
HTC EVO 4G LTE w/ CM 10.2 | NookColor w/ CM 10.2 | Samsung Epic 4G w/ CM 10.1
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.
"The mind works quicker than you think!"
Wait, someone is making an actual next-gen Amiga, and it's not those dolts. See here.
Circumcision is child abuse.
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.
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.
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
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.
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!