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

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 ???

[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.

Oh wow.

[Anonymous Coward]

_Only_ a terabyte of storage?

Since when is that a little amount of storage?

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: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.

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: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

[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

[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.

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.