The Amiga has a small but really enthusiastic fanbase that doesn't want to admit that it's dead. That's it, as far as I can tell. All of the modern Amiga hardware seems to suffer from similar issues to the ones mentioned here - it's expensive, slow by modern standards, has strange and annoying hardware and driver issues, and there's just not much software for PPC Amiga. It can't even run modern web browsers. (Unless I'm mistaken, the second core and a lot of the motherboard peripherals are entirely unused because AmigaOS doesn't support them.)

You've hit the nail, hard. I grew up on Amigas and SGIs and owe those platforms everything I am today professionally, but what is going on with Amiga post 90's is catering that nostalgia feel and that's about it. It's dead, Jim - but let's sell flowers to people worshiping the grave.

I had a maxed out Amiga 500 (with sidecar expansion) back in the day and it was awesome (for games and 2D graphics) in 1988, amazing in 1990, and then Commodore ate it owing to monumental incompetence.

Even at the height of its technical superiority, it was crippled for serious work. Its pixels weren't square in any graphics mode, and in the highest resolution mode you needed to endure flicker unless you had a special monitor.

I remember when our 512k mac's power supply died and we tried to use our (maxed out) Amiga for word processing we discovered the top-rated word processors became unresponsive with documents over 4-5 pages (WriteNow on the Mac was cheerfully handling hundred page documents with graphics). And its print quality was atrocious even setting aside the whole non square pixel problem.

I don't know why you were downvoted because you're describing a major problem the Amiga had in the creative industries of the '80s and '90s.

Back then almost everyone was still designing for print, and the Amiga just wasn't cut out for that. It was a multimedia machine before there was any way to distribute multimedia to anyone else than other Amiga users.

Video production was a niche that was compatible with the Amiga's design, but working with analog video wasn't going to be mainstream ever... and for digital video, the Amiga was fundamentally underpowered.

Designers were a tiny minority of computer users back in the heyday of Amigas, and they're still a tiny minority of computer users now. Designing for print on computers back then was as much a nice activity as using computers for video post production. So if the Amiga sucked at printing, that was not what held it back from succeeding, as desktop publishing was just in its cradle back then. In fact, as an avid Amiga user back in the day, I never ever heard anyone complaining about the Amiga's printing chops.

These are the kinds of arguments against the Amiga that I actually heard: "Who would ever need 4096 colors?" "I don't need to use all those sounds" (coming from IBM PC owners whose computers could only display 16 colors and only produce bleeps and blops for sound).

The Amiga's real forte was games, pure and simple. It was a monster of a gaming rig, for the day, and a ton of gaming innovation happened on the platform. Gaming was a pretty mainstream activity for computer users even then, and Commodore completely flopped by not marketing the Amiga as primarily a gaming machine.

Word processing was a huge market even if design was not.

I definitely think that, when it was released, Amiga was ahead of its time, at least compared to the equivalently priced Mac and DOS/early-windows systems. I just feel that the system hasn't really kept up since commodore left the picture.

As a child, I remember walking into a "World Computers" retail store and seeing a Commodore Amiga running some graphics demo. I was utterly blown away. It was far beyond what I had ever seen with a home computer, which at that point, was limited to a Macintosh SE and an 80286 PC running DOS 6.

Bouncing Ball?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ga41edXw3A

My first store demo of an A500 was an educational title that taught German with full audio samples using a point and click interface. My dad bought the thing with practically zero convincing from his excited kids.

Rationally you are 100% on the money, but people are not always rational and I actually love it that they did this simply because they could. Bringing a machine to life at this level is an adventure all by itself and given the rather boring nature of the compute landscape I'm all for people taking the long way home and enjoying the scenery rather than just being driven by price and practicalities.

As a nostalgic Amiga user I agree on principle, sadly this platform has little to do with original Amigas; I applaude their effort but wouldn't spend even 100 euros to buy one. The Amiga success was a result of genius, money and time constraints, being in the right place at the right moment and a huge users niche still untouched by IBM/Apple/Atari; it's impossible to repeat, period. However I we wondered what if the surviving original developers banded together again and designed something new to be produced by some Chinese fab in Shenzhen, like small companies like Friendly Elec or the guys behind the Orange Pi can do today like twice a month. That could be an interesting move to give new life to a concept.

I totally understanding the beauty of the system; what I don't understand why they don't move to something like AROS, which is open source and runs on (substantially) cheaper hardware.

To the point!

What I don't get: Why don't they use at least a customized case which doesn't look like a typical PC case (such as Apple does with the Mac Pro)?

I also do not quite understand. As someone who loves 68000-based powerhouse art computers from the '80s, I can understand the appeal of the original Amiga line, but the PowerPC ones confuse me a bit because they no longer bring a unique graphics chipset to the table. Without the (potentially) interesting graphics chipset, does the appeal really extend beyond the OS interface design and the brand itself?

There where some pretty efficient workflows in many of the tools, it was a really logical layout to an OS, and it seems like much of that thinking infected many of the developers that built apps for it. The video toaster comes to mind, while the Amiga hardware was obsolete by the time NT and SGI where in full swing for graphics, you still saw the real time stuff being done on toasters. It took advances in software to finally put the final nail in it's coffin. A lot of people that did not use Amiga's don't really realize how far ahead of their time they where. Through a lot of ingenious software and hardware designs and hacks they really built something that was from the future. That being said, after the toaster was surpassed, the present passed the Amiga up and now it's just nostalgia.

Does objective criteria matter if it is a machine that does what you need of it and you find pleasure in using it?

I write this while sitting in front of a modern machine that has as much appeal as a kitchen appliance, yet I regularly dig out an old computer to revive old interests. It is irrational, since that modern machine can easily be used to explore those old interests. Yet the old computer gives me pleasure while doing so, so that is the route that I have choosen.

What makes the Amiga so wonderful is a great question, but what makes it worth $1500 depends very much on the buyer. Some people will pay far, far more than that for a stamp or a coin or a rock, which do absolutely nothing. Beauty and value are in the eye of the beholder.

I spent more money than that on a bicycle just to learn to build bicycles. As hobbies go, $1500 isn't crazy.

Yep, it's just a hobby and not a terribly expensive one as you say.

I loved my Amiga 500 & 2000 back in the day, and spent more on them than this costs although it was obvious they were never going to be main stream.

I wouldn't do it now, but good luck to those who do.

When we were kids the Amiga was for quite some time the center of our life.

When it was launched there were PC clones with EGA graphics (16 colours), the Atari ST just launched which was a good computer and we were also outgrowing our 8-bit computers (C64, Amstrad CPC, ZX Spectrum). Then, the Amiga was gem-like compared to the alternatives and I remember I was so in love reading colorful Amiga ads over and over: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/ce/8a/49/ce8a...

But to be honest, I don't get why people still stick to it nowadays.

There's a large number of electronic music producers that still use these things.

I'm absolutely convinced they can't produce anything on their Amiga 500 that can't be made on a $50 sbc just as much as the people I've spoken to are absolutely convinced that I'm wrong and just don't get it.

I think it's more a sign of prestige for them; like trying to argue that the durability and workmanship on the $1,000 designer t-shirt is indistinguishable in quality from the generic $10 one - this is also a losing battle.

I owned an original Amiga way back when. In fact, my was from the batch that had the design team signatures injection molded into the inside cover.

It was a fantastic machine at the time. I enjoyed using it. It was a refreshing new take.

Today? Nah. There is no reason to revive almost anything from that era. The only things I have that survive the test of time are my HP-41 calculators and a rugged-as-f--k all metal shop vacuum cleaner that still works as new thirty years after I bought it.

Personally, I like the diversity of ideas and implementations. It can lead to new explorations by researchers/developers, compilers detecting unforseen errors among other things, and immunity for a subset to untargeted malware.

Me, I'd rather emulate a few classic games. But it had me wondering for a while if I'd get any value from this, before deciding "no".

I find it interesting that so many of the people making YT videos and in the current Amiga community don't seem old enough to have been there first time around! So it can't be just nostalgia.

What I really want is someone to reimagine a 3000+ prototype[0] for this decade and a modern Intuition. Then I'd probably impulse spend a lot of $. Of course that would cost someone a lot of R&D spend! It's almost inconceivable anything could recapture the magic though. :)

There's an interview from a couple of years ago with the guy who made the X5000 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb6nbQSOAA0 and his Amiga addiction.

I started out doing real programming on an Amiga and I took a LONG time to retire it. Wasn't for lack of trying...

For years after if I needed to do something useful I used the Amiga over Win, on my first couple of very expensive PCs, because it was an order of magnitude more productive. It felt faster, with endless virtual screens, despite the ludicrous MHz/graphics gap. It was actually faster at most real world tasks except those needing raw CPU loads. It was far more reliable ripping or writing CDs etc. You generally plugged any Zorro card in and it just worked - none of the faffing with interrupt jumpers and Plug n Pray/BSOD. I used it over Linux/BSD as the sw wasn't there.

It took until the XP era, and much expense, before the Amiga became pointless. I was delighted when the Macbook Pro arrived... I'd sold the 4000 well before then.

I still miss many aspects of it. Not because I am somehow stuck in nostalgia for the 90s, MHz over GHz or scanlines and flicker fixers, but because I feel it was, in many ways a far better starting point for modern computing - mostly Intuition, but also the approach to everything in the hardware design (pre 4000 anyway). If only they had developed over the years since...

I suspect, had Commodore lasted, that they'd have gone an OSX-like route - new processor (this was already planned as there was no future in 68k series) and reimagining of Intuition on top of nix, maybe BSD. It already had a rather nix flavour, ARexx and so on. Hopefully on something more interesting than just PC clone hardware, though I doubt it these days.

[0] Dave Haynie designed a machine that was another leap forward in 90/91 whilst AA was still being worked on (I think): early spec PDF: http://www.thule.no/haynie/research/a3000p/docs/a3000p.pdf

Medhi Ali wanted to cut cost above all, and make some crap PCs, so the world got the piece of junk A4000 and AGA instead. Oh, and a cost-cutting A600 that cost more to produce than the A500.