You put into words the feeling I've held onto for 25 years. When I finally gave up on my A1000 and moved to Windows on a 486, it felt like a loss to be grieved.
> What made Amigas great was the creative life energy that was weaved throughout it more than any specific technical considerations. If the Apple Macs were created with the taste of expert graphic designers, and PCs by accountants, the Amiga was made by the kind of anarchist creatives who would later on go to make things like the early Burning Man, perfect the 90s counter-culture digital art movements like the demoscene, off-beat public access videos with the video toaster, the epic Babylon 5, and allow bedroom game coders to absolutely maximize their art. It was the seed that gave visual representation to earlier cyberpunk.
Seriously, you're capturing my memory of this platform perfectly. The Mac was the nearest thing to an Amiga, but it was still lacking in some hard-to-pin-down way that I think you just nailed.
... which cost you a fortune and yet was still worse than the oldest and cheapest Amiga, nevermind the A1200 which was made available around that time.
I finally "upgraded" to an Athlon with Linux in 2000. I do not feel like I missed anything in between; Through the years, I had lots of chances to extensively use 386/486 with DOS and Pentiums with Windows 9x elsewhere than home, and at no point I thought the user experience held a candle to my Amiga, which by the way was just an A500 with 1MB RAM and no hard drive.
PCs just sucked. Quake was cool, though.
The arguments even then were frozen in time, look at all the Amiga HAM mode colors vs your 286s CGA! Ha! PC beeper vs the Amiga's sweet 4-channel digital sound. and on and on.
Meanwhile, I typed my angry responses on my 33 MHz 80386 with a 387 math co processor, a sound blaster, and VGA graphics on a system with a case actually designed to hold a hard-drive and 2 entire MB of RAM. I was bewildered at this stranger's insistence that their thoroughly hacked A500 was a better system. I was even recently introduced to the demoscene and while the Amiga demos had better design, the PC demos of the time were really quite spectacular, introducing real-time 3d in ways nothing at the time could hope to match.
It was an angry, bitter argument that went on for weeks until we both tired of it and gave up.
Looking back what I really remember was the resentment at losing their platform. Of investing and heading down a spectacular evolutionary dead-end and a desire for it not to be wiped away by boring beige boxes that lacked any of the passion or wit that the creators of the Amiga had infused into their creation.
What made Amigas great was the creative life energy that was weaved throughout it more than any specific technical considerations. If the Apple Macs were created with the taste of expert graphic designers, and PCs by accountants, the Amiga was made by the kind of anarchist creatives who would later on go to make things like the early Burning Man, perfect the 90s counter-culture digital art movements like the demoscene, off-beat public access videos with the video toaster, the epic Babylon 5, and allow bedroom game coders to absolutely maximize their art. It was the seed that gave visual representation to earlier cyberpunk.
It influenced everything and no lessons were learned from it.