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Re:Amiga Forever by squarefoot on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @02:38PM (#34071289)
I agree pretty much on everything, adding a hard disk would have placed the smaller machines in a whole different segment. I however recall also the A2000 was sold without a hard disk, just to advertise it ad a lower price, which I find absurd since that way it was essentially an A500 plus expansion slots.
Re:Amiga Forever by amiga386 on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @06:57PM (#34074706)
To be fair, the expansion slots were a pretty useful thing and allowed a lot of extra hardware (including the Video Toaster) that the A500 sidecar was incapable of. But yes, the original A2000 was a souped-up A1000, later upgraded to a souped-up A500.

I looked this up and it appears the A2000 launch price was $1495 USD in March 1987, I don't know the UK price but it would've been around £950 at the time. That's ridiculously cheap (until you understand it's an A500 with Zorro and ISA slots). The A3000, probably the best machine Commodore ever made, launched for $3379 USD in 1990.

I don't have any magazines from 1987, but Amiga Format issue 1 (August 1989) has an advertiser selling:

A2000 standalone £799

A2000 with 1084s monitor and XT bridgeboard £1099

A2000 with 1084s monitor and XT bridgeboard and A2090a (HDD controller card for the A2000 because IDE hasn't been invented yet) with 20MB HDD £1369

A2090a with 20MB HDD £479

A2090a with 40MB HDD £750

A2058 (up to 8MB RAM expansion) with 2MB RAM populated £449

I can see why you'd offer a working system, 1MB RAM, floppies only, if it more than halved the visible price.