They have a G4 700Mhz version ready to go as soon as AmigaOS 4.0 comes out. It no longer needs an Amiga 1200 as a host, it is a stand alone computer now. If only they had the marketing and the dealers, they could challenge Apple.
I was an Amiga developer for 7 years (including CD32) and that thing is no Amiga. For a start there never was AmigaOS, it was AmigaDOS & Workbench. But most importantly the custom chips are gone - Paula, Agnes, Denise & Gary - which makes AmigaOne a nice PPC based box with an obscure OS.
I'm all for keeping the fabulous memory alive, but I hate the deranged idea that the magic can be recaptured - it will just be soiled.
Give MacOS X draggable screens and chequered beachballs, hell port Alien Breed and Deluxe Paint if you want, but let it go.
Things change, AmigaDOS and Workbench got turned into AmigaOS around version 3.9 wasn't it?
To me, the Amiga was the better Macintosh. Apple should have bought it out when they had the chance.
This new system is no Amiga 500, but things change and the new Amiga had to change as well. PowerPC processor, ATX form factor, IDE hard drive, PCI slots, etc. It adapted to a PC-Dominated world. The main thing is that it is different from a PC, and offers another choice besides using a Macintosh or Linux.
Maybe it can fit in where BeOS and the BeBox failed?
I still have my old Amiga 500 that my son plays video games on.
This is a long thread that I only got interested in now, so there are many points to address. First my general thoughts on the subject: Jobs has stated on more than one occasion that he doesn't feel like getting into the PDA market. He said it's not a desirable place to be. I don't know what metric he uses to determine what markets he desires, so it's difficult to gauge Apple's potential moves in the PDA arena. Apple must know that Mac users would go nuts for a wonderful Apple PDA, but that's obviously not the market the company would like to tap.
On the other hand, another poster brought up a great point concerning market saturation. The market for MP3 players wasn't saturated - even though it appeared to be. Apple came in with a superior, price skimming, Mac-only product and it sold well. The iPod coupled with recent moves like Ink are certainly the strongest indications that Apple may do something new with PDAs. And I also agree that continued murmuring from the foreign trade press does bode well for the prospects. Yet, then again, I won't be holding my breath. With that said, here are some other things I'd like to address:
Apple and Palm
Anyone who thinks Apple and Palm have a warm relationship better be able to explain away why it took so very long for Palm to get its software to OS X. Moreover, developers continue to moan today that there are elements of the OS X version missing that make their third party applications incompatible. (I believe I'm talking about conduits.)
With that said I would like to thank the poster who found that Register article. That was quite illuminating. It seems that Jean-Louise Gassee pulled off a reverse take-over, much the same way SJ took Apple over. At least that's how The Register frames it. Very interesting indeed.
Apple, Be and Palm
There already was past ill will between Apple and Palm because Palm rejected the acquisition play. Now with JLG in place I doubt Palm would want to unite with Apple. JLG was burned by Apple at Apple; JLG and his cohorts were burned by Apple at Be, when Apple refused to acquire BeOS. Additionally, JLG must hold SJ responsible for Apple's dismissal of Be. As evidenced by Be?s reverse takeover of Palm, JLG quite possibly was planning to do to Gil Amelio what SJ did. Unless JLG hopes to take Apple over, I don't he would go for it. (And if he is looking to ?Steve? Steve, Gassee should stop dreaming.) JLG knows that he would be marginalized if Apple took Palm.
Besides, what does Apple have to gain from acquiring Palm? I can?t think of one reason why Apple and SJ in particular would want anything to do with the BeOS. What good is it to them? (More on this later. . .) Perhaps, under a Palm acquisition scenario, Apple would put a Palm compatibility environment in OS X Lite. But other than third party legacy support, what does Apple have to gain? The only other plausible reason for such a take-over would be to take Palm out of the market so that it wouldn't compete with an Apple hand-held.
Finally, Cable, your posts are definitely misguided. You state Apple should have bought Be instead of NeXT. While Be was a nice OS for what it was, it wasn?t ready for prime time by any stretch of the imagination. BeOS did indeed run on the PPC, but then again I believe NeXT had internal builds of OpenStep that ran on the PPC too. BeOS was immature and unproven in comparison to OpenStep. And with NeXT Apple also got a very powerful, respected web application engine. So your assertion that BeOS was superior because it was newer than OpenStep is ludicrous. More importantly, Steve Jobs alone was worth the price of NeXT. BeOS was too highly priced and not compelling enough for Apple to purchase back in 1996, and it certainly would have nothing to offer Apple today.
Cable, you also state that Apple should have bought Amiga to bolster the classic Mac OS. If you don?t understand the software development process or the issues that hindered the Mac, you shouldn?t be making outrageous statements. Amiga wouldn?t have done anything for Apple, let alone the Mac OS. Despite the technical diagrams companies like to post, OSs aren?t simple lego-like components. One couldn?t plug Amiga/Be/OpenStep into the classic Mac OS and make it modern. The reason Apple had so much trouble making the OS modern is the classic Mac OS and its applications made assumptions about memory spaces, threading and system globals that disallowed much architectural progress. If Apple had more powerful hardware to base its OS on back in 1984, we would have had a much more powerful OS. Yet, design constraints forced the Mac OS to be what it was, and later the backward compatibility question maintained the status quo. Amiga would have offered nothing to Apple. (As an aside, I?ve heard so many fawn over the Amiga platform. I?ve used classic Amiga boxes, and IMO, the platform was no prized pig.)
(Sorry for the off-topic comments, but I felt like addressing them. . .)
<strong>PDAs and mobile phones will not converge. They are totally different devices.
PocketPCs only suceeded through compaq/hp dealing with their business clients, with deals better for the clients than them, to force PocketPCs (crap platform) through.
Treos, communicators etc. IMHO will only suceed if this happends to.
Does anyone here want a mobile phone 4 times the size of your current one, so it can fit the screen and ARM CPUs into it? Does anyone here want a PDA with a screen the size of their mobile, and a mobile phone keypad?
A PDA organises. A mobile communicates. It makes far more sense to have both bluetooth enabled, then you can leave your mobile in your pocket, connected to the 'net while you type e-mails on your PDA.
Connection between devices? Yes. Convergence? No. A combination phone/camera/pda/whatever is pretty stupid, considering the divergent nature of their functions.
Barto</strong><hr></blockquote>
Its a shame that there are not many voices shouting this, one of the most intelligent outlooks on the convergence issue. A single device that does everything is not required. What is required is integration between these devices.
Here's to the release of the brand new newton bluetooth and airport enabled ofcourse
I strongly disagree that they should not be merged.
Stereo makers have been doing this for over 25 years. They keep making combination players and "lots and lots" of people keep buying them. The multiple functionality devices sell very well with the low-end users.
Yes, I would rather have separate components/devices that have the features that I want, but I also want them to communicate with each other(wirelessly of coarse). This is probably how the High-end devices will develope.
Just as most men carry a wallet and only some carry a briefcase, I think that there is a definite market for small and a market for big personal devices. Some people would not mind having a large Tablet device that replaced their phone, still/video camera, Radio/music/video player, Data assistant, etc. if it was cheap.
That day is many years away. Until then most devices will be High-end and be marketed to Business professionals (We can afford them).
Until Apple makes a Portable computer that has a Realtime OS, I will stick with my belief that they no longer market to the business community. So I don't see them wanting to make a Newton replacement.
Finally, Cable, your posts are definitely misguided. You state Apple should have bought Be instead of NeXT. While Be was a nice OS for what it was, it wasn?t ready for prime time by any stretch of the imagination. BeOS did indeed run on the PPC, but then again I believe NeXT had internal builds of OpenStep that ran on the PPC too. BeOS was immature and unproven in comparison to OpenStep. And with NeXT Apple also got a very powerful, respected web application engine. So your assertion that BeOS was superior because it was newer than OpenStep is ludicrous. More importantly, Steve Jobs alone was worth the price of NeXT. BeOS was too highly priced and not compelling enough for Apple to purchase back in 1996, and it certainly would have nothing to offer Apple today.
<hr></blockquote>
BeOS has a smaller footprint and doesn't need the faster system with more memory to run it. Look at how bloated OSX is and the requirements to run it. Basically Apple butchered *BSD Unix, added the Mach Kernel, and then added in the OpenStep and Mac code to it and then tweaked it a bit. It was such a rush-job that they didn't get support for some hardware in OSX until recently like DVD Players and CD Writers. Even Linux is a much better design than OSX is, with its dynamic modules that get loaded by the kernel when in use and unloaded when not used, to save on memory. Steve Jobs was a good move for Apple, but how long will he remain useful? He trimmed the Fat off of Apple, got rid of the Mac Clones, the Newton, and Apple printers and scanners. Some may say that he did about as much harm as good, but that in itself is another debatable topic.
[quote]
Cable, you also state that Apple should have bought Amiga to bolster the classic Mac OS. If you don?t understand the software development process or the issues that hindered the Mac, you shouldn?t be making outrageous statements. Amiga wouldn?t have done anything for Apple, let alone the Mac OS. Despite the technical diagrams companies like to post, OSs aren?t simple lego-like components. One couldn?t plug Amiga/Be/OpenStep into the classic Mac OS and make it modern. The reason Apple had so much trouble making the OS modern is the classic Mac OS and its applications made assumptions about memory spaces, threading and system globals that disallowed much architectural progress. If Apple had more powerful hardware to base its OS on back in 1984, we would have had a much more powerful OS. Yet, design constraints forced the Mac OS to be what it was, and later the backward compatibility question maintained the status quo. Amiga would have offered nothing to Apple. (As an aside, I?ve heard so many fawn over the Amiga platform. I?ve used classic Amiga boxes, and IMO, the platform was no prized pig.)
<hr></blockquote>
So a quick jab at the Amiga, eh? The Amiga was in development before the Mac was finished, and the Amiga designers had some of the same walls to bust through or work around that the Mac designers had. Basically it was the same CPU, a simular GUI, but a different OS and a different system design. Much of the AmigaDOS/Workbench design went around a lot of these things by using their customized chipsets instead of the CPU to work out video, audio, I/O and other tasks. Apple could have at least used those custom chips to empower the 68K Macs to get a better performance. There would have also been a color Mac in 1985 instead of 1987 if Apple had bought out Amiga and used their chipset. Besides the Amiga had a lot of good emulators, some of them Mac Emulators. Apple could have had a Dual-OS, where the new OS (MacAmigaDOS) could emulate the old OS (Macintosh System) to run older applications.
But oh, rather Steve Job's ego got the better of him, and he decided to go ahead and do it their own way without using anyone else's technology (Save what they bought/borrowed/stole from Xerox?) and just said no to the Amiga offer before the Macintosh was done.
Of course it helps to bash the Amiga, doesn't it? Nothing like killing the competion?
Comments
<strong>The Amiga is not dead yet, and it isn't underpowered either.
<a href="http://www.eyetech.co.uk/amigaone/300502update.php"; target="_blank">http://www.eyetech.co.uk/amigaone/300502update.php</a>;
They have a G4 700Mhz version ready to go as soon as AmigaOS 4.0 comes out. It no longer needs an Amiga 1200 as a host, it is a stand alone computer now. If only they had the marketing and the dealers, they could challenge Apple.
[ 07-07-2002: Message edited by: Cable ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
I was an Amiga developer for 7 years (including CD32) and that thing is no Amiga. For a start there never was AmigaOS, it was AmigaDOS & Workbench. But most importantly the custom chips are gone - Paula, Agnes, Denise & Gary - which makes AmigaOne a nice PPC based box with an obscure OS.
I'm all for keeping the fabulous memory alive, but I hate the deranged idea that the magic can be recaptured - it will just be soiled.
Give MacOS X draggable screens and chequered beachballs, hell port Alien Breed and Deluxe Paint if you want, but let it go.
To me, the Amiga was the better Macintosh. Apple should have bought it out when they had the chance.
This new system is no Amiga 500, but things change and the new Amiga had to change as well. PowerPC processor, ATX form factor, IDE hard drive, PCI slots, etc. It adapted to a PC-Dominated world. The main thing is that it is different from a PC, and offers another choice besides using a Macintosh or Linux.
Maybe it can fit in where BeOS and the BeBox failed?
I still have my old Amiga 500 that my son plays video games on.
On the other hand, another poster brought up a great point concerning market saturation. The market for MP3 players wasn't saturated - even though it appeared to be. Apple came in with a superior, price skimming, Mac-only product and it sold well. The iPod coupled with recent moves like Ink are certainly the strongest indications that Apple may do something new with PDAs. And I also agree that continued murmuring from the foreign trade press does bode well for the prospects. Yet, then again, I won't be holding my breath. With that said, here are some other things I'd like to address:
Apple and Palm
Anyone who thinks Apple and Palm have a warm relationship better be able to explain away why it took so very long for Palm to get its software to OS X. Moreover, developers continue to moan today that there are elements of the OS X version missing that make their third party applications incompatible. (I believe I'm talking about conduits.)
With that said I would like to thank the poster who found that Register article. That was quite illuminating. It seems that Jean-Louise Gassee pulled off a reverse take-over, much the same way SJ took Apple over. At least that's how The Register frames it. Very interesting indeed.
Apple, Be and Palm
There already was past ill will between Apple and Palm because Palm rejected the acquisition play. Now with JLG in place I doubt Palm would want to unite with Apple. JLG was burned by Apple at Apple; JLG and his cohorts were burned by Apple at Be, when Apple refused to acquire BeOS. Additionally, JLG must hold SJ responsible for Apple's dismissal of Be. As evidenced by Be?s reverse takeover of Palm, JLG quite possibly was planning to do to Gil Amelio what SJ did. Unless JLG hopes to take Apple over, I don't he would go for it. (And if he is looking to ?Steve? Steve, Gassee should stop dreaming.) JLG knows that he would be marginalized if Apple took Palm.
Besides, what does Apple have to gain from acquiring Palm? I can?t think of one reason why Apple and SJ in particular would want anything to do with the BeOS. What good is it to them? (More on this later. . .) Perhaps, under a Palm acquisition scenario, Apple would put a Palm compatibility environment in OS X Lite. But other than third party legacy support, what does Apple have to gain? The only other plausible reason for such a take-over would be to take Palm out of the market so that it wouldn't compete with an Apple hand-held.
Finally, Cable, your posts are definitely misguided. You state Apple should have bought Be instead of NeXT. While Be was a nice OS for what it was, it wasn?t ready for prime time by any stretch of the imagination. BeOS did indeed run on the PPC, but then again I believe NeXT had internal builds of OpenStep that ran on the PPC too. BeOS was immature and unproven in comparison to OpenStep. And with NeXT Apple also got a very powerful, respected web application engine. So your assertion that BeOS was superior because it was newer than OpenStep is ludicrous. More importantly, Steve Jobs alone was worth the price of NeXT. BeOS was too highly priced and not compelling enough for Apple to purchase back in 1996, and it certainly would have nothing to offer Apple today.
Cable, you also state that Apple should have bought Amiga to bolster the classic Mac OS. If you don?t understand the software development process or the issues that hindered the Mac, you shouldn?t be making outrageous statements. Amiga wouldn?t have done anything for Apple, let alone the Mac OS. Despite the technical diagrams companies like to post, OSs aren?t simple lego-like components. One couldn?t plug Amiga/Be/OpenStep into the classic Mac OS and make it modern. The reason Apple had so much trouble making the OS modern is the classic Mac OS and its applications made assumptions about memory spaces, threading and system globals that disallowed much architectural progress. If Apple had more powerful hardware to base its OS on back in 1984, we would have had a much more powerful OS. Yet, design constraints forced the Mac OS to be what it was, and later the backward compatibility question maintained the status quo. Amiga would have offered nothing to Apple. (As an aside, I?ve heard so many fawn over the Amiga platform. I?ve used classic Amiga boxes, and IMO, the platform was no prized pig.)
(Sorry for the off-topic comments, but I felt like addressing them. . .)
<strong>PDAs and mobile phones will not converge. They are totally different devices.
PocketPCs only suceeded through compaq/hp dealing with their business clients, with deals better for the clients than them, to force PocketPCs (crap platform) through.
Treos, communicators etc. IMHO will only suceed if this happends to.
Does anyone here want a mobile phone 4 times the size of your current one, so it can fit the screen and ARM CPUs into it? Does anyone here want a PDA with a screen the size of their mobile, and a mobile phone keypad?
A PDA organises. A mobile communicates. It makes far more sense to have both bluetooth enabled, then you can leave your mobile in your pocket, connected to the 'net while you type e-mails on your PDA.
Connection between devices? Yes. Convergence? No. A combination phone/camera/pda/whatever is pretty stupid, considering the divergent nature of their functions.
Barto</strong><hr></blockquote>
Its a shame that there are not many voices shouting this, one of the most intelligent outlooks on the convergence issue. A single device that does everything is not required. What is required is integration between these devices.
Here's to the release of the brand new newton bluetooth and airport enabled ofcourse
Stereo makers have been doing this for over 25 years. They keep making combination players and "lots and lots" of people keep buying them. The multiple functionality devices sell very well with the low-end users.
Yes, I would rather have separate components/devices that have the features that I want, but I also want them to communicate with each other(wirelessly of coarse). This is probably how the High-end devices will develope.
Just as most men carry a wallet and only some carry a briefcase, I think that there is a definite market for small and a market for big personal devices. Some people would not mind having a large Tablet device that replaced their phone, still/video camera, Radio/music/video player, Data assistant, etc. if it was cheap.
That day is many years away. Until then most devices will be High-end and be marketed to Business professionals (We can afford them).
Until Apple makes a Portable computer that has a Realtime OS, I will stick with my belief that they no longer market to the business community. So I don't see them wanting to make a Newton replacement.
Finally, Cable, your posts are definitely misguided. You state Apple should have bought Be instead of NeXT. While Be was a nice OS for what it was, it wasn?t ready for prime time by any stretch of the imagination. BeOS did indeed run on the PPC, but then again I believe NeXT had internal builds of OpenStep that ran on the PPC too. BeOS was immature and unproven in comparison to OpenStep. And with NeXT Apple also got a very powerful, respected web application engine. So your assertion that BeOS was superior because it was newer than OpenStep is ludicrous. More importantly, Steve Jobs alone was worth the price of NeXT. BeOS was too highly priced and not compelling enough for Apple to purchase back in 1996, and it certainly would have nothing to offer Apple today.
<hr></blockquote>
BeOS has a smaller footprint and doesn't need the faster system with more memory to run it. Look at how bloated OSX is and the requirements to run it. Basically Apple butchered *BSD Unix, added the Mach Kernel, and then added in the OpenStep and Mac code to it and then tweaked it a bit. It was such a rush-job that they didn't get support for some hardware in OSX until recently like DVD Players and CD Writers. Even Linux is a much better design than OSX is, with its dynamic modules that get loaded by the kernel when in use and unloaded when not used, to save on memory. Steve Jobs was a good move for Apple, but how long will he remain useful? He trimmed the Fat off of Apple, got rid of the Mac Clones, the Newton, and Apple printers and scanners. Some may say that he did about as much harm as good, but that in itself is another debatable topic.
[quote]
Cable, you also state that Apple should have bought Amiga to bolster the classic Mac OS. If you don?t understand the software development process or the issues that hindered the Mac, you shouldn?t be making outrageous statements. Amiga wouldn?t have done anything for Apple, let alone the Mac OS. Despite the technical diagrams companies like to post, OSs aren?t simple lego-like components. One couldn?t plug Amiga/Be/OpenStep into the classic Mac OS and make it modern. The reason Apple had so much trouble making the OS modern is the classic Mac OS and its applications made assumptions about memory spaces, threading and system globals that disallowed much architectural progress. If Apple had more powerful hardware to base its OS on back in 1984, we would have had a much more powerful OS. Yet, design constraints forced the Mac OS to be what it was, and later the backward compatibility question maintained the status quo. Amiga would have offered nothing to Apple. (As an aside, I?ve heard so many fawn over the Amiga platform. I?ve used classic Amiga boxes, and IMO, the platform was no prized pig.)
<hr></blockquote>
So a quick jab at the Amiga, eh? The Amiga was in development before the Mac was finished, and the Amiga designers had some of the same walls to bust through or work around that the Mac designers had. Basically it was the same CPU, a simular GUI, but a different OS and a different system design. Much of the AmigaDOS/Workbench design went around a lot of these things by using their customized chipsets instead of the CPU to work out video, audio, I/O and other tasks. Apple could have at least used those custom chips to empower the 68K Macs to get a better performance. There would have also been a color Mac in 1985 instead of 1987 if Apple had bought out Amiga and used their chipset. Besides the Amiga had a lot of good emulators, some of them Mac Emulators. Apple could have had a Dual-OS, where the new OS (MacAmigaDOS) could emulate the old OS (Macintosh System) to run older applications.
But oh, rather Steve Job's ego got the better of him, and he decided to go ahead and do it their own way without using anyone else's technology (Save what they bought/borrowed/stole from Xerox?) and just said no to the Amiga offer before the Macintosh was done.
Of course it helps to bash the Amiga, doesn't it? Nothing like killing the competion?