I agree with you. It's far too expensive, and I doubt you'll find too many Amiga users who would disagree. It's a way of keeping the platform alive while the problems with Amiga Inc. were sorted out though.

The decision to go PPC was made way, way back when there was a lot of money around, and m68k -> PPC made the most sense with regard to endianness.

Since then, with the contract with Amiga Inc, and all the legal difficulties, Amiga OS has been effectively nailed to PPC.

I remember reading that the developers would love to port it to x86 if they had the resourses, but for the moment it's PPC only.

For a couple of cheaper Amigalike options, the Amiga OS compatible MorphOS has just been released for the G4 Mac minis, and the open source AROS (in the form of Icaros Desktop) is available for x86 hardware.

As far as current guessing goes, there were around 1500 AmigaOne systems sold, and there's been around 300 SAM440ep boards sold. (Disclaimer: This is purely what I've read elsewhere.) Those systems run OS 4, so that's about 1800 users. (There's way more users of OS 3.x out there, though.)

I think Hyperion also do contract work outside of Amiga stuff. I'm not sure what though.

On the Amiga Inc. side, one of their main financiers, Pentti Kouri, died back in January. Whether this has "encouraged" the end of the legal action is open to speculation. Whatever's gone on in the background though, it's good for the platform that Hyperion have come out on top. Amiga Inc. have done almost nothing productive with it for the past 9 years. There's been a lot of weirdness going on on the Amiga Inc. side for a long time, but that's another thread entirely.

Why use Amiga OS in 2009? It makes me smile. It's fun. It really is as simple as that. I wouldn't run a business on it, but that's not what it's for. :)

The SAM440ep exists.

Now that the legal troubles are out of the way, Hyperion are free to port the OS to whatever they like.

AmigaKit.com (and a few other resellers I forget the name of) sells OS 4.1 + ACube Systems' 733MHz SAM440ep.

Yeah, it's not fast, and it's very expensive, but considering that the platform has been through lawsuit/scammer/hoaxer hell for the last 15 years, it's pretty amazing that anything exists at all.

There's a lot of love for the Amiga out there.

I remember Ian Hislop saying that "Tony Blair MP" is an anagram of "I'm Tory Plan B".

You were being anti-semantic!

Bloody hell. I need some sleep.

Jamai's!

(sorry)

News for turds?

I'm from England and my brother calls it the "hard drive" all the time. Every time he does it now, I ask him: "Did you drive here in your fucking steering wheel?"

The one I've found that works reasonably well is:

RAM is how much stuff you can do at the same time.
Hard drive storage is how much stuff you can keep.

My wife's a scientist. She spends most of her time on her computer coding in R on Debian. She's really wants to pick up a Dell Mini 10 after seeing these ads.

Why? Because you can get them in red.

The best answer is:

"Of course those jeans don't make you look fat. It's all the fucking cakes you've eaten that's made you look fat."

Hologram.

New Amiga hardware and software has been out for ages. Sure, it's slow and expensive, but it certainly exists.

That was my first thought too.

In fact, I may try out the Amiga port on my A1200 when the 68030 accelerator board I ordered the other day arrives in the post. :)