Quote:
Originally Posted by TCD
It's quite obvious that Commodore by that point was lacking a 'product strategy' for the Amiga. Not sure they ever had one to begin with.
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On the contrary, the A600 was a core part of their product strategy. You could argue that it was a bad strategy, but not that it didn't exist.
The A600 continued the same strategy they had followed under Tramiel and early Amiga years - cost-reduce the existing model while developing a new more powerful one to replace it. They did it with the TED series (supposed to be a cheaper alternative to the C64), the C64C, and the A500.
The A600 also served as the vehicle for transitioning to a full surface mount motherboard, which had the potential to be much cheaper. It crammed everything the A500 had in it and more, onto a motherboard that was half the size. That also allowed the use of a compact wedge-shaped case, and all this became the blueprint for the A1200 (which was effectively a 'stretched' A600 with A500 keyboard, AGA chipset and 68020 CPU).
At the high end they had the A4000, a redesign of the A3000 but with IDE and AGA which made it cheaper (no SCSI controller, no flicker fixer). These 3 Amiga models all sported a classy white case with clean lines that made the entire lineup part of a family, with the size of each model reflecting its capabilities - in contrast to the mishmash of different designs they had in the previous lineup.