Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by redblade

I found it, and I posted it maybe 20 pages back. The 68EC020FG16Mhz $15USD and EC020@25Mhz $19USD per 1,000 units. It was under $20USD

$43US and $65USD for EC030@25Mhz and EC030@40Mhz
https://eab.abime.net/showthread.php...st#post1583930

@AmigaJay What is the source for that price break down of all AGA amigas?, And can you post that in the Amiga News section so it's easier to reference to in the future? Thanks

I’ve created a news post with the link to the document (will appear when approved).

But yes it does make you wonder if Commodore got 020/14 cpus for $8 ($7 less than the retail for 020/16s) what they could have gotten for 030/25s….

And at the end of the day it was all a balance to hit the top retail price, they were only making $65 per unit iirc so any upgrade bites into that, there simply wasn’t room for better off the shelf parts, it was all about the custom processors being good enough to make a difference to survive unlike the PC market.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by TCD

Thank you If in that list the 68EC020FG16 (which I assume is the more or less the CPU that was used in the A1200) is 15$ and Commodore got it for 8$ the 68EC030/25 might have been 20-25$ more.

I find it hard to believe that Apple and Commodore would get a better deal then the one mentioned. I thought that per 1000 would cover Apple and Commodore and companies that brought per 100 (i.e Blizzard, GVP) would have to pay the extra $5 per cpu.

Thanks Amigajay just makes it easier for referencing.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

And at the end of the day it was all a balance to hit the top retail price, they were only making $65 per unit iirc so any upgrade bites into that, there simply wasn’t room for better off the shelf parts, it was all about the custom processors being good enough to make a difference to survive unlike the PC market.

In 92 Commodore was not yet struggling to survive - 91 had been a good year, thanks to the fall of the iron curtain - but they made a serious of devastating decisions like stopping the A500, introducing the A600 only month before the A1200 … and so on

In 92 many people would have gladly payed $100 more for a faster 030 or $200 more for 030+FastRAM

But C= only put this "one size fits all" out there, which was underwhelming for many potential customers.

Leaving the Upgrades to 3rd party companies did of course not help Commodore’s business …

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Gorf

In 92 Commodore was not yet struggling to survive - 91 had been a good year, thanks to the fall of the iron curtain - but they made a serious of devastating decisions like stopping the A500, introducing the A600 only month before the A1200 … and so on

In 92 many people would have gladly payed $100 more for a faster 030 or $200 more for 030+FastRAM

But C= only put this "one size fits all" out there, which was underwhelming for many potential customers.

Leaving the Upgrades to 3rd party companies did of course not help Commodore’s business …

Not struggling in Amiga sales, struggling as a company as a whole they were, making tiny profits on bit revenue was a sign of a badly managed company at that point, having to sell a million Amiga's and only making $27m that financial year, its no wonder they went bankrupt now having to hit those unrealistic targets year on year, its a wonder they didn't go bankrupt a year earlier tbh.


I don't agree at all people were willing to pay $100 more for a 030 equipped A1200, sales were low as it was with the £399 price-point, a £499 price takes it out of the price range buyers had come to expect from a budget computer, the £499 Archimedes and £599 Falcon bombed even more because of this.


All things have a maximum price that in the UK at least seemed to be such as;
8-bit consoles - £100, 16-bit consoles - £150, 32-bit consoles - £300, 8-bit computers - £200, 16-bit computers - £400, 32-bit computers - £400.


Anything above those prices simply didn't sell (PC's withstanding), i.e Mega Drive didn't sell well until it hit £149, the C64 didn't start to sell in volumes until it hit £199, Atari ST/Amiga 500 £399. 3D0, Saturn, NGCD all had bad sales as they retailed for £399



Commodore were right to target £399 for the A1200, but as mentioned it was the custom chips that needed to be amazing for it to reach the heights of A500 sales again not off the shelf parts.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Anything above those prices simply didn't sell (PC's withstanding)

And there's your problem (or Commodore's to be more specific). You sell it as a 'home computer' you die like the rest of them. Not that hard to figure out.

[Gorf]

Commodore was always making tiny profits - even in its best years. So that was neither new nor extraordinary in 91. The managers preferred higher salaries to company profits and credits to reserves. Not very smart in the long run, but that is how they operated.

You did not understand what I wrote:

I was talking about offering different models and not just one!

At least for the German market a little bit more expensive but better equipped A1200 (or call it 1300 or 1400) would have been what a larger percentage of people wanted.
(Not everybody of course - hence not just one model)

The sales back then clearly show, statistically speaking people had no problem spending more money on computers. But Commodore had nothing to offer around the £700 spot - the A4000 on the other side was massively overpriced.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Gorf

Commodore was always making tiny profits - even in its best years. So that was neither new nor extraordinary in 91. The managers preferred higher salaries to company profits and credits to reserves. Not very smart in the long run, but that is how they operated.

You did not understand what I wrote:

I was talking about offering different models and not just one!

At least for the German market a little bit more expensive but better equipped A1200 (or call it 1300 or 1400) would have been what a larger percentage of people wanted.
(Not everybody of course - hence not just one model)

The sales back then clearly show, statistically speaking people had no problem spending more money on computers. But Commodore had nothing to offer around the £700 spot - the A4000 on the other side was massively overpriced.

True about the managers, they did run the company into the ground in that way yes.


Well Commodore did offer A1200 HD models too, but i'm pretty sure these models were just a small percentage of the total A1200 sales because of the extra wise Amiga owners in general were not willing to pay.


Having an 030 equipped A1200 as a side-option would only fragment the Amiga games market (which lets face it what the majority of people bought one for) even more, developers and publishers didn't even make AGA games/upgrades for the majority of games after the A1200 arrival, i couldn't have seen a A1200/30 doing much more than what was happening in 95/96 games wise, it is what it is hardware wise, faster CPU's were not the answer for the A1200, it needed changing from the ground-up.

If you had £700 looking for a computer in 1992, most went for a budget 386 system, they didn't even consider to pay £400 for a budget games computer and upgrade it with an accelerator because why would you? In reality only 'some' Amiga owners would, not new potential computer buyers in general.

[Gorf]

HD models are different in that everyone can just buy a hd and plug it in - and this probably at a lower price. No matter how: as a company you do not profit much (if at all) with providing more or less harddisk space

Sure: one could soon buy a FastRAM expansion or a 030 turbo boards as well, but that did not help Commodore as a company!
And here Commodore would have been in the position to offer a better price compared to an A1200+3rd-party-turbo, if they would have made an A1400 themselves!

Same goes for an affordable desktop/tower model … many customers felt the time of wedge-computer was over. This shape did not help the Amiga to be taken seriously…

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Having an 030 equipped A1200 as a side-option would only fragment the Amiga games market

Like faster CPUs did fragment the PC games market? …

All this considering the Amiga just as a game-console with a keyboard is what killed the platform!

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Gorf

HD models are different in that everyone can just buy a hd and plug it in - and this probably at a lower price. No matter how: as a company you do not profit much (if at all) with providing more or less harddisk space

Sure: one could soon buy a FastRAM expansion or a 030 turbo boards as well, but that did not help Commodore as a company!
And here Commodore would have been in the position to offer a better price compared to an A1200+3rd-party-turbo, if they would have made an A1400 themselves!

Same goes for an affordable desktop/tower model … many customers felt the time of wedge-computer was over. This shape did not help the Amiga to be taken seriously…

Well they had plans to release a CD32 with 030 CPU if you look at the 1994 timeline, maybe a 030 A1200 too, but we all know this would have not helped anywhere due to the architecture was outdated.


I still firmly believe Commodore could have survived, not with the Hombre CD64, heck even i'm not that deluded it would have been head-on with the PSX!


But a Hombre A1400 or whatever the name may have been could have carved a niche market at £400/£500, SGI was high end, Apple was DTP, PC was most of the rest, but the prices were still way too high especially outside of the US.



Most PC's under £1000 were naff with 1mb ram, SX CPU's etc. Commodore failed because of the products (AGA) were not good enough to stand out for new or existing buyers, Hombre was a game changer for the low end computer market.... etc No miracle was ever gonna come with current AGA range.

[Gorf]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Well they had plans to release a CD32 with 030 CPU if you look at the 1994 timeline, maybe a 030 A1200 too, but we all know this would have not helped anywhere due to the architecture was outdated.

Sure - but offering a 030 version in 92 as an option would have helped.
(along with ordering enough AGA chips!)

I still firmly believe Commodore could have survived, not with the Hombre CD64

Hombre was just a paper - and of course also too late IF(!) they would have managed to create such a thing.

In 95/96 a C=-successor could have teamed up with parts of the original Amiga-Team, now at 3DO. Their next-gen gfx-chipset (the M2) was very impressive.
So impressive that Matsushita later (97) bought the design for $100M.

But before that, 3DO licensed it e.g. to Konami for a couple of Arcades.
[ Show youtube player ]

A PC-gfx card prototype from Cirrus Logic with M2 chip also exists ...

An M2 based design with and additional 68k-AA+ chip*, like the Hombre design suggests, might have been in reach if Gateway would have cared.

*)
e.g. based on:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freescale_DragonBall
at this point Motorola was open to include custom designs ...

[oscar_ates]

Just 50-60$ more, add 25MHz 030 and 1MB fast ram, and there you go. It would be a savior of Amiga and Commodore

[sandruzzo]

Are there some inexpensive Aga fixes that could have helped A1200 to sell better?

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Just 50-60$ more, add 25MHz 030 and 1MB fast ram, and there you go. It would be a savior of Amiga and Commodore

Unlikely. They already couldn't make A1200s fast enough to meet demand. What might have saved them (for a little while at least) was getting it out sooner.

Why didn't they? I think Commodore, like many others, didn't realize how fast the PC juggernaut was coming up behind them. They had no idea how delicate their position was and how quickly the rug would be pulled from under them.

The signs were all there though, for those who didn't refuse to see them. Commodore USA finally got a wakeup call in 1992, when they received zero orders from their distributors for the A2200. Nobody wanted another boring ECS machine. We were all hanging out for something cheap to counter VGA on the PC. The A1200 was that thing.

The A3000 was a disastrous attempt to court the high-end 'workstation' market, the CDTV was an equally misguided attempt to court the high-end consumer electronics market, and the A600 was a premature attempt to replace the A500. All failed because neither the engineers nor management realized that what we really wanted was a serious upgrade to OCS at the low end. Why? For better games of course, and for hobbyists who wanted a better toy to play with. Don't give them that and what will they do? Buy a PC.

In 1992 an 'entry level' PC was a 386SX-16 with 1-2MB RAM and a small IDE hard drive. A sound card was extra. With a 16 bit bus It was no faster than a 286. But it had VGA graphics, and could run Windows 3.1 in '386 enhanced' mode (with 2MB RAM). The A1200 could beat that even without FastRAM and an 030 CPU. And unlike the 386SX it was expandable with no limit.

Yes, Commodore should have produced a machine with 030 CPU and FastRAM onboard, and they eventually did (A4000-030). But it should have been a mid-range model like the A2200 was supposed to be. The A1200 should have been released at the same time or earlier, and then the A500 dropped as its sales declined. By 1993 they would have been looking at the 'next generation' that would be required to keep the Amiga going into the future, with a solid base of AGA machines behind it like OCS provided earlier.

[sandruzzo]

in 1992 wasn't a great money effort for cosumer to pay a little more for 020 28mhz and 1mb of fastmem put into A1200

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by sandruzzo

in 1992 wasn't a great money effort for cosumer to pay a little more for 020 28mhz and 1mb of fastmem put into A1200

But without that being the default configuration, no developers would make software that requires it and few would make any that benefits from it.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Karlos

But without that being the default configuration, no developers would make software that requires it and few would make any that benefits from it.

I wonder why they did exactly that on PC though.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by oscar_ates

Just 50-60$ more, add 25MHz 030 and 1MB fast ram, and there you go. It would be a savior of Amiga and Commodore

I don't know what the cost would be to put FAST RAM on the motherboard. but it was an extra $4USD ($19USD) for a 68EC020FG25 and they could have that clocked at a multiple of 3.5Mhz for the A1200 so maybe 24.5Mhz.

Maybe the 25Mhz 68EC030 would have been better in the CD32.

Would people have brought the A1200 it it retailed at 450GBP with a 68EC030@25Mhz and still 2MB RAM Which would put it in Atari Falcon territory? Remember that was with no software except Workbench.

[Gorf]

Which would have been very fine as an option!

And pushing the A1200 to spring of 92 (instead of the A600) and produce enough of them for Christmas that year, might have been just enough for Commodore to survive - of course together with massive downsizing and getting rid of the PC business …

Someone on YouTube pointed out that in 1994 Commodore filed for voluntary liquidation instead of "chapter 11". So Gould and Ali did not want a court looking too closely into the books …

[Promilus]

@redblade - faster CPU = fast ram on board. It just wouldn't work without it... what's the point, that's exactly reason why faster CPU alone on bare A500 is just waste of money. Faster CPU which cannot be fed properly from CHIPRAM alone is useless. Faster cpu AND fastram makes good hardware platform. Actually pretty darn good hardware platform paired with AGA. So, yeah, that one would've been bigger jump over ECS than what Commodore had in mind. But CD32 would've been wasted anyway. The one really slim chance it got was early adoption through on-premiere exclusives for the platform. But that's just another thing - Commodore, like Atari - didn't really keep developers close.