Would it have made any difference if Commodore had made Amiga laptops?

[CCCP alert]

Atari did an excellent, if limited to monochrome mode only, 1992 laptop called the ST Book, it sold practically nothing.

Acorn produced the A4 Archimedes 1992 laptop, again sold nothing really, but perhaps important relevant to desktop Archimedes computers sold in total.

The huge amount of engineering talent and time needed to make something as good as these and then to have maybe 2000 units sold doesn't really make sense. I doubt Commodore would have lasted any longer due to their existence.

They were probably a bit busy making something out of the stalled AAA chipse development anyway to make a laptop and IIRC the wholly/controlling share owned Eagle Pitcher LCD screen manufacturer in preparation for the cancelled Commodore LCD was let go during the Gould era so no commercial advantage for production.

[A500]

Thanks for bringing this up. I had no idea those laptops existed!

[grond]

It wouldn't have made any difference other than meaning yet another project with lots of development expenses. For a laptop to be of any strategic significance market wise, your computer would have to have a lot of productivity/business software that is going to be used on the road. Laptops used as small desktop computers became a thing in the second half of the 90s when LCD display technology was good enough to replace a monitor.

[Dunny]

We made Amiga laptops back in 1993. They were A1200s with 640x512 backlit LCD display and we sold a grand total of 3. They were horrifically expensive to make, so were amazingly expensive to buy.

They were bloody lovely though, if a little large and bulky what with their rosewood or black ash cases.

[AestheticDebris]

The biggest hurdle for an Amiga laptop was probably the display. Unless you had a decent colour display with a smooth 50Hz refresh rate, most of the software people wanted an Amiga for wasn't going to work well. But laptops of the time had dreadful, usually mono, displays with terrible lag and hideous refresh rates.

The use cases for laptops at the time was pretty narrow, given the bulk involved and limited battery life. If you couldn't sell it to a businessman for doing some spreadsheets/word processing on the train journey, you probably didn't have a real market for it. No matter how cool the idea.might have sounded, the technology just wasn't really there (and that's before you consider the power requirements of all the Amiga custom chips etc).

[Minuous]

Laptops were becoming important by the late '80s and certainly by the early '90s; the lack was one of the reasons the Amiga was not taken seriously as a business machine. Maybe it would not have sold huge amounts initially but it was necessary to have a complete range of machines.

[Megalomaniac]

Laptops and Amigas weren't aimed at the same markets. The Amiga's strengths in graphical production (let alone games) would translate very poorly to the laptop screens of the day, whereas the ST's monochrome mode was a natural fit for them. Despite that advantage, the ST laptop still sold poorly, mainly because of high power consumption - and an Amiga laptop with the custom chips would surely be worse. How would you convince a business to buy them instead of industry standard 286/386 (depending on the timeframe) laptops?

[Locutus]

If released, they would be damn nice collectors items nowadays.

[sokolovic]

Isn't the answer solved by the OP ?

[Karlos]

Originally Posted by Dunny

We made Amiga laptops back in 1993. They were A1200s with 640x512 backlit LCD display and we sold a grand total of 3. They were horrifically expensive to make, so were amazingly expensive to buy.

They were bloody lovely though, if a little large and bulky what with their rosewood or black ash cases.

Was that the PAW thing?

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Isn't the answer solved by the OP ?

Pretty much. Let's sum it up: No.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by Karlos

Was that the PAW thing?

No, this was made by Applied Systems Group. It was an A1200 in a wooden laptop case with colour LCD; the LCD alone was more than the cost of the Amiga. We made two in Black Ash, one in Rosewood.

Last one I saw was bought by a carpet salesman in yorkshire.

[grond]

Originally Posted by Minuous

Laptops were becoming important by the late '80s and certainly by the early '90s; the lack was one of the reasons the Amiga was not taken seriously as a business machine.

But by then the race for "business computer" was run. The Amiga didn't run Microsoft Office. Case closed.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Dunny

It was an A1200 in a wooden laptop case with colour LCD; the LCD alone was more than the cost of the Amiga.

Just out of curiosity: Did you ever try to run a (scrolling) game on it?

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by TCD

Just out of curiosity: Did you ever try to run a (scrolling) game on it?

I never saw it run anything other than WB3.1 - it did handle 256 colours without issues though. If memory serves it didn't do lowres? But damn it was a long time ago now.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by Dunny

But damn it was a long time ago now.

Indeed I vaguely remember seeing a quite expensive color LCD around 1996 and while it was okay for typing, any movement on it was really blurred.

[Bren McGuire]

can we have a forum for this kind of fan-fiction what-if theorizing so i can completely ignore it when i look for new posts?

[oscar_ates]

Given that they barely improved Amiga from 1985 to their demise this was an mission impossible. Probably will not make any difference if they could release a laptop too

[grond]

Originally Posted by TCD

Indeed I vaguely remember seeing a quite expensive color LCD around 1996 and while it was okay for typing, any movement on it was really blurred.

My first PC was a 1996 Siemens laptop. It had a 12" 800x600 top-of-the-line TFT screen that was simply astonishing back then. I played all of Warcraft 2 and quite a few other games on it. It certainly wouldn't have been a good screen to play any fast action game on but there were a lot of great games on the PC during that era that didn't have all of the screen moving all the time. In the first half of the 1990s it would have been a completely different story, laptop screens were horrible before the advent of TFT LCD screens.

[squidbass]

I had a Zenith Supersport 286 laptop circa 1990-91. It had a blue monochrome panel. It ran DOS. I remember playing Prince of Persia on it for hours and a few other games. Weighed a ton too.