Amiga 600
Dave,
I think your statements about the Amiga 1200 are right on target.
However, I would like to point one thing that we have realized as a dealer
that many in the Amiga community have not.
There is a market for a $399 computer bundled with software. One of the
absolute hottest packages we had this year was the A600 RoboCop 3D package
that included five software programs (four of them were decent too!). At
$399 the systems rolled out the door in near record numbers. Remember
these systems were complete with RF modulator, internal disk drive, 1MB of
RAM, 2.05 in ROM and a 2MB Agnus. The machines are small enough to be
considered portable and are well made. The most often heard comment after
I demonstrated what the A600 could do — was wow, all this for $399!?
Would you guess who the major customer is? I will save you the guessing.
It was the c64 customer. Most Amigas have been priced out of the range of
those who wish to compute on the biscuit and bread budget. The Amiga 1200
at the PowerUp price of $599 is still too rich for the blood of these
types of folks. We added the "A64 Package" to the list of software that
was distributed with the system so that the C64 user could begin the
migration from yesterdays computing to todays. Of course each c64 user
had to send the shareware fee in to get the hardware interface that allows
the 1541 to be connected to the system.
Now I will grant each and everyone of you who are about to post–AGA is
the future. However the people that are buying the A600s don't care about
graphics for the most part, but simply want a machine that has a good
installed base of software _and_ can be expanded into a reasonable machine
a little cost. They like the fact that the system can have a hard drive
added for a few dollars (similiar to the days that you bought the c64 and
then saved for the 1541) and that they could use their existing 1702
monitors.
The other source of customer was Amiga 500 people who wanted a hard disk
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