Over the last couple of years, many small companies have released new products for classic AMIGA’s, such as accelerator cards, CF-Card hard drive replacements and even full re-implementations via FPGA chips.
However some other companies decided to go a step further and actually release full PC systems under the AMIGA brand name. One such company is A-EON.
A-EON, headquartered in Cardiff, United Kingdom, have been bringing systems to the market such as the AmigaONE X1000 and X5000 as alternatives to the standard Intel and AMD-based systems these days.
While I absolutely have to give them credit for being bold, independent and doing something totally different (much like Commodore in its glory days), time has simply passed them by and their systems are completely outdated and, most importantly, incredibly overpriced.
Let’s take a look at their newest model, the AmigaONE X5000.
First off, the specs.
The X5000 system, much like the X1000, uses a PowerPC chip as its CPU, clocked at 2GHz and utilizing two cores. Furthermore it’s using 4GB DDR3 RAM at 1600MHz by Kingston, features on-board LAN, a 240 GB SSD, DVD Writer, SoundBlaster Live sound card and, hold on to your seats, a RadeonHD R7 250 with 1 GB of DDR5 memory!
Now apart from from maybe the SSD (240 GB is not too shabby!) and the 4GB memory, this machine is having the lowest specs I’ve seen so far in 2017. Yeah I get it, its mainboard is also custom-made by A-EON, still, it’s the specs that count, and those are lower than low.
Especially when you consider that this thing costs; again hold on to your seats: $1,499.50.
Yes. $1,500 for an incredibly outdated computer. And that price is just for the board, no case included. If you want it in a tower case (made by Fractal Design), you gotta pay $1,740.00
For that price, you can get a high-end gaming PC featuring the latest i7/i9 or Ryzen processors, a sh*t-ton of memory and probably even an Nvidia 1070 for 4K resolutions.
This, A-EON, is NOT how to revive the AMIGA brand. This how you make a fool of yourself. And while I understand you want to be different and do your own thing, at that price only a very small percentage of computer buyers will be interested in your machines. But it seems there are those who do have way too much money to throw away… Good for you!
While there are many others who try to bring the brand back with ridiculously priced hardware (I’m looking at you, Individual Computers), I think the AmigaONE takes the cake.
Anyhow, those are just my thoughts on this. Feel free to leave a comment with your take on the whole thing!
Weblinks:
A-EON Technology Ltd
AmigaOne X5000 "First Encounters" (Motherboard *Bundle) with New Sound Card
AmigaOne X5000 System “First Encounters Bundle”
First posted on my Blog