Yokemate of Keyboards
Posts: 12136 from 2003/5/22
From: Germany
> I don't think that the X1000 was expected to be a commercial success by anyone.
I expected at least a break even target. When Trevor later revealed he was not going to recoup NRE costs, I was very surprised, and I remember others were as well.
> there is no evidence that A-Eon made any money from X1000 sales, regardless
> of development costs. From comments Trevor has made from time to time, the
> impression I have gotten is that he was losing money on every X1000 sale
The impression I got was that the turning point was when the PA6T unit price almost doubled from 500 to 975 USD (before it went down to 600 USD again), and the price increase was not passed on to the customer (see comment #54).
> I [...] was surprised that Trevor wanted to continue producing AmigaOne
> hardware (which sadly also has almost zero chance of recouping development
> costs), once he had his own X1000 in his hands.
He announced his plans for follow-up systems way before he got his own X1000, so I was not surprised about that. Regarding the recouping of NRE costs for the new boards, is there a public statement on this that I missed? So far, Trevor has said in public (e.g.
AmiWest 2012) that he indeed intends to recoup NRE costs with follow-up systems to the X1000.
> I wonder who is paying the Hyperion Entertainment developers to port AmigaOS4.1FE
> to the X5000 and Tabor boards?
I think the Hyperion developers are being paid by Hyperion for this, and Hyperion in turn is being paid by A-Eon for this. Historically, it was a fixed amount (20,000 EUR a decade ago) that Hyperion requested for an OS4 port to any PPC board. I don't know if that's still the case.
> I must assume that A-Eon is not in charge of, or paying developers for doing the
> porting work, or it would have been done sooner than now.
A-Eon is surely not paying the developers directly, yes, else A-Eon wouldn't point to Hyperion everytime they are asked about the status of OS4 porting to A-Eon's boards/systems.