At the AmiWest 2011 Show I asked Trevor Dickinson what was next for him. I thought that after all the criticism he received about the X1000 computer he would be discouraged and not wish to spend any more money trying to satisfy the Amiga community with more hardware projects. To my surprise, he instead announced that he is moving forward with more new computers from A-Eon with Varisys as his partner and AmigaKit was also joining him as a partner to produce new AmigaOne computers. He also expressed that although his personal preference is OS4, he hopes to bring the Amiga community back together and one way to help accomplish this is to provide hardware that all Amiga inspired OSes can run on.

Of course he cannot accomplish this without cooperation from the AROS and MorphOS developers, as well as his current cooperation with Hyperion to have AmigaOS4.x ported to any new computers. It will be interesting to see what his next system(s) is/are going to use for a CPU, as OS4 and MorphOS are clearly not moving away from PPC in the near future and AROS is already available for PPC, though I have not read up on which PPC platforms AROS has been ported to, or if work continues on the PPC port, or not. The QorIQ CPU's are the most likely choice, I would guess.

Trevor also said that he will not be talking about what he is doing, or releasing any specs on his next project(s), until they are ready to release. It was an obvious statement on his displeasure on the highly critical nature of many users in the Amiga community that love to tear apart and criticize plans and timeframes that are released early, or who moan and complain endlessly about the direction some people are taking to advance the Amiga experience, instead of doing something themselves. We have no shortage of people that love to sit on the sidelines and complain, instead of actually contributing anything useful to the Amiga community as a whole. So, with this choice to hold back information about new projects, we will have to wait until a product is close to being ready for release, before we will know what CPU any new computer from A-Eon will be using.

I for one, will be interested in seeing what Trevor will come up with next.

2012 should be another interesting year for new Amiga hardware announcements. Now if we could just make some progress on bringing back more developers and speed up the writing of more useful software and drivers for the hardware we already have, or will soon have, the future of Amiga inspired systems would be better than it has been in many years.

[ Edited by amigadave 09.12.2011 - 11:41 ]