Acolyte of the Butterfly
Posts: 105 from 2003/2/10
From: Lightning capi...
Quote:Velcro_SP wrote:
Quote:
Hopefully the Mac mini will soon provide us with a case study whether a more widely avaiable hardware with better price/performance ratio will yield to more sales or not.
I think it will, Zylesea. They've ironed out a lot of the kinks with the web-payment/distribution model with the Pegasos and Efika 2.x versions. The PPC Mac mini version should play out along those lines: install the demo, run it, register online if you like it. The availability of PPC Mac mini hardware is just better than Pegasos and/or Efika. Yeah, it is used hardware, but so was Pegasos by the time 2.x was released. Efika was available new then, but had to be assembled and so forth. PPC Mac mini should be a lot user-friendlier (assuming they iron out the installation process and it's not problem-ridden).
I think as a business plan and in building on what they know, MorphOS Team is making the best possible move. What, they should hang on for Genesi to market an ARM product, who knows for how long, and then sell Efika-like numbers? I don't think so. Go for PPC Mac mini, or better yet of course PPC Mac full-stop.
I agree with the move but in my environmental and innovative heart I do wish they'd also consider opening up a channel to CherryPal manufacturers and do a bundling arrangement. The CherryPal is amazing hardware and well-suited for MorphOS. Could make a killer, cheap bundle.
I don't think anyone is suggesting being tied to a Genesi product, for-se, but that migration from the PowerPC to ARM platform would bring far more benefits than drawbacks. Genesi does not come close to offering even a fraction of the ARM systems on the market. You have development boards from Marvell, Samsung, Freescale, TI, all available to work from. Look at the Beagleboard sometime, an embedded joy for $150.
My concern with PPC remains the lack of vendors for key components, and the reliability of them. While the CherryPal looks good, agreed (and I might buy one myself anyways) what happens beyond that? The PPC based Macs are aging, the PPC amigas even moreso. There is not a huge development pool of vendors to supply us with the necessary hardware, and those that do often times lack the leveredge to make full use of what they have. ARM does not have any of these problems, and the only real problem comes one of perception and upper scalability, only coming in speeds of up to 2Ghz. But, considering we're limited to G3 and G4 era PPC's anyways, there is no loss there.
Nate Downes
Genesi SARL
