@amigadave

Sure, you are free to do whatever you want with your money. You could make a big pile of 3,000 dollar bills in your back yard, pour some gasoline on it, light it up and barbecue some hot dogs over the fire. Or make 30 spliffs of hundred dollar bills, and you will feel good for an entire month. Two examples of very expensive "hobbies". But since there are other materials you can use for your barbecue, like charcoal, that has both better features and better price, and since you can roll your cigarettes using other kind of paper that is both cheaper and better, mis-using money this way would easily be perceived as provocative, pointless, or yes indeed, insane.

An X1000 level of computer (2007 level of performance) should never have left the Excel spread sheet after having calculated the BOM cost and end-user price for motherboards in volume of hundreds, it shouldn't even have entered early design stage. But here it is, system presenting 5 year old computer technology at a cost of 3-4 full 2012 spec'd Core-i7 Gaming Systems, running an OS that is sub-standard in almost all measuring points of features and performance, even in terms of Amiga. Again, you are of course free to do whatever you want with your money, be it your hobby is barbecuing hot dogs over a $3,000 fire, or buying an X1000. But I think both cases pictures an insane misuse of money, and I almost get a little angry when I think what many good things that kind of money could have done, had it been spent differently. But some people don't know the value of money, or don't care. Some people just have "too much" money and don't know what to do with it. Buying crap, paying overprice in gold, just for the fun. Or like the upper class "brats" in Stockholm with daddy's American Express Platinum card in their pocket, truckloads of "old money", going out on über expensive clubs, buying 2 bottles of über expensive Champagne, drinking one and pouring the other one untouched into the sink, just for the "fun" of it. We all have different hobbies. Maybe I am not alone to get provoked by that, having to struggle to make ends meet at the end of the month. I know the value of money.

Someone said in this thread that OS4 has an advantage of having the "Amiga" name connected to it, but I don't agree, because there will be *no sales* of this hardware to *anyone outside* that little group of people, mostly hanging around AmigaWorld.net and Amigans.net, that *blindly* follows anything Ben Hermans say and do, that follow the Amiga(TM) flag, that literary buys *anything* at *any cost* if it just has Hyperion's blessing and a pinch of The Trademark attached to it (the X1000 is being parasite-marketed as "Amiga" (in quotation marks) by Trevor Dickinson, since they explicitly don't have the right to call it Amiga, but that seems to be enough for the cheerleaders).

OK, I used the name "nutcases", but maybe it's more like some kind of a closed social club? I remember when "sicky" over at Amigaworld.net got "back into the scene" the other year, by purchasing a Sam board (a similarly insanely over priced and under-performing system that never should have seen the light of day), and if you read all his comments from that time, it becomes *evident* that it mostly was about community for him, wanting to be part of something, wanting a particular kind of friends. He wanted to get in into the club, and payed the entrance fee. If you look at his posts that followed over the following months, you'd understand that he is really clueless about Amiga, doesn't really seem to know what it is, doesn't really care, but gradually learning the limitations over time, and of course quickly forgiving any problems, because that's what you do when you are a club member. You pay, you cheer, you wait. Then you pay, you cheer, you wait. And no, I don't think these are signs of healthy behavior (meaning *mental health*). Blindly throwing away premium money for the worse options, not because of the quality or technical merits (the stuff is worse than the competition), but because it's what Ben Herman's wants you to do, and this sets the norm for the club, and you want to be in the club. I'm sure you are going to be a fine club member, amigadave. You are a moderator there now too, so in combination with your X1000 purchase, maybe this will bring you onto the express way towards a higher social status than most? I'm sure you think it was well spent money, so have fun and enjoy the ride...