AmigaOS4 & PPC Future?

It is a shame about what’s happened to AmigaOS4 and AmigaONE market, I feel for the size of the market, the level of investment it had its kind of amazing by what has been achieved.

Just think we had Eyetech dodgy development boards, OS4 lawsuit, PowerPC AIM ending (arguably the ending of true PowerPC consumer focus supported products), splits in what’s left of the community for MorphOS/Aros and yet we still got our fav OS up and running on PPC systems.

Now we are where we are with the platform, I dont think anyone would be really happy with where the AmigaOS4 market is today, its no one person or companies fault and it too easy to say with hindsight AmigaOS should of perhaps been ported to x86 or Arm or you could just make the argument its a retro machine and should be just honoured as that.

Well I love the Amiga platform and I do wish it was the platform I could use to do my day to day computer work on, I mean OS4 and other efforts to push Amiga forward (MorphOs/Aros) are great, but there just not quite there. Its kinda of a relief to finally see updates coming for OS4 and we have more hardware on way with Sam460, A1222 and even maybe X5000/40 and just maybe Acube PPC Laptop.

However I do feel at least the AmigaOS4 team should be thinking maybe a little bit more forward about the future of the platform and it true viability, you know where do Amigakit, Hyperion, Cloanto, anyone else involved in AmigaOS4 & PPC see the platform in 5, 10, 15 years? We seen MorphOs announce a port to x86 and Aros PPC development has all but stop, instead work on 64bit, SMP, ARM support is where the focus is.

I love the classic and retro scene. Plus the really impressive work going on in the FPGA Amiga world and emulation but i still would love to see the platform to be pushed forward more, the only kind of solution I see from that market for my dream Amiga, is Rabbit Hole, that allows access to modern Apps on a host system, and increasingly due to the size of the community, the amount of developers left and the challenges of keeping things like a modern web browsers up to date I see it as maybe the only kind of solution.

Here the sad truth that we all kind of know, the Amiga community is just too small to keep up with the main stream programs. I want to see the Amiga push forward largely so I can boot up my Amiga more often and do more work and play round on it, but let’s face it Modern web site/apps, like Spotify are not designed with Amiga in mind. But if hacks / work around like Rabbit Hole help get these programs/services useable from within the AmigaOS, well I just think that’s great, I wish rabbit hole could be made for AmigaOS4, even let’s say it had to be hosted on a linux PPC OS, it would just open up that possibility of when I need / want to just open that one app that’s not on Amiga I can do it without turning to another computer. Yes I would love native Amiga apps that could do it all, but we have to be realistic in what we can do, it’s kind of amazing what has been achieved, I mean 4K video is something I don’t think any other PPC computer can do.

So this is not a ungrateful open blog to developers or supporters of AmigaOS4, I just hope they really stop and think about the long term goals of the project and where they see it like I said in 5, 10, 15, or even 25 years from now, is PPC really viable long term?

For my part I still will keep my X1000, and will support and buy AmigaOS4.2 if it ever comes out (actually because I got a X1000 First Contact I should get that free? Not holding my breath on that one or if it ever comes out!). I will promote it on my website/videos and will likely buy the odd app/game for it but I just worry about the viability of the platform long term and wish they could come together to maybe think about moving off PPC, I know it be a lot of work, money and lost work again, but I really am starting to think Arm is the future and I think Im going to do what I can to promote and push that angle.

Remember this is just one fan thoughts.